Are we all into vanity searching?  I am.  I want to know what people are saying about me.  But googling myself just does not do it.  The problem with googling myself is that I get over half a million results and the top 50 rarely change.  So no matter how absurdly vain I am I just don´t have the time to look at how my personality evolves in Google over time.  And I have not found alerts of the kind as “a certain result has made it into the top 25 in your search”.     I also have a Google alert on Varsavsky (there are of course other extremely accomplished Varsavskys but we are all the same family and when they show up I also like to hear about them)  but one of the annoying things that happens with google alerts is that I tend to get alerts notifications that are either very late or repeat alearts of articles that have been written ages ago.  The Technorati alerts work better but they only alert you on what the blogosphere is saying about you, which is fine but not enough.  And then there´s google news, which tells you when news articles appear on you.  And that works pretty well but it´s only news.  So in the quest for the perfect vanity tool I came up with UnfoldingNews, the vanity search engine….at least for me.   What I did with unfolding news is ask my developers to help me with a search engine that draws from different sources but tells you about all the very recent stories that blogs and news sources have about you.  I launched it a week ago and in my Spanish blog which tends to get many more comments than my English blog we got many sugestions to improve it.  And we did.  Now if you share this desire to follow how the news on you unfold or the news on anyone you like or care about, I recommend you try it out.

Follow Martin Varsavsky on Twitter: twitter.com/martinvars

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Linus Bille on October 20, 2007  · 

Hi Martin,

Have you looked at this experimental Google feature?:
http://www.google.com/views?q=martin+varsavsky+view:timeline&vwms=&vwme=&esrch=RefinementBarTopViewTabs&vws=13860&vwe=14630&sa=N&ct=tlhist
Can we schedule a meeting at SIME?
Cheers
/Linus Bille – GiverSign

3.0 rating

Simon on October 21, 2007  · 

I’m going to say the same I did in the last post.

Really love the idea, but I just don’t think the results are accurate enough 🙁

3.0 rating

Keefieboy on October 26, 2007  · 

I kinda like it: it pulled up a few blog references to me that I wasn’t aware of. Although the layout could do with a tweak or two: it just looks like a toy right now.

3.0 rating

Geoff Long on October 30, 2007  · 

Kinda strange but Unfoldednews did not pick up on my blog entry about Unfoldednews. Strange because it seems to pick up on every other blog entry I make, but not that one!!
It’s here anyway: http://www.notshort.net/2007/10/search-site-for-breaking-news.html

3.0 rating

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