Keeping up with your favorite topics on the web has never been easier. The variety of methods continues to grow with blogs, twitter search, various RSS aggregators and much more. One of my favorite ways to keep up on Gluten Free articles, recipes and foods is to set up a Google Alert. If you are not familiar with Google Alerts let me give a quick overview.

The idea behind Google Alert is to keep you up-to-date on new happenings around the web that involve a topic you are interested in. As Google indexes articles, blogs and other writings it stores the information so it can be searched easily. With Google Alerts, you set up a keyword or phrase for the topic you are interested in and Google compiles the information on that topic when it is made available.

As an example, I have a Google Alert for “gluten free”. As new information is indexed by Google about things gluten free I receive an email with a list of links and a short snippet of each article. So instead of scouring the web looking for gluten free information, I have that information coming to me.

There are a few settings you can choose to make the information available to you. You can choose to have it appear in an email within your Gmail account or you can have it pass to a feed reader such as Google Reader.

For topics that are getting written about frequently I would recommend using the feed reader to aggregate the information into a nicely formatted list. For topics that receive less frequent updates or topics that are very important to you you might want to have the aggregated links sent to your Gmail. Another nifty setting for Google Alerts is the frequency you gather the updates. By changing the “How often” setting it is possible to receive updates as-it-happens, once-a-day or once-a-week. Lets face it, we are inundated with information daily and sometimes we do not need to know everything right away about a particular subject.

I am sure there are “Alert Power Users” out there that can offer other benefits or techniques in using Google Alerts. If you don’t already have a Gmail account get one and utilize the wonderous Alerts system.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 at 12:25 pm and is filed under Daily Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.