Many of you have probably wanted to monitor and watch how you, your company, or your brand comes up in online conversation.

Perhaps, you've used a search engine to do this. But one of the best ways is to use a free service from Nielsen BuzzMetrics called BlogPulse.

I just performed a search for a client of mine, Shiftboard, and if you use the typical search/boolean operators like quotes around the term, you'll get much better results (as in fewer, more relevant results).

For example, they are in the nascent online scheduling world with their web-based scheduling solution, so putting those terms in quotes makes a ton of difference in the results.

Blogpulse is worth a look, if you like to keep track of your terms within blogs and comments at blogs. You can turn the result into an RSS feed, too, which is an awesome feature.