A discussion about corporate and business podcasting with tips and guidelines

Anyone who's been blogging or podcasting for a while likely knows how to keep track of themselves.

The reasons for keeping track of what people are saying about you on the Internet are the same reasons why you don't go to a cocktail party with headphones on. You're podcasting and blogging explicitly to participate in the conversation and this is how the conversation takes place out here.

When you start talking, other people start talking about you. Or at least about what you're talking about. The most obvious way to keep track of who's talking about you is to provide trackbacks from your blog. That will only work, however, when someone links to one of your posts while talking about you. While doing so is considered polite and correct, it's not always done or feasible. So how do you keep track of your buzz outside of trackbacks and pingbacks?

Apples to Oranges has a great roundup of tools that can be used for just this purpose. While some of them have been around forever such as Technorati and using the old link: operator with Google, there's quite a few on the list that I haven't heard of before.

A couple of the new ones on me:

• Talk Digger
• Socialmeter

I'm also gratified to see that Sphere sucks as bad for other people as it does for me.

Update: I spent some time today tracking all the Biz Podcasting links and conversations out there. That was time well spent because I found literally HUNDREDS of incoming links and conversations that I had been missing entirely from my typical haunts. Lesson: Shake it up a bit and try different sources!