How To Find Things On The Web

Chapter 9 of The New Influencers titled "Tools of The Trade" was all about the different kinds of search engines there are to help find things on the web. Knowing how to find information on the web is extremely important, especially, if you are a corporation. "As a business marketer, you don't necessarily need to be a player in social media, but you should be aware of what's being said about you," (163). It is very important to keep up with this information because if you are a company you are going to have to respond to your customers/media/etc in some way. If you are not aware of what is going on then you are never going to be able to give that response, potentially hurting your company.

This chapter focused on some certain things that people usually need to look up or keep track of and don't know how too. It mentioned some important tools and search engines needed to help find different things and research.

Basic Information:
To help keep up with information on a certain topic there is the already well known search engines like google, yahoo, and the book mentions that ask.com and amazon.com are also always good sources to use to keep up with information. Search engines like these help companies keep up with themselves, allows people to keep up with a certain/specific topic, and allows people to see what is being talked about in the world.

Blogs:
Since this entire class already has a blog we already know of some of the ways to keep up with them. In this class we use RSS. This helps us to be informed when other people in the class have written blogs so that we in turn can read them, and comment on them if we choose. The book also mentions a couple of other tools that can be used to help keep track of blogs. These are Technorati, Blogpulse, and IceRocket. "These provide experimental tools to help you track conversations," (165). Lastly, there is trackbacks. We have learned about these as well. This is how the authors of the two books that we are using in this class found us. They were informed when there books were being linked too and they were then able to find our class blogs and find out where we were from.

Podcasts:
Lastly the chapter talks about podcasts. It mentions two search engines named podscope.com and podzinger.com. These two are the main search engines that can be used in helping to find a podcast or topic that a podcast focuses on.

The web is full of all different kinds of information. But with helpful tools like the ones mentioned above it allows it to keep generating even more information. As long as we have these tools and they continue to grow and get better as the web grows, we will be able to keep up with everything as well as be able to find everything easily on the web. Luckily because of these tools the web will be around for a long time.