Google Alerts

Google alerts is a tool I didn't know existed! Seems very good. I put on two alerts, one for my favourite soap (Coronation Street, of course!) and one for an American athlete. I set them up yesterday afternoon and checked this morning, and already my alert for Coronation Street has given me several results for news and blogs. Compare this to my feed on my Bloglines account from ProQuest which hasn't given me any results yet after five days. I didn't need to refine my search because well, the name of a TV show and someones name are pretty limited as they are. I think I would recommend this tool to patrons if they were following a news story- for example, if a science student was studying the H1N1 flu strain, or a politics student following a government election. If the topic is updated constantly then this tool would be useful. For myself, I think it would be useful but at the moment just for recreational topics. Though saying that perhaps work-wise I could set up alerts for updates on library technology or changes in public libraries or such.