Vanity Monitoring Tools

May 7, 2006 · by · in Blogosphere Issues

At the Bloggership conference, a few of us discussed tools to track citations to our blogs or articles. It quickly became apparent that I ranked high on the vanity-o-meter due to my extensive knowledge on this topic. So, at the risk of publicly confirming my vanity, this post discusses some of the vanity monitoring tools that I use:

Blog Rankings

* Technorati. Technorati is notorious for having rankings that are out-of-date and for randomly failing to count links it knows about, but it’s still a very large and useful database.

* Alexa. Alexa generates its data based on people who use its toolbar; but my understanding is that marketing types are the principal users of the toolbar (because they are trying to get this data). So I’m not sure if the rankings are very reliable.

* PubSub. They offer a daily RSS feed.

* BlogShares. I don’t totally understand this site. It tries to establish a trading market for blogs, so in theory it’s possible to compare market values of blogs. However, its link calculations are woefully incomplete, and I don’t understand how it calculates the market value. I use it mostly to see if it picked up inlinks that other sites missed.

* Kinja. Another aggregation of stats.

* MarketLeap. This site allows searches on the number of in-links from various search engines. I don’t find it all that valuable.

I know a lot of bloggers use The Truth Laid Bear, but I can’t figure out this site or how to get ranked by it.

Another blog ranking service, of sorts, is Google’s PageRank. I use Google’s toolbar, so I see the PageRank for every site I visit.

Blog Citation Alerts

* Technorati. I have Technorati alerts set up on my name and my blog URLs. This gets delivered via RSS. I find that this RSS feed in Bloglines is inoperable a lot.

* Google Blog Search. Google allows you to set up an RSS feed for search terms. This has worked pretty well for me.

* BlogPulse. This tool is pretty flaky, buyt it does offer an RSS feed.

* Talk Digger. A meta search engine that combines results from a variety of sources. The searches can sometimes produce some interesting results.

General Citations

* Google News alerts. I’ve set up an automatic search in Google News for “Eric Goldman” and some of my article titles. These results are delivered via an RSS feed. Unfortunately, this RSS feed doesn’t do a good job screening out past results, so I get identical results every time I access Bloglines.

* Westlaw Westclip and Lexis Alerts. I have alerts set up for my name and my articles in the law journal and news databases (as well as some KeyCite alerts set up for my articles). These results are emailed to me.

Google supports alerts from its main organic database (in addition to its news and blog search databases). I’ve tried setting up alerts there as well, but I’ve had little success with this.

Please email me or comment if I’ve missed a good tool. Please do NOT email me telling me to get a life or to bash my obsessive navel-gazing (I know).