A Couple Tools I Made for Internet Listening

A key skill of any knowledge worker or online community manager is the ability to listen to the internets. A lot of engagement around topics, brands or issues important to their particular line of work is important to building their professional capacity. However, a lot of engagement sometimes happens on websites not their own (or their organization's). How do you monitor and track this? Where are these conversations and engagements happening on the internet and how can you find them without getting lost? 'Listening' is the obvious answer, but how?

Here's two tools I developed for listening, as well as use cases for them. I included links to related tutorials at the end of the post.

A "Federated Search" of NAMAC's Membership:

A 'federated search' is term used to describe a restricted search across a specific list of websites. They work particularly well for 'association' type organizations/businesses. They provide a great way to search JUST the websites comprising the 'federation' of websites affiliated with an org or business. In less than 15 minutes, I built one for my org:

http://www.namac.org/federated-search-beta

Here's how I used mine:

I really like the idea of 'independent makers' in our Membership, but am also curious how it ties into our policy initiatives.

As I know 'policy' is as important to NAMAC's direction as our Member base, I did a search to see if 'independent makers' is being spoken about alongside 'policy' issues in our Membership.
I did a search using the Google Custom Search tool I made and found: http://tinyurl.com/independentmakerssearchresults
While the results indicate that the idea of 'independent makers' is not tied very strongly to policy within our Membership (or at least not mentioned on their websites) - the idea IS out there among a few members:

Center for Social Media in their Next Generation Strategy for Media Democracy and Participatory Culturementioned it as a very strong idea in the Free Culture Conference in 2006 (according to ther PDF) - they also have a list in the PDF of participants in the conference (some are CTC VISTA recipients!)
Standby Program has it as an actual word in their mission statement
Experimental TV Center has been speaking about it since 1980!

From this, we can start to think a little bit of how to 'connect the dots' strategically within the context of net-"working" our Membership as well as ask a few more questions to further our inquiry:

Where else might our Membership might be expressing a voice on these topics (any suggestions, dear reader?)?
Where else might interconnections be found?
If not found else where, might it be something we build out?
How might the Advocacy and Policy area (or any new site area) fit in?
What are key organizations (aside form the ones found here) should we follow?

An Aggregated Online 'Listening Post':

This one was fun to make and had some nice ingredients:

RSS feeds from a few NAMAC Members
'RSS-ified' searches of a few key topics/terms
A flexible 'aggregator' to house all the information (I used NetVibes)

Here's the results of mashing up the above ingredients: http://www.netvibes.com/namac-listening-post

I won't go in to too much detail here, of a use case, but I do refer to it occasionally, just to get a 'pulse' of what's happening. I think of it as like a personal cnn.com, but for our Membership instead. Ideally, our org's own website would function a bit like this (but it'd of course look cooler:)

Conclusion:
This is stuff I think about all the time while I'm in my decision making process around technology and engagement on social networks. I'd imagine that one's community is the first and best resource for any kind of movement building/social change - that's why we're here, right?

Here's links to the related tutorials:

How To Set Up a Google 'Federated Search' For Membership/Association-based NPOs

How To Stay Informed On CTC VISTA Using RSS and Google Alerts