Trapdoor Books

What Are They Saying About Me on the Internet?

Posted on 27. Jul, 2009 by Chris Matney in Book Publishing, Front Page Posts

I am not one to Google myself. Really.

However, there are several fascinating evolutions going on in social networks and the internet in general that have me scratching my head.

While news aggregators have existed for years – we used their services extensively back in my IT analyst days – it seems that the variety and volume of sources has blossomed from dozens to hundreds to thousands. Mere mortals can’t be expected to track every news link and Twitter feed.

In fact, Essential Writers magazine did a nice article on us today entitled Chris Matney of Trapdoor Books tells us why new writers must practice their craft to succeed. I would have missed its publication altogether if not for the dedication of Judy Darley to point out its release. Why? Not because I’m famous and get dozens of well-crafted articles published about me every day. No, there is just too much information.

A buddy of mine turned me on to a cool technology today, filtrbox. It allows you to set up filtrs – basically really advanced searches (with Boolean statements, check boxes for content sources such as blogs and realtime alerts, tag cloud exclusions, etc.). These filtrs scour millions of potential sources and report back when your search criteria are met. The full version of the product allows for reporting, trending, etc. Whoa. Now, not only do I know what they are saying about me on the internet, I know it in real time!

Now, filtrs are not perfect. Apparently an article on How to Build a Tree House contains the words “trapdoor” and “books”. However, my basic searches found Ms. Darley’s wonderful article, copies of every blog I have made, and several sources I didn’t even know about. Thanks to the Walrus Club for posting an article about us as well.

It doesn’t look like filtrbox looks into the social networking sites – or maybe I haven’t figured that part of the puzzle out yet. It would be nice to have a single aggregator to update my LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, etc. accounts. I can push information OUT to each of these, but pulling it back in doesn’t seem to work yet – one Social Network to rule them all… Sounds like a title for another blog.