This article (http://apnews.myway.com/article/20090810/D99VV4M80.html) doesn't specify HOW they did it, but it seems that the U.S. Air Force was using Rep. Monitoring techniques to analyze the buzz from the "Air Force One Photo Shoot Scandal".

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.

Not everyone needs to spend a six figure expense to monitor reputation.

Marty Weintraub has a nice tutorial up at: http://www.aimclearblog.com/2009/03/16/how-to-build-a-reputation-monitoring-dashboard/ ... using free tools from Google and others to monitor info sources. This is nicely done.

While larger companies will want (and need) advanced analytics and filtering options (normalization of source names, for one), this is certainly worth pursuing.

I'll cover this in-depth at a later time, but wanted to write a quick note about SM2 by Techrigy, a reputation/media monitoring web app. See it at: http://sm2.techrigy.com/main/home.aspx.

Thus far, it compares favorably to many other services.

Quick hit to Andy Beal's site ... he's commenting on the Michael Phelps unwanted publicity over the weekend.

Read more at: http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/02/how-michael-phelps-screwed-up-his-google-reputation-in-just-24-hours.html.

The Saturday quick hit is myON-ID people search (http://www.myonid.co.uk/), a search engine that mines the web and social networking sites to discover what sites are saying about you. Simply type in your name, and the system searches its index for any mentions (you'll need to try different variations of your name ... Larry, Lawrence ... and I'm not quite sure how it handles all of the "John Smiths" out there) of your name, categorizing the results in tabs (Social Media, Social Networks, Web and Media).

This site is still under development, but it could develop into a nice tool to track individuals and their public profiles on the web. 

VideoSurf, a new video search engine is now in "live beta" (does anything ever come off beta these days <G>), and it is worth a look for anyone needing to search publicly available videos on the net. Aside from the abilty to jump into the middle of a video to view a specific scene, which is a time saver, as well as providing valuable video cues as to the content of the video (see below image for an example of the navigation elements).

 Relevancy for the sample searches I tried was quite good; company searches retrieved clips about the companies ... VideoSurf will be useful for media monitoring and competitive intelligence. Definitely consider adding VideoSurf to your search toolbox. 

BlogCatalog recently launched a new blog / social search engine; view it at: (http://www.blogcatalog.com/search).

The search pulls results from BlogCatalog's directory, blog postings, discussions, blog tags, post tags, and social search. The search results are well organized, and retrieve relevant postings. I'm not sure about the breadth of this search engine, and will have to do additional testing to review this resource.  

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

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. 

Google is adding the indexing of the audio from video clips to their searches of Google Video and YouTube. While currently an experimental feature, this could be another "killer" application for search. Media Monitoring companies will certainly be able to use this feature, as they need to be able to find client mentions from all media types. It will be interesting to see if Google decides to extend this technology out to other audio formats, such as broadcast radio ...

Read more about this at: http://labs.google.com/gaudi.