I started using the Filtrbox online monitoring service after reading Aliza’s great review from last year. Like her, I was intrigued by the promise of more easily managing the sheer volume of information I was wading through.

Since then, I have come to rely on the Daily Briefing email they send me. It outlines my results without me needing to visit the web site. While this “set it and forget it” system was providing good value for me, I knew I was missing out on a lot of the flexibility and power of the service.

So, prompted by the recent upgrade to what Filtrbox is calling the “G2″ release, I decided to revisit the site and see what else it could do for me.

Filtrbox is a monitoring service which scours the web to provide you relevant results related to your keyword-based searches, or “filtrs”. It is primarily aimed at companies doing brand monitoring and sales people researching prospects or competition. For the web worker like me, it is also a good choice for article and product research.

The key to Filtrbox is the filtr itself, and setting them up properly can affect search results significantly. You start with a basic keyword and then refine it with the “and”, “or” and “not” modifiers. For example, I might want Apple and iPhone but not AT&T. A drag-and-drop tag cloud helps to create and refine the filtr using the actual results.

What I really like is that Filtrbox acquires everything but then lets me control what I see. Each result is given a ranking based on the popularity of the site and my own personal usage and rating. By adjusting this FiltrRank I can keep the results manageable but then still expand them if I want a bigger picture view.

Content can be pulled from three source categories: Mainstream, Blogs and Social Media. Unfortunately, while you can adjust which category you want to search, this setting is applied at the account level, and not the filtr level where I think it would be much more useful.

There are also options to sort by rank and date, which are helpful.

While not really an aggregator, I can also have my results returned to me in my Google Reader via an RSS feed. Filtrbox they also sugges importing your current OPML feed export files into the application. This will let you use your rankings to tweak results and filter out the noise from what you are currently reading.

Filtrbox has cut the pricing significantly in this G2 release, moving from 25 filters for $20/month to unlimited filters and usage for $10/month. This makes the service much more appealing for a small business or independent worker, and a steal compared to some other monitoring services. The paid accounts also provide additional reporting and export options. There is also a free 14-day trial account.

Filtrbox is a browser-based application that requires Flash 9 or greater. IE7, Firefox 2 or later and Safari 2 or later are all supported.

How do you track your brand online? Would Filtrbox help you manage your searches?

Disclosure: Filtrbox is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True

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The last time we looked at Twing, Mike found the forum friendly search engine to be a useful tool in the search arsenal, particularly for finding help from others who may be experiencing similar issues.  A recent Twing update now adds functionality to make this process even easier for those looking to monitor forum discussions for their brands or products.

These newly added features include the handy ability to save frequent searches and to view what they call Buzz Charts. Buzz Charts visually display what is hot in the various forums that they index. They also let you prepare a comparative view of multiple terms to gauge trending.

Fancy presentation doesn’t mean a whole lot if the data behind it isn’t strong though, and here I found Twing to be somewhat hit or miss. Results for some of my test search terms came back strong with recent results while others were a bit less so.

For example, a search for Tivo at the forum level did come back with the largely popular Tivo Community Forum, but when looking for posts or topics specifically about TiVo I couldn’t find anything from them mixed in with the results.

I wouldn’t rely solely on Twing, but as a compliment to other services it can help you better keep track of the online discussions about your product or service.

How do you track your brand online?

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That said, I am so glad that I took the time to seek out a demo of Filtrbox. As someone who is a major consumer of information from the Web as part of my Web work, Filtrbox is going to be my new best friend. Initially, I misunderstood its purpose and saw it as another feed reader. But with some hand-holding from the company, I realize that their term “media monitor” truly is a better fit. And I’d add “little miracle worker” and “fire hose diffuser” to the description.

At its most basic, Filtrbox let’s you create filters and filter groups to parse online information based on keywords. The filtering process involves ranking algorithms that you can dial up or dial down based on the level of noise you want to keep out.

The rankings consider:

1. Popularity and credibility of the site or blog where the information was published.

2. Contextual relevance, for example, how many times and how high up in the article or post your keywords appear.

3. Smart attention to how you interact with the data you receive via your filters such as which articles you star and which ones you “x.” And if you keep reading certain types of articles, rank scoring increases for that domain on that particular topic.

At your Filtrbox dashboard, you have two sliders – Filtr Rank and Show days. With Filtr Rank, articles and posts are ranked from 1-10, with 10 being most relevant in every possible way based on the input you’ve given. You can increase the filtering by rank or decrease by simply moving the slider, and you can watch the results from your features appear or disappear depending on the direction you go. In seconds, you can watch the noise disappear and can end up with only the highest ranking articles if you don’t have time to go through a lot at any given time.

With Show days, you can decide how old or new you want the articles and blog posts to be in the filter results. If you only want to read the last day’s worth, slide the slider to one. With the free version of Filtrbox, you get up to 5 Filtrs and 15 days of history for a single user. I know in my industry, often reading something more than two weeks old can be a detriment when I’m looking for the absolute latest on any given event, technology or news.

You can also change the way your filter results are sorted and presented to you. You can Sort by Rank, Title, Date, By Filter or by the ones you have Flagged. You can review results as a list which requires more scrolling but with this view you can star and flag articles, “x” or delete them if they are totally irrelevant, and share them by email (it took me a while before I recognized their email envelope icon as an envelope – one of those little intuitive issues). You can also view your results in a data grid to see ranking, flags, title, corresponding filter name and date at a quick glance.

You can filter your articles by Sources which include mainstream, blogosphere, twitter and friendfeed. Adding twitter and/or friendfeed greatly increases your results, thus increasing the noise, but knowing what is being said in the most immediate ways via popular microblogs can be very useful when looking for the latest trends.

After making your filter groups and filters, you can turn each one on and off to vary the way information is sliced and diced and delivered to you. To start, I made three groups with a number of filters in each one:

• Social Media
  • plurk
  • social media

• Vanity Search
  • Aliza Sherman
  • Cybergrrl Oh

• Virtual Worlds
  • google lively
  • second life
  • kaneva
  • there.com

Besides an Articles view, you can view your information through the Analyze feature and see how the mentions of topics for each filter you’ve created ranks against other topics you’ve selected. While this is much more than I need to know on a regular basis about the data I filter and consume, I can see using this if I were filtering for a client and wanted to see which campaign or project generated the most online ink. Or when looking to explain to a client how much more popular Second Life is right now as compared to Kaneva or There.com, I could check the rankings to get a snapshot.

For Web publishers and bloggers, you can also embed a Filtrbox widget into your site or blog and provide your filtered news feed as additional content on your site.

According to the company, the purpose of Filtrbox is to drill down, analyze and control the noise. Now that I have a firmer grip on the many ways the company’s application does this, I’m impressed. The application offers two premium levels: Pro provides 25 filters and 45 days of history for a single user for $20/month or $200/year. Team provides 100 filters, 1 year of history, and up to 6 users for $100/month or $1000/year.

At the moment, I’m happy with the free version, but that doesn’t mean I may not upgrade soon. My only worry is that at some point, if I have too many filters, I’ll end up having to filter my filters and then filter the filters that filter my filters. Until that time, I can just let out a nice big sigh of relief as Filtrbox gives me control over the clatter of information noise and helps me to consume more quality stuff.

Disclosure: Filtrbox is backed by True Ventures, also an investor in GigaOmniMedia, the parent company of this blog.

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