At OSS Watch we like to know who how people react to our events, our documents and our blog. Sometimes this feedback comes to us directly, via our personal email accounts, our catch-all info@oss-watch.ac.uk account, our mailing lists or even by phone.
Sometimes, people take about us on their own mailing lists, blogs and websites. Initially we kept track of such feedback by checking inbound links reported by Google. This, however, has become less and less reliable, partly because Google now have separate indexes for much of the web that doesn’t show up in most searches. The total number of inbound links to the OSS Watch website, as reported by Google, seems to be static, even over periods when we know that new links were added, so this number appears unreliable.
Currently we keep track of such feedback using Google Alerts These regularly run a given search across a number of the Google indexes and email you of any new hits. Any Google query string can be used. I have alerts, for example, for “Stuart Yeates” and “OSS Watch,” but they can get very complex. I recommend using as tight a query as possible over as wide a range of media as possible.
Personally I find Google Alerts strangely reminiscent of alerting services in the bibliographic world, which have been running customised queries against newly published journal articles for at least ten years.
As mentioned recently on the mailing list, we’re also currently playing with Google Analytics.
So how do other people monitor the buzz they’re creating?
1 Response to “Monitoring the buzz”