News today that Alterian acquired Techrigy. I'm wondering if we'll begin to see more consolidation, as larger entities gobble up small to midsize companies in this space.

Read the PR at: http://www.alterian.com/about_us/techrigy_acquisition.aspx.

This link came across my desktop today, and thought it was pretty interesting, and a bit of a warning to all of the bloggers, tweeters, facebookers, etc. ... you never know who's watching your blog!

Read more at: http://shankman.com/be-careful-what-you-post/, certainly don't do what this fellow did! Especially be wary about posting about current or former clients, employees, etc.

Have a great week!

VideoSurf, a new video search engine is currently in beta at: http://www.videosurf.com/ .

This site offers many features:

• Ability to start videos at certain segments
• Searches multiple video sources (Google, YouTube, MySpace, etc.)
• Short text description included
• Ability to run alerts against search strings

This is another site to watch ... video search needs improvement.

Social media searchers have another tool in Social Mention (http://www.socialmention.com/). Social Mention has tabs for searching blogs, mico-blogs, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news and videos. They search web properties such as: Google blog search, Twitter, Delicious, FriendFeed, Flickr, Digg, YouTube and many others. Searching is via a simple search box, and advanced search options are available. Of particular interest is the availability of an API; media monitoring companies may be able to tap into Social Mention's database to search for further analysis.

Overall, this could develop into a good tool; I'd like to see a search option that combines all of the tabs. 

While I don't "tweet" quite a few others do ... so if you're looking to monitor social media, you'll want to search Twitter as well. Luckily Twitter has a nice (free) API for searching their db. Access it at: http://search.twitter.com/api.