Putting Things in “Prospective”

We were lucky enough today to secure the services of Tom Raftery, to give us an overview of blogging in a business capacity and to advertise the power of blogging to a mostly vanilla audience. During Tom’s talk he spoke about the importance of “prospective search” for tracking information being published about you in blogs and other RSS publishing platforms. More importantly Tom spoke about the value of tracking competitors in a business capacity to see what they are up to and try to gain an edge that way.

This was a topic that I have often practised but shamefully never spoken about. It was only when one of the presentation attendees turned to me and said “did you know about that?” and I responded “yes” that I was rebuked for never telling them previously about the value of a custom search feed in an RSS reader. Basically a prospective search is when you attach your RSS reader to a feed conjoured by something like Google Blog Search and then wait for updates to that feed that will only occur if new information matching your search terms hits the blogosphere. Pretty simple really but immensely powerful. Anyway many thanks to Tom for the presentation and discussion today and also for giving me a post topic to air this evening.