Alert: We are talking about alerts

As some of you will know I am one of a trio of contributors over at the Duggup blog. The rationale is basically “live music isn’t dead… YET”. Anyway, running this new site is producing some amazing results.

Not the least of which is, I wrote a post about an Italian musician last Sunday and by 6:00pm he had left a comment that he was “indeed singing in English” (read the post). Now that’s about an elapsed time of 30 hours. So the question I was left with was “How did he know that unadvertised and obscure website halfway around the world had written a review of his music”?

It’s a ripper little question and I think I have the answer to it here and needless to say Google appears in it somewhere (you sort of knew it would).

The Short version:
Google Alerts lets you set up Google searches.
When new “hits” to those searches are posted on the Internet, Google Alerts sends you an e-mail with a link to it.
As tools go it’ s a no brainer

The Long Version:

Let’s say you have a blog called “duggup” (oh look, there’s one I prepared earlier)

  • Step 1. Go to http://news.google.com
  • Step 2. Look down the left side of the page for “News Alerts.” and click on it (there is a little envelope icon)
  • Step 3. Add the “keywords” you want to be told about. I am using “duggup” {I use quotes around the search}
  • Step 4. Choose the type “News & Web” from the drop-down menu
  • Step 5. How often do you want a to be told about a “hit”. Lets try “As it Happens” from the next drop down menu
  • Step 6. Add your e-mail address and click “Create Alert”

That’s it, from now on, it just works (well that’s the theory).

Now here is a thought, if the search you are setting up is likely to generate a ton of information coming at you regularly, consider setting up a GMail account and using it to bear the brunt of the it. Leave a comment if you need an invite)

Have fun, the uses of this are really only limited by your imagination. AND yes I wll have an inbox with a bunch of links to this post in about 24 hours. I will paste it in as an update when it arrives.

Alerts ThumbnailUPDATE: The Alert arrived at 10:29am on Sunday… about 30 hours. Click on the picture to see what it looks like in Gmail.

1 comment

  1. OK, I’m pretty sure I understood all of that. Now, let’s see what Google finds about anyone who has the same name as mine, or who uses the name of my soon-to-be-released CD… 🙂

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