In just a minute you can set-up an alert to keep a watch on your family's internet exposure with Google Alerts.
I heard about some changes on the radar for Facebook or maybe MySpace yesterday to protect children online by requiring their parents to register and it reminded me that I was going to post a tip about Google Alerts.
When the name of one of your family members or your business appears on a blog, in the news, in a video or even in a newsgroup, you can get a daily summary of those listings. I use it for my business and my running site to make sure I know what people are saying, if anything at all. In most cases it is a blog somewhere and I leave a comment thanking them for the feedback or offering an answer to a question or a problem they encountered using my site.
You could easily use the same approach to monitor your children's names to protect their online identity. If you see something they have done or someone else has posted about them that you think could be a problem, you can take action early before it gets to be a bigger problem.
How it works:
1. Go to http://www.google.com/alerts
2. You will need a Google account to set this up so it may prompt you to create one at this point
3. For search terms put the search term you want to track in quotes e.g. "adam howitt"
4. For type, select "comprehensive" to make sure you get a broader insight across video, blogs etc. If you only care about blogs you can just select that
5. Set "how often" to daily for a daily email
6. Enter your email
Easy huh? The only challenge may be a common name or that you have the same name as someone else with a lot of activity on the internet. You can minimize mistaken identities by adding extra qualifiers to your search e.g. "adam howitt" Chicago
Here I'm trying to broader mentions of my name by picking out those that mention the city where I live. You can create as many of these as you need so in addition to geographical tips like "Chicago" I can use keywords related to the type of work I do or the activities I'm involved in.
Good tip. I sat up alerts for all family members name, our street address, any my companys name.
