Would you use it.

[yorganic]

Am interested in serious comments from people who maybe use systems such as Google Alerts and RSS News and/or Web page monitoring software etc.

Would you use one system if it was all combined? i.e. the ability to monitor whether a certain keyword / phrase appears in a certain location in a HTML page or via an RSS feed.

Be able to group alerts into categories e.g. customers, suppliers, competitors, general news etc

Be able to group alerts by priority i.e. low in a weekly summary, medium by daily email, high by instant email or SMS?

Does anyone already use such a system or use several systems combined to do this? If not would you use such a system.

Finally, would you be interested in a free trial?

Carl

[Brian Turner]

It certainly sounds interesting - there's so much information and sources of information out there that I'm certainly open to finding out more about aggregation services. Not sure if it's something I'd paid for, as companies such as Google News and Topix do a generally decent job of aggregating major sources, but keyword sorting into groups sounds like a nice little touch worth looking at further.

[yorganic]

Brian, thanks,

However, do you not find that you are sick of reading about Google in the online press but, take note when the UK offline press write about Google?

Or, have an interest in whether a web site mentions competitors name and you can't wait for it to be picked up via a Google Alert bearing in mind you are at the whim of Google and its indexing schedule on that one.

[Brian Turner]

When offline press write about Google, it's usually clueless stuff.

I like reading about Google on online press as it's inevitably up to date and dealing with issues now - and written up by clued up people. I'm not talking major press, but instead niche portals such as Threadwatch, which even has Google staff making comments.

But information is a real issue - especially consolidating it in simple and effective ways. I used to use Bloglines for feed reading, but aside from the fact it went bugged and stopped working, I also found there was just too much useless raw information and no real way to itemise and categorise it in terms of usefulness.

I know people have tried, but any possible solutions on this front that can improve on Google alerts would certainly be interesting.

[cat]

I use google alerts all the time for uptodate news stories. I thinks it's brilliant

[mbm]

such monitoring system could be valuable.