I use a pipe called Social Media Firehose: http://pipes.yahoo.com/update_maker/social_media_fire_hose

It brings up some items I don’t get using the various types of Google alerts (which you can in fact set up as an RSS feed rather than email), so I use both along with a direct Twitter search result as a feed.

One more resource recently suggested to me: whostalkin.com (which I can’t help but read as “Who’s stalking”…. I’ve looked at the results and am still trying to figure out whether it yields things I didn’t find in the other two.

I tried Serph thanks to the discussion here and kept getting an error until I realized it didn’t want quotation marks around my search string. That’s really non-intuitive, given search parameters in other tools such as Google, and I want the ability to seek for specific intact strings.

@BarbChamberlain

Ok, so maybe students “use” Wikipedia (heck, so do I, but I don’t rely on it’s information for important research), however the statement “they know the information is more likely to be unbiased” cannot be determined from analytics Analytics cannot read our minds. More than likely, the students go to Wikipedia because they are lazy, and found the information with ease (yup, the first or second results in Google). Ok, so that in itself is also an assumption, but as a student not too long ago, that was my mentality, and I am sure it is others mentalities too. Finding qualified journals is very painstaking and time consuming, Wikipedia is alot easier after all. This is why it is the professor’s job to state that using Wikipedia as a reference (or at least, an ONLY reference) will get the student a grade of a big fat 0.

Any other questions that you have about monitoring a college’s online identity?

“Many people will go directly to the Wikipedia entry instead of your website because they know the information is more likely to be unbiased.”

Where are you getting your facts from? Wikipedia is not an authoritative resource. You can never use Wikipedia as a resource for a major research report. I would trust information from a niche site rather than information from Wikipedia. Of course, Wikipedia is good for general facts, but again, for critical topics such as Science/Research, you do not use Wikipedia as a resource!

Glad that my comment on Court’s blog helped you.

http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/2860/google_how_to_access_filter_by_date_dropdown_box

You can filter Google search or news results by date by appending some info to the url.

Here’s Google search results for Wofford College. Note the dropdown for past 24 hours, past week, etc.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=wofford+college&as_qdr=d&btnG=Search