A poor man’s ORM - my journey so far

For a while now I’ve been using Google Alerts and Technorati feeds to let me know when my name, the company I work for or some of our key clients’ names pop up online.  Recently I began wondering how often these terms were cropping up on twitter, and in what context.  Summize.com is a really slick Twitter search engine and has the advantage of providing your search results as an RSS feed - all I needed to get near realtime alerts of my key search terms on twitter.

The problem was that for a search term like Peugeot there is a lot of sales spam kicking about:

I had a quick poke about the summize.com documentation, but being easily distracted I soon found myself kludging together a Yahoo Pipe to fix it.

The problem with this was that the summize.com RSS feed only returned 10 results to me, and with the Pipe cleaning out the majority of them, the resultant output feed was looking a bit bleak.

An email to feedback at summize.com sorted it all out.  Not only did they tell me how to get more than just 10 results back from a query (rpp as a parameter) but that I could negate specific authors by using -from: in the query.  Cunningly all things that I had managed to avoid reading in the documentation on the site.

All’s well that ends well.  I now have a spam-less feed and I know that the support from Summize is excellent.  Not only are they friendly to blind schmucks like me, but they value community feedback - 2 great ways to build a solid, well liked product.