WhosTalkin.com is a social media search tool that allows users to search for conversations surrounding the topics that they care about most. Whether it be your favorite sport, favorite food, celebrity, or your company’s brand name; Whostalkin.com can help you join in on the conversations that you care about most.

Joe Hall asked me to beta test the system and aside from a few minor issues my first impressions are very positive.

The Interface and Controls

Top marks for making this simple and intuitive. Steve Krug would approve. My first choices are limited to a single search box, which gathers results from all their sources.

You can then drill down results by each source, listed on the left. These range from Twitter, Technorati to Bloglines and YouTube. Simple enough. My only complaint here would be the need to operate two scrollbars, one for the menu and another for the results. Even with the site at full screen, the design is limited by a fixed height. It would be good if scrolling could be limited to one controller only.

The Results

A quick vanity search on “Nick Wilsdon” produced 210 results. Although I monitor this search in Google Alerts, there were several new results for me here. To be fair to Google Alerts, my free account only returns results to a certain depth.

WhosTalkin should have an advantage over GoogleAlerts by querying the sites direct, but this advantage will depend entirely on the quality of each API. If they manage to provide a more comprehensive picture without charging, it will do very well. Clearly this could become another useful tool for ORM monitoring.

Other Features

The WhosTalkin team are considering or already working on a range of paid subscription services to compliment the free system. On their list are plugins for WordPress, iGoogle and Firefox. The must-have function for me is RSS feeds for selected searches.

With a hat tip towards my industry collegue Brian Carter, adding feeds from WhosTalkin.com and Google Alerts into your iGoogle desktop would make an excellent D.I.Y. monitoring tool.

Overall this is an excellent mash-up and will prove useful to anyone monitoring their online reputation. There’s still room in the market for ORM search engines, provided they return better results than their competitors. WhosTalkin.com seems to be succeeding on this point.

You can follow the progress of WhosTalkin on their blog. They don’t have a launch date at the moment, beyond “very soon” but Joe is open to beta test requests on the system.

Technorati Tags: ORM, Reputation Management, Search Engines, Social Search, WhosTalkin

So as part of my contribution to the Linux community, I’ve been trying to help in the Wine project. This software attempts to allow you to run Windows programs in a Linux environment, and is completely free. The list of applications they have working is impressive and the work of the Wine community has definitely enabled many people to cross to Linux.

One of the first tools I have managed to get working there, is GSiteCrawler. This program will scan your site and automatically create and upload an XML sitemap for Google or Yahoo! Once uploaded, their location can be added to the respective webmaster panels.

How to Install GSiteCrawler for Ubuntu

If you already have Wine installed then jump to point 4.

1. Add the Wine respository to your system:
# sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list

2. Update your system package information:
# sudo apt-get update

3. You can now install Wine by clicking this link. Alternatively, you can install by going to Applications->Add/Remove and searching for Wine.

4. Install the following at the terminal:
# wget kegel.com/wine/winetricks && sh winetricks jet40

5. Download the full installation copy of GSiteCrawler from here and save to your desktop.

6. Right click the program install file and select “Open with Wine Windows Program loader”.

You’re done. Of course, any of my Windows readers can also download GSiteCrawler and install this handy application. I’m building a list of Ubuntu-friendly SEO/SEM tools as a reference for online marketers who have crossed over or are thinking about the switch. Feel free to list any must-have Windows tools in the comments and I’ll add them to my list for testing.

Technorati Tags: Google, GsiteCrawler, JohnMu, Sitemaps, Ubuntu, Wine