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CBSnews.com
Search feeds are one tool to track blog buzz about Katie Couric's anchor debut. |
Yesterday, my Poynter Online editor,
Bill Mitchell, asked me for ideas for covering how
Katie Couric's debut last night as the new
CBS Evening News anchor is playing online.
When I'm trying to follow buzz or monitor conversations or topics online, one of my primary tools is to set up a group of search feeds.
Many online services allow you to save a search as a feed. This is helpful because then you'll receive in one place (your feed reader) a fairly organized, chronological list of the latest content that matches your query terms. In other words, you don't have to keep looking for new results -- they keep coming to you. At the Society of Professional Journalists conference a couple of weeks ago, I listed search feeds as an indispensable tool to help reporters cover a beat or a specific story.
If you haven't ever used a search feed, the current Katie Couric buzz provides a great example. Since she's famous, her name shows up in all sorts of places. However, this is also a not-so-great example, because searches for her name turn up so many hits that it takes considerable sifting and fine-tuning to make a meaningful assessment of what people are thinking or saying about her.
Today I assembled a collection of search feeds for the query "Couric" drawn from nearly a dozen online sources. Only one of these directly represents mainstream media (sort of, it's from the CBS Couric & Co. blog). The rest are mostly from sites that aggregate mostly non-MSM content, such as blogs.
I've just posted a selections of Katie Couric search feeds on my blog The Right Conversation. There, you'll see the most recent results each of those feeds is serving up. This covers not only text content, but also audio and video.
See The Right Conversation for more. I've put the Couric search feed content on my blog because I didn't want the Poynter site to be displaying the occasional bit of spam, obscenity, or irrelevance, which is unavoidable in search feeds.
