thomascwaters.com

Easy Ways to Gather Information: Google Alerts

Wanted to spend a few minutes describing my experience with using Google Alerts as a part of my blogging work flow. sounds serious doesn’t it? Blogging work flow. When I started this WordPress blog, I was interested in building a readership. It was  (and still is) important to me that people come to my blog, read it, and get something from it. In my ideal world, readers would leave comments, and dialogue would ensue. My level of comments are still low, but readership has been increasing at a nice pace.

Early on, I was looking for ways to gather source material to write about. I was interested to see what else was being said about various topics across the blogosphere, as a way to find material to respond to in my posts as well as to help me have more than a single person’s view of a topic. I found Google Alerts. This enabled me to set up key word searched and receive regular reports about my interests. Since I was writing a lot about Marriage Equality after the passage of Prop 8 in California, I added an alert for “Marriage Equality” so that once a day, I get an email listing a variety of web pages and blog entries which have discussed Marriage Equality. The email contains, not only a link to the source, but it identifies the source, the author, about a sentence of text,  and sometimes a picture. My work flow has been to take that email, and each day, read through it, follow those links that look of interest, and then write about some of them. I started with 3 alerts- 2 produce a daily email, and 1 sends me an alert whenever that keyword appears. This has worked out pretty well over time, but I needed something more.

I found that my keywords were often, not providing me with the full story. For example, using the term Marriage Equality tends to find only stores and blog entries which are supportive of Marriage Equality. but what about what the opponents are saying? They don’t tend to characterize the issue as Marriage Equality, so more keywords were needed. In hind sight, this is all pretty basic stuff if you do a lot of research, but this was my progression. I wanted one other addition too.

I wanted to see about eliminating one piece in the work flow- the email, to simplify the process. Anything that I can do to improve my productivity since this is not my full time job, I need to use my time and resources wisely. so, I thought it would be so cool if I could get my alerts via RSS instead of email. Of course, Google Alerts allows this, but it took asking on twitter, and replies from two folks for me to figure that out. I had looked at the UI for alerts, and how I missed it is beyond me, the-snake-would-have-bit-me kind of thing. so I added a new alert, and set it to RSS, to see if that met my needs better.

Now of the 2 replies I got on Twitter, one suggested it was very good, and the other suggested it wasn’t as good as email.  ”Good” is a subjective  thing, and I didn’t ask for greater articulation. What may seem good to one person, may seem not as good to another. To me, “good” would have to do with the thoroughness of the results. and it seemed to me that the found results ought to be the same, if it comes via email or RSS.

Alerts as RSS automatically get added to Google Reader. This was both good and bad for my use. How about that? So, with the email, I would:

• open the email
• scan email, and follow links of interest
• on an interesting web page that I wanted to blog about, open another tab, and begin to add a blog entry.
• After some writing, return to the email.
• If, of no interest, go back to the email.
• At the end of the email, save email to an archive folder.
• Finish anything started on the blog.

One thing that didn’t work as well for me, was that I tend to read the email on the bus on the way home from work, on my iPhone. There is no easy way to do the above steps completely. so I would end up reading the email on the bus, and then again opening it at home. Just ignoring the email on the bus however, doesn’t work for me. I’m interested in seeing what is there.

The RSS approach works really well for this. I use the Google Mobile app for Google Reader. I can read the feed on the bus and “star” anything that looks good. Then at home, I simply look at the starred item list and go from there for the writing part. This cuts the work flow to about 5 as opposed to 8 steps.

There is one downside to the RSS feed approach for me. I have so many feeds from blogs I like in my reader that I often can get lost in reading them, and do not focus on my alerts feed. small issue- a change in my discipline to read that feed first would solve that issue.

So, now I have alerts I read and use 2 different ways, and I am planning to keep it that way  for a while. I like that I can use a smart mailbox (Apple Mail) to gather the alerts into a “folder” as opposed to my Google Reader feeds being in alpha order. And I use different alerts someone differently. Some, I see more as inspiration for writing ideas, and others as direct source material. I can “share” items in Google Reader, which is a way to put something out there, without necessarily blogging about it. so I plan to keep playing around with this as I find the way to use these to my best advantage.

How do you collect content? How do you use Google Alerts- let me now, leave a comment.