BlogoTrack Yourself: Who Is Talking About Me On The Web Today?

Roland Tanglao has done it again.

Thanks to the excellent free services provided by PubSub, Roland has taken the time to spell out for the novice and the expert alike how to track your name, URL and related keywords.

Roland gives a very accurate and reliable list of steps to take in order to start monitoring the Web blogosphere, in near-real-time, for signals calling out your name.

 

 

This is what everyone should be doing today, and not just to track company or product mentions but also to discover and identify new sources and breaking news stories that are relevant to your goals.

The growing number of tools and free services that allow the ability to monitor and track specific information online is truly impressive, and over a year ago I crystallized the best that was available in a professional mini-guide called NewsGod.

Since then, a lot has indeed changed. Not only the services and tools have multiplied, but more than any other factor, RSS has become a key new component in search and information distribution strategies.

Its role is so pervasive and important that its wide application and use will create opportunities for services and professions that we have never imagined before.

One of these new roles is the one of the RSS newsmaster, an emerging professional who culls RSS feeds, search filters and aggregators to build content streams on unique vertical topics.

This is something we are just seeing emerge timidly in these months.

Roland says that newsmasters are not new. Any techno-savvy digital librarian can do the same.

That is certainly not the way I see it. Newsmasters have a much harder task than any tech-savvy librarian has and they need to leverage and refine tools which are still much in the making.

While he is correct in saying that the amount of information a newsmaster has to deal with is orders of magnitude larger than any librarian has ever encountered, he doesn't realize that such key difference makes both the job, the skills and the tools needed very different from what a traditional librarian was required to have. And this is what makes the newsmaster role so different, unique and yet underestimated.

I'd be very happy to take Roland and anyone else who wants to find out more about professional newsmastering for an online public conference about what it does really take to learn this new craft.

Simplifying everything the newsmaster does to collecting and aggregating RSS news feeds really misses the whole point of both the cultural and technological challenges being faced, which believe me, are pretty amazing.

If you would like to join me, and possibly Roland, in an online public voice conversation about this fascinating new role, just put your name in your comments area below, and I will let you know when and where to meet.