Everybody has "googled" their avatar name before, and the more vocal ones of us have certainly found a mentioning here and there. But did you know you can automate this process? Google Alerts is a nifty little gadget that allows you to store Google queries within the search engine itself, and get an email report (or a personalized feed) as soon as one of your searches gets a new result.I am using Google Alerts both for my SL avatar as well as for my RL person, and it has become an essential tool for me. However the other day I read an article by metaverse consultant Ener Hax and realized that probably not everybody knows about Google Alerts. You might notice that against my usual practice I did not link to Ener's article. The reason is that Ener writes she has - just like me - set up extensive Google Alerts "so if someone mentions me, i wanna say hello back". I hope Ener Hax shows up in the comment then to prove the effectiveness :-)
As you can see from the screenshot I have set up Google Alerts for my name and the name of my businesses and the projects I am involved in. In my particular case I have also set up Alerts for the common misspellings - some people never get my name right. Basically you can set up Alerts for every valid Google query. The "link:" queries you see in the image for example fire if someone links to my blog.
Admittedly I have edited the screenshot. I have also set up Alerts for my avatar name in conjunction with my real name - I want to know right away should they ever appear in the same context. I have also set up Alerts for my competitors so I can keep an eye on them.
I hope this helps you keep a better eye on your online persona - and of course these things apply to your RL identity too.
14 comments:
I've had one of these set up for a while, and it is defniitely good information to have. I've found all sorts of fun crosspostings to my blog.
anyanavarita.wordpress.com
just wanted to mention that i really have enjoyed reading your blog <3
This is a great resource Peter, thanks.
Thanks for reminding me!!! I've intended to set it up for my RL business for months and never did *adds on to do list*
Hi Peter here is another example to use great Google tools.
A public RSS feed I'm publishing with Google Reader since some days on Second Life News
Second News (en)
Interesting. I did not know this. Thankies :)
Oh thank you Peter, I wasn't aware of it.
ha ha ha, touché! nice on the test, i hope i did not fail you
alerts are a wonderful, free, and effective tool for seeing where you show up. it can get daunting on the amount of places you may be listed so create your alerts and edit until you get a good balance
i don't have any set as "enerhax" although that could be useful as that is my forum name in many places
nice job on explaining alerts - they can be set to only look at blogs or news or the web
mine does pic up my own activity, such as comments in flickr pics i upload or tweets i put out
good luck and with some free tools, your Second Life endeavors (like stores) can get some "reach" outside of Second Life =)
Thanks Ener, indeed you did not. I keep on getting my own posts and replies as well, but since Alrts are usually very fast, it's easy for me to dismiss them right away.
I did not think of the misspelling and the no-blank-form at first, but my name gets permanently misspelled and usually by people where I very much like to know what they write about me...
I already do this. I also do this for the names of other avatars whom I find interesting.
I orginally started off with google alerts on my name, but then switched over to google reader. You can get an RSS feed of google search results. Even better, you can get it off of the blog search as well. blogsearch.google.com
For a while now you can get your Google Alerts results as a personalized feed as well.
My goodness this is a handy feature, in all worlds. Glad I stuck my nose in here :)
Now, lets see if it spots this comment, as a first test ...
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