Sims Learning Connections

This is the third installment in a series of tips for software applications in my own personal learning (and doing) environment. Earlier I looked at LinkedIn and del.icio.us. Here I’ll look at search alerts.

Why use Search Alerts?

• To follow a particular topic or person on an ongoing basis — to then selectively engage with via reading, commenting on, blogging about, etc.
• To discover new conversations, content, and people within a topic area — to then selectively follow using a feed reader (RSS) or additional search alerts. For me, search alerts have been the most effective means for this ongoing new sources discovery — more productive than following tags in del.icio.us or following links from other blogs, although these are also essential.

Without much though I choose to use Google for my alerts — and since I’ve been satisfied with results, I haven’t looked at other alternatives such as Yahoo! alerts (the News category looks most promising for the learning context) or Technorati’s watchlist.

To get started with Google, go to Search Alert home, which is available via the navigation: Google home > About Google > Google Services and Tools

1. Enter your query. Tip: first try out the query from the usual search interface, and when satisfied with the results, cut-and-paste the query to the Alert’s ‘Search terms.’
2. Select desired ‘Type’, which indicates how broadly to search — refer to the Search Alert FAQ for more detail. This page is available via the Help link within the page footer
3. Select desired frequency
4. Enter your email address
5. Click ‘Create Alert’

If you are not logged-in as a registered Google user (and you don’t need to register to use alerts), you’ll receive an email confirmation where you’ll need to click a link to confirm. Register with Google to avoid this extra step and gain easier administration with the Manage Alerts page. This page launches with each new ‘Create Alert’ (if you are logged-in) and is also available via the ‘click here to manage your alerts’ link on the main page.

Strategy tips and considerations:

1. I’ve found search alerts to be most useful for narrowly defined topics — some examples from mine of the moment, where the quotes indicate ‘exact phrase’:
   • “PLE -engineering – public – Maya – exercise ” (where the ‘not’ terms help weed out other uses of PLE acronym)
   • “personal learning environment”
   • “informal learning”
   • “enterprise 2.0 “
   • enterprise “donald trapscott” OR “don tapscott” (to follow conversations related to Donald Tapscott’s Enterprise 2.0 writing and speaking)
   • “faceted navigation”
   • “del.icio.us tip” OR “del.icio.us tips”
2. Consume as email or RSS? This is a personal preference. I prefer email. When I briefly tried consuming my blog search alerts via RSS in my feed reader, I found that the feeds became just one of 300 feeds that I don’t fully keep up with, i.e. they become yet more of my “someday” reading queue versus “act on now” (including with choice to delete) as how I use email. For my use case, I do want these as an ‘alert’ to potentially jump into a conversation underway or to better understand one that I’m inadvertently only partially reading. If you’d like to give RSS a try, in Google, you can subscribe to a blog search via the Atom or RSS links in the left panel of results page ===>
3. How widely to search? — blog search alert versus web search versus comprehensive? I started out almost exclusively using blog search as Google made this alert option prominent in the left panel. I’ve now started to change over to Comprehensive for some of my Alerts and so far I haven’t found the increased results unreasonable to glance through.
4. If you have an active internet presence, you might want to create a search alert for your own name, or in my case ["Ray Sims" learning] as I share my name with several others that also have an active internet presence. I only recently did this what might seem vanity for some and I have discovered a few links to me that my WordPress Dashboard hasn’t picking up.
5. Similarly consider creating alerts for your employer (or potential employer) name, competitors, and particular products that you wish to follow closely.

Final reminder, if you have access to subscription services such as EBSCO, also set-up search alerts for these.

I now can’t imagine “keeping up with the latest word” without using search alerts.