Unfolding News doesn’t have quite as pretty an interface as some other tools that scour news sites and social media messaging, but it’s a good search engine for getting nearly instant updates on breaking stories. For any search topic you enter, it provides a mix of tweets, blog posts, news stories from established sites and more. You can also create an RSS feed for any search term you enter, which you can use to stay up to date as stories are published on the web.

Unfolding News bills itself as a “live search engine.” It’s useful not only for keeping track of news and how people are reacting to news, but, as this post notes, it could be useful for tracking what’s being said about a new product release and other, similar applications. The site could use a slicker interface, but it does a good job of what it sets out to do.

What if you want to track the web buzz on content you post online? I’ve become increasingly reliant on ConvoTrack for this task, as I mentioned here, and it has steadily added source sites that it tracks. ConvoTrack is an easy-to-use free web app that allows you to track online conversations on social media sites related to content that you post or read. You don’t even need to download an application in order to use it. Instead, you can just type http://convotrack.com/ before the URL (no space between the two) for any web page you want to track conversations about, and then hit Enter. So to track what people are saying about WebWorkerDaily, I would type “http://convotrack.com/http://webworkerdaily.com/” into my browser’s address bar and hit Enter.

What tools do you use for keeping track of news and reactions online?

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ConvoTrack is based on the BackType API, an open API for developing applications based on HTTP GET and POST requests. If that sounds awfully techie, ConvoTrack is anything but. Here’s how it works:

1. Go to WebWorkerDaily’s home page: http://webworkerdaily.com/

2. Before the http:// prefix in the address, type in http://convotrack.com/

3. Hit Enter

If you follow those steps, this is the URL that should be in your browser’s address bar when you go to hit Enter: http://convotrack.com/http://webworkerdaily.com/. Soon after you hit Enter, ConvoTrack will automatically present you with a dual-paned view. On the left, you’ll see a running list of posts to social sites ranging from Twitter, to Digg, to FriendFeed, and more. In this example, the posts are chatter that involves WebWorkerDaily. (Give the application a bit of time after you hit Enter for your lookup.)

You can follow the same steps for the URL of any particular post or article online, by simply typing the http://convotrack.com/ prefix in before the URL of the story you’re interested in tracking chatter for. For WebWorkerDaily, a quick glance at the ConvoTrack list tells me that the story on Pogoplug is getting attention on Twitter, as is the story on finding the right people to follow on Twitter. There’s also a bookmarklet available to quickly get at the ConvoTrack list of any page.

Social media sites are now often the places people go to discuss content online, and ConvoTrack is a useful way to get a snapshot of the discussions very quickly. It’s also a polite application that gives you a Close button right on top of the lists it generates. I’m now using it every day.

What do you think of ConvoTrack?

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