Here’s another in the “How I Use” series: Google Alerts.
Over the last few months I have migrated the bulk of my news consumption and web research from Google to Yahoo!. In fact, my browser start page is now Yahoo! News, even though I was once a huge lover of the automaton Google News. I’ve found that I actually like it when an actual human being organizes my news portal, and Yahoo! has a number of things like their Full Coverage feature that really dive deeply into news and pull together lots of content sources (including Flickr photos and relevant, authoritative weblogs) into one page. Their Supreme Court Full Coverage is a good example– tons of audio, video, wire stories, and other media thoughtfully collected & presented.
Yahoo! also has a news alerts feature that I consume in my Bloglines reader, but I prefer to use Google Alerts for my search for John F. Burns content. Google Alerts covers all new “results” from their search engine, not a news on a particular topic like Yahoo! or from a particular source like Bloglines. So this morning I got an email from Google Alerts telling me that John F. Burns is back in Baghdad after a long and well-deserved layoff. Long may he write.