Ego Surfing: Of Course You Do It, but Are You Good at It?

Ego surfing (searching the internet for mentions of your name, organization, or projects) is the dirty little linchpin of conversational media. Everyone does it, although many people hesitate to admit to it because they don't want to appear vain or they're ashamed of their meager results. Yet it's hard to participate effective in conversational media without doing at least occasional ego surfing.

Personally, I recommend consistent, ongoing ego surfing -- the easy way. I use a series of search feeds to handle this task for me. That is, I make certain queries to search engines (like Google) and feed aggregation services (like Technorati), then subscribe to feeds based on those queries so that I learn of new results as soon as they get indexed...

For context, here's an excerpt from my current set of ego-surfing search feeds. (It's an OPML file.)

Crafting a good set of search feeds, and sifting through them, is a bit of an art. There's more to it than just knowing which terms to search, in which resources. It takes practice, and insight.

This is why some of my clients pay me for blog monitoring, a service that includes advice on which online conversations they should pay attention to, which they might join, and how. (If you're interested in this service, e-mail me.)

...Over at Contentious today I've written a bit more about the intricacies and serendipity of ego surfing. See: "What's in a Name? (Or a Nmae?)"

Now it's your turn to fess up: How do you go about ego surfing? How often do you do it, and why? What do you get out of it, if anything? Please comment below.

Comments

[Kent Newsome]

I use Technorati and Google Blog Search as my primary ego surfing tools.

I check them a couple of times a day.

I have nevered tried to do search feeds, but I am going to take a look at your and see how it's done.

Thanks for sharing them.

[Easton Ellsworth]

Like Kent, I use Technorati and Google Blog Search. I also use BlogPulse. Unlike him (for now) though, I just use search feeds. Saves me the trouble of searching myself. I haven't figured out yet how to eliminate duplicates from my ego feeds (sometimes different searches bring up the same exact URLs in the results), but at least it goes quickly every day.

"Ego surfing" is the most popular way of describing what we're doing here, but maybe it ought to called something else. We're talking about persistently scanning the Web for references to our names, blog names, URLs, and even company names and blogging topics.

I look forward to what others have to say here - coComment (another semi-ego-surfing tool) will make sure that I remember this URL!

[Dennis D. McDonald]

Whatever tool I use, I need to figure out ways to avoid hits on mentions of my last name as this frequently recives hits from folks looking for information related to a certain fast food restaurant. Part of the complication is my last name and the fact that my blog's name is "All Kind Food" even though I address issues related to technology management and digital media. Any suggestions?

Also, I get different results from whether or not I include my middle initial in the search.