I’ve put together various processes for companies to monitor keywords online that don’t require purchasing anything (I suppose it’s that boot strapping, entrepreneurial mind that sends me on such quests). As such, I feel it only fair to make mention something I recently caught eye of over on Julia Roy’s blog called MonitorThis.
MonitorThis pulls results for your keywords from a huge list of services (22) and rolls it into an OPML file (fancy way of saying makes it so you can add it to any RSS reader) for easy viewing. MonitorThis has a number of great services it pulls results from. Two in particular I’m happy about are Del.icio.us’s popular keywords (wicked), and Flickr (while Topix and Furl are a plus). I am sad, however, that it’s missing StumbleUpon and Yahoo! Answers since both already have RSS integrated into their services. If it also pulled data from Digg, that would kick some major ass and really sum it up for the place to go to monitor stuff.
As it is though, I’ll still be using MonitorThis in conjunction with a few other tricks. Looking to the future, a nice feature would be to allow me to choose what services to add to my OPML.