Adult Webmaster Message Boards – say what you want about the personalities that post or the pitfalls of paying attention to the prose they proffer (damn, I’m cute!), but these staples of daily webmaster life are a vital tool for learning, networking, and entertainment – but necessary as they are, they are not without their serious drawbacks…
Tracking the Boards
When I say that message boards “are not without their serious drawbacks” – I mean that beyond the reliability of the recommendations you find on them, the explosive growth in their number over the past few years has made monitoring them nearly impossible without help. And there is a need to monitor them all (Stephen enters story mode):
So there I am, earlier today, minding my own business and diligently working to bring you a bigger, better, and brighter XBiz, when all of a sudden, my ICQ “cuckoo” sounds off. It’s my good pal Carrie, who despite being a competitor in the resources market, alerted me to a thread concerning me personally on a board that I do not frequent. Apparently, a fellow in New York had placed some of my articles on his website and then asked for link trades on a certain board. Titmowse, another competitor and all around sweetie, was the first to point out his unauthorized usage, leading to a barrage of accusations and excuses, finalizing in the surprising claim that he bought them “on ebay. In fact it came with full resell rights which I never used.”
So, here I am, discovering the possibility that someone is selling my soul on ebay, and worse yet, one of the purchasers is publicly challenging me thusly: “If this stephen yagerwits guy is infact an author of something i host and wants it removed, have him send me a C&D”
The point of me relaying this little drama is that while I was fortunate enough to have friends that looked out for me, I may not be so lucky next time – and neither will you. Having a tool that can monitor all of the major boards for references to you, your company, or your site – as well as provide you with every thread of potential interest to you – and that’s constantly updated throughout the day – becomes vital. That tool is available now, and it is called BoardTracker!
A Little Background
From the developers: "Boardtracker.com is an innovative new site, which tracks all the threads from all the valuable message boards on the net in real-time and allows you to see an easy to read display of threads matching your interest. Using BoardTracker.com, you can keep track of threads that relate to you and avoid all the worthless threads that take up so much of your precious time.
Instead of going from board to board or limiting the number of boards you view (and miss part of the big picture), you can now do all the viewing, searching and filtering of all those boards' threads in one place. Even the smaller message boards may contain valuable and important threads or leads.
One thing seasoned webmasters never have enough of is time, and one of the most time-consuming things on the net is having to manually filter all of the many threads in an attempt to find the relevant ones. Utilizing innovative technology, BoardTracker.com promptly and automatically concentrates all the threads from all the boards in real-time. It then lets you view the threads in an easy to read format, presenting the title of the thread as well as its summary, so you are not lured into useless threads only by their taunting or catchy titles. Accompanied by features like forum bookmarks and keyword filtering you can make sure you view only the forums you find valuable and threads on subjects that relate to you.
With BoardTracker.com, you can receive email or ICQ alerts about new threads started on the different boards which match your interests or keywords you define, instead of constantly chasing the boards. This is especially important if you are an owner or a representative of a company, service or a product and wish to be notified whenever someone is talking about it or even about you. BoardTracker.com notifies you about the thread – and leads you to it. Now you can be among the first people to reply to such a thread, instead of finding yourself saying "No. The rumors are not true!" on page 6 of the thread.
With features like cross-board threads view, easy to read display, bookmarks, Email and ICQ alerts on new threads, cross-board search, central thread tracking and many others, it has never been easier to find the threads that are important to you across your favorite boards. Whether you are a professional marketer or a board-junkie, you are very likely to find BoardTracker.com as an extremely helpful tool; best of all it’s FREE!"
In Part 2, I’ll run through the installation and configuration process, and help you to get started with this powerful message board monitoring tool – stay tuned! ~ Stephen
