Ongoing searches, ongoing problems…
Today, monitoring a topic on the internet requires either a great amount of time or a great amount of technical skills. In both case, you will also need a strong editorial discipline.
Unless your company has acquired expensive Business Intelligence tools, you have to regularly perform searches over the internet, collect information streams from authority blogs and various news sources, and store them in a convenient place for later search and retrieval.
If the topic you’re tracking is of vital interest, you’re likely to learn how to master the various tools involved, but this will take time, and setting up a fully automated process is impossible without technical skills: in fact, if you’re not a geek, chances are it will prove to be too complex.
Needless to say, if you haven’t setup a fully automated process or if you lack the necessary time to monitor your favorite topics as a daily routine, you will miss essential time-critical information.
To fill this need, eBay, and most job-posting websites, have developed a ‘persistent search’ function years ago to setup simple & dedicated newsradars, but when it comes to content, nothing as easy is available yet.
Financial industry is probably the place where you can find people struggling with this issue who have invested significant amount of time (and money) to solve the problem
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Only the most skilled can survive information overload
Google Alert is a simple way to address the problem, but its results, coming from Google’s search engine, can quickly become overwhelming. Other simple alert systems, similar to Google alert, have the same problem: information overload and a low signal/noise ratio.
The most efficient way to solve the problem today is a combination of a smart editorial selection of news sources, and, using RSS, some custom mixing and keyword filtering using a tool such as Yahoo Pipes.
Storing and accessing the results could be done using a feed reader like Google Reader or even Netvibes.
Of course, this can only be done if you master both the editorial and technical processes involved.
If you lack the editorial skills, then you can rely on pre-aggregated news source like Google News or AllTop.com, but you will need to regularly monitor those sources and store interesting content somewhere for later use. Any failure in your daily monitoring routine would result in loosing possibly vital information.
To sum it up, without strong editorial and technical skills, there is no easy way today to monitor a topic on the internet and keep with a reasonable amount of high quality results.
This is the first part of an ongoing (and probably neverending) serie… Stay tuned (e.g. subscribe to my RSS)
