Monitor you presence in social web

There is so much discussion going on in social sites.. It's seems that there is no way, that you could monitor what is really happening out there. Luckily there are several tools that can be used for monitoring these social sites. These help you to react and respond rapidly.  Here are few, that I use in my daily work. 

Web searches

Google trends offers great statistics for specific search words. This is more high level trending for you site/product/area of interest. It also aims to connect specific news or happenings, that may have had effect on the search amounts. Use as you like check this trend examples: facebook (quite nice hockey stick curve:) and compared to Ipod.

           Facebook trend

Other service offered by google is even more detailed: Google  Insights for search example of Ipod

Flickr

For Flickr I'm using iGoogle gadget that shows all the images that have been tagged with the specific word I'm interested of following. I'm using two different RSS feeds. One for listing the most popular images in Flickr (with specific tag) and the other on for listing the latest additions of images in Flickr (with spefific tag). You can generate the required RSS feed with Flickr RSS Feed generator

After you have generated the RSS feed, just go to iGoogle and and the new feed as a gadget. Everytime you log in to iGoogle you are able to check if there are new images created with tags you are interested of..

Youtube

Similarly as for Flickr, For Youtube I'm using iGoogle gadget that shows all the videos that have been tagged with the specific word I'm interested of following. iGoogle gadget is based on the Youtube RSS feed, which shows all the videos broadcasted with the specific tag. You can generate the required RSS feed with RSS generator.

Social Bookmarking sites

Digg & Delicious

I'm using the same principle as with youtube and flickr with services such as Digg and Delicious. Both offer the possibility to get the RSS feeds. In delicious you just need to search the bookmarks with specific word. Then on lower part of the page, you can find the RSS feed for the results. In Digg you can find the RSS feed on the righ side of the page. Use these as iGoogle (or other RSS feed reader) gadget. I'm using these to check, if there is any new bookmarks done related to the specific product/service I'm interested of.  For example these are the latest diggs for iPod and same as RSS feed. One important point. When you search the Digg with specific word and then choose sorting "Newest first", this doesn't affect the RSS feed. When you click the RSS feed, you need to manually add "&sort=newest" at the end of the RSS feed URL. 

For Digg there has been created a trend analysis tool, which you can utilise to monitor the hottest topics in Digg. Check it out: Digg Trends

Twitter

Tweetag is a great tool for checking out what is happening with your product, company etc. in Twitter. You can easily see who is talking about this, when and why.. For example I have been taking part of web 2.0 expo for last two years. So if I would be interested of checking out what people are saying about this, I can just go to Tweetag: Tweetag about web 2.0 expo

TwitterStreamGraph is very cool tool to check what is happening in twitter. It graphs the "A StreamGraph is shown for the latest 1000 tweets which contain the search word." For example if you are working with a product name x, you can checkout how and what people are talking about this in graphical format. You need to see it yourself: Me in Twitter

Few other interesting statistical services.

Alexa

Alexa is website ranking service. It offers statistics on sites that people are mainly visiting. The statistics are based on Alexa toolbar that is part of the browser (if you have taken it to use). It's not the fact, but seem to offer quite good estimate on number of visits in various sites. Here is an example comparison between myspace, facebook and twitter.