Staying on Top of Your Research
A simple but effective way to monitor the Internet is “Google Alerts”. Google Alerts will automatically track news up to 30 days old, blogs, the web, videos tagged with your keywords, and “comprehensive” (a combination of news, web and blogs). Once you have entered your keywords and created your alert, Google Alerts will you send you an email whenever a new page has that keyword.
This is a handy way to stay on top of a field, research a particular subject, find more sources for your thesis, find bloggers writing about your topic (so you can post comments at their blogs or pitch them for publicity), find journalists who cover your area of expertise (so you can research them further by name), get the latest on a celebrity or sports team, or watch for new videos that match a specific topic.
To get the best results, be sure to use synonyms and phrases in quotes separated by the Boolean OR term. If you want to monitor news pages, you can even specify a location (e.g. location:Canada) or a source (e.g. source:globe_and_mail).
Google Alerts can also let you know whenever a new website links to your blog (e.g. link:myblogname.com); but on the other hand, you might find it useful to suppress results from your own website with the “site” operator (e.g. “the search term” –site:mysite.com).
If you would like to be notified when a particular webpage is modified (as opposed to containing your search terms), you can use “Change Detection”. This can be useful to alert you to those pages that are updated semi-regularly (e.g. once a month).
Both Google Alerts and Change Detection are free services and both will help you keep abreast of your particular areas of research interest.