Google Alerts (revisited)

I week or so ago I generated a post reacting to the claim that successful bloggers updated their posts. This was kind of a revelation to me. In fact, in continuing to think about this I think I remember a time when some argued you were supposed to use “strike through” and similar signals much like lawyers do to show when you changed a post. I think the logic was that people who linked to your work wanted to be able to count on their reading of what you said. Times change.

Anyway, the notion of reposting returned to me when I recently read a post aimed at educators that was a simple tutorial on using Google Alerts to follow a specific issue/topic. I remembered that I had written a similar tutorial and educators who now find the new post of value would have been very unlikely to have read what I first read about the same topic. Since few would think to search a blog for information (the focus of my previous post), perhaps reposting content that changes little would be a reasonable thing to do.

Here is my post on Google Alerts from 2013.

I have just discovered Google Alerts. These settings establish searches and periodically send you the results via email (or RSS if you prefer). This tactic works well if there are specific topics you find important and you want to know when anything new appears online or in journals (Google Scholar).