With now over 70 million blogs, you can almost guarantee that someone is talking on their blog about you, your company, or some topic that you should be paying attention to. But how do you know if the blogosphere is talking about you?
Blog search engines are the best tool for this situation. The two most widely used blog search engines are Google Blog Search and Technorati. They each have their strengths and weaknesses, which I won’t dive into in this post.
Once you’re at the search engine, plug a URL or some keywords into the search box. You’ll get a list of results of people that are talking about the keywords you mentioned or who are linking to the URL that you typed in.
Typically you’ll have the ability to sort by the date/”freshness” of the post or you can sort the search results by relevancy.
Instead of having to do this search every couple days, you can take the RSS feed from the search results and subscribe to it in your RSS reader. Every time there is a new post about the topic or link you searched for, you will be alerted in your RSS reader. This is super handy for keeping your finger on the pulse of what people are saying about you or the topic you’re interested in. (I will write an intro to RSS readers and subscribing to RSS feeds in a future post.)
Once you see that someone is talking about your or a topic you’re interested in, I’d encourage you to drop them a comment. Acknowledge the fact that they wrote about you or engage them further in the conversation. People like to know the fact that you’re listening. Dropping them a comment is the easiest way to do that.
If you haven’t yet, lets take a blog search engine for a spin. Let’s search for people are saying about:
What are your thoughts? Did I miss something? Do you find this helpful? Please comment and let me know.
Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp's blog 
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