Tip Of the Week - Ego Feeds
February 25, 2005
This week, the TOW involves the art of making an ego feed with the PubSub matching system.
For those who don’t know, an ego feed involves the creation of a subscription to match your name. Thus, whenever someone mentions you in a weblog post or in the news, you will be notified in real-time. That said, there is more to it than just putting in your name. Here are some pointers.
+ Do you use a middle initial in your name? If so, does everyone use that middle initial when they blog about you?
+ Are there different ways to spell your name? For example, Stephen versus Steve verus Steven. You will want to put in every possible spelling of your name.
+ Does you name often get misspelled? If so, you may want to use the most common misspellings of your name in your ego feed.
+ Sometimes bloggers may link to one of your weblog posts, but not use your name in their post. You may want to utilize the URI attribute, which will match any results that link to any part of the URL. For example, if someone linked to PubSub but didn’t write the word PubSub, then using URI:pusbub.com will still pick it up.
+ For those that have a common name, I also suggest using the URI attribute, but also suggest adding keywords to your ego feed. For example, if Bill Gates was as common as John Smith, it would be beneficial to add keywords such as ‘Microsoft’ or ‘windows’ to the feed, to decrease the number of irrelevant results.
Find out what people are saying about you. Set up an ego feed in PubSub today.
1 Comment »
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Also: add a feed for your instant messaging/IRC nickname(s). Maybe someone posted a chatlog of a chat you had without your knowledge?
My family name is commonly misspelled, so I don’t care what people are saying about me as long as they spell my name right (and, even better, link back to me).
Comment by Richard — February 25, 2005 @ 4:57 pm