Ego alerts, in Russian

In my workshops on advanced Internet search techniques, I urge reporters to create "Google Alerts" on relevant subjects. I wrote about this strategy in an article that will be in Quill, the magazine of the Society of Professional Journalists:

Most of us use Google by typing words and phrases into a box and clicking the search button. But you can also play fetch with Google Alerts [www.google.com/alerts]: You can tell Google to constantly search the Web, news sites, blogs and/or discussion boards for keywords – and then to e-mail you the results. You can receive the links as soon as Google finds them or bundled daily or weekly.

Google Alerts can be a godsend for journalists tracking specific topics. You can use all the search commands supported by Google: searching for phrases or synonyms, for example, or restricting searches to specific domains, Web sites, news sources or geographic locations. (For a list of these search operators, see www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html.)

So, if I were covering mining for a Virginia newspaper, I might set up a Google Alert with these parameters: mining +safety (location:va OR site:gov)



This means Google would search for mining or related words (mines or miners) and the word safety; it would look for information located either in Virginia or on government Web servers; it would search the Web, blogs, Google News and Google Groups; and it would e-mail me a compilation of results once a day.

At the very least, you might want to set up an “ego alert” – to see if people are talking about you or reprinting your bylined stories on the Internet.

[Me again, not quoting from Quill:] I've got an "ego alert" set up for "Jeff South" (and variations on my name) + VCU or variations of VCU, and/or "professor". The results go once a week to my Gmail account.

But that ego alert works only for references in the Roman alphabet. What about references to the Russian spelling of my name -- Джеф Саус? So I've set up a Cyrillic ego alert. Here are the hits so far:

http://www.zaxid.net/newsua/2007/6/12/105822/

http://www.zik.com.ua/index.php?news_id=87669

http://www.poralviv.org/pages/view/general-about-membership

http://atn.kharkov.ua/mess.php?id=18213

http://www.pr.ua/news.php?new=3926