Keeping track of what others are saying about your project

There are a few ways to easily keep track of what others are saying about your Free Software project. In a very popular project, you may already have enough feedback from its busy forum or mailing list, but in new and small projects, you often have to actively seek feedback/comments from end-users.

Here are a few ways to find out what people are saying online about your project.

RSS Feeds

First of all, here are the RSS feeds I subscribe to for one of my projects (safe-rm):

• Technorati (blog posts)
• Twitter tweets (tweets)
• Identica (notices)
• TweetMeme (tweets)
• BackTweets (tweets)
• Freshmeat (comments)
• Ohloh (journal entries)

Google Alerts

I have also signed up for the following Google Alert:

Search terms:	link:safe-rm.org.nz
Type:	Comprehensive
Deliver to:	Email
How often:	as-it-happens

which emails me anytime someone links to my project's homepage in one of the resources indexed by Google.

Backtype Alerts

Finally, these Backtype Alerts notify me anytime safe-rm features in a blog comment:

• safe-rm
• safe-rm.org.nz

Anything else I should subscribe to or follow?