Keeping informed with keyword alerts

As far as we know, everyone with my last name is related. The reason is that just a few generations back, our common ancestor just made up the name. Since that time, relatives have spread remarkably widely, and branches of the family have proliferated.

Even though I am personally acquainted with only a fraction of them, Google makes it easy to stay current on what my same-named relatives are up to. Whenever someone with our name gets into the news, Google sends me an email about it.

Not long ago, I learned that a distant cousin attended his senior prom in a homemade duct-tape tuxedo. His date wore a lovely duct-tape formal that he made for her. According to the report, they both agreed that apparel made from duct-tape, while quite durable, made some dance moves difficult and tended to absorb moisture poorly. Without Google’s alerts, I might never have heard of this.

For a growing number of people, the Web is becoming a prime source of news and information. Of course, all of the major news organizations, such as ABC, CNN, Fox News, and this newspaper, have websites where you can see at a glance what is happening.

Because it is so concise and free of advertising, my personal favorite is news.google.com. In fact, I have made it my home page so that each time I launch my browser, I can quickly keep up-to-date on the breaking news.

However, navigating to a website or doing a search requires some effort on your part. To automate your quest for knowledge, many news sources will also allow you to subscribe to news updates via email. Some will even send updates to your cell phone, so you can track a major news story no matter where you are.

On the other hand, there are things that I want to follow that never make the headlines. The activities of my relatives are just one example. I also like to know whenever our company is mentioned on a website or in a news story. You may want to track the activities of a competitor, a celebrity or a particular product. For purposes like this, keyword alerts can fill the bill nicely.

There are three sources for keyword alerts that I am familiar with. The one I use the most comes (again) from Google. If you navigate to www.google.com/alerts, you can enter key words that you want to keep track of. Once you have properly registered your request with Google, you will start getting summary notifications by email whenever a new article or a new webpage with those terms in it meets Google’s criteria for alerts. You can also specify how often you want the emails to come.

Yahoo! has an alert service that is similar to Google’s. At alerts.yahoo.com you can specify your keywords, or you can elect to be kept informed of broad categories of news such as sports, particular stock prices, weather warnings, etc. In addition to email notifications, Yahoo! will deliver alerts via Yahoo! messenger or to your cell phone.

Clip&Copy, at www.rsicopyright.com, is more like a traditional clipping service, but online. RSiCopyright has agreements with more than 300 publications, which it will scan for news items that meet your specifications. Then it will send you emails with the relevant headlines and a summary. This is all free – until you want to actually use the news Clip&Copy finds for you. Then, because RSiCopyright is the licensing agent for each of the publications, you can instantly buy the permissions you need to put the news items on your website, make copies for press kits, or email it to key customers. You can also specify how often you want the email alerts to come to you.

Keyword alerts are a great way of filtering the flood of news items on the Web to focus on those items of particular interest to you.