Google Alerts

Just a short post today, a head's up about a handy internet tool called Google Alerts.
All you have to do is enter a search string and it will search for the string periodically and send you an email when it has new results. You can set it to daily, instantly, and I think there's another setting or two.

This can be very handy for writers to see what people are saying about them. Just start a search for your name. If you've published some stories, you could start separate searches for the titles.

I started doing this a few weeks ago. Most of the time it just comes up with people who share my last name, but I got a hit in the last couple days that links to a blog that links to my blog.
In case you're interested, the site is here, under the name Bibliophile Stalker:
http://charles-tan.blogspot.com/2009/03/march-27-2009-links-and-plugs.html

Google Alerts could be useful for other things too, of course. I first heard about it from a magazine editor who used it to track web traffic about his magazine, that way he can find out what people are saying about, good or bad, without any effort.

You could also use it to track news about a movie release or DVD release, that sort of thing, news about a particular topic of interest, etc.