Leigh recently blogged about Google Alerts.  I’d seen Google Alerts when they first came out, and I’d tried a few different alerts but the e-mails bugged me.  I spend a lot of time dealing with e-mail already, and getting random mails from Google wasn’t that interesting to me.

But, when Leigh blogged I thought I’d check them out again – and I found you can set the alerts to be read as an RSS feed.  This is awesome, if you use Google Reader the feeds show up automagically in your list of feeds, and every time the search finds something it creates a new entry.

I’m really used to using Google Reader now, and I find it really convenient to just pop in, read a few posts from a few feeds and pop out again, knowing anything I don’t read will still be there later.  Combining that with Google Alerts basically let’s you create your own RSS feeds for any topic you like, if you can narrow the searches down enough (which is the main issue).

Just thought I’d mention it, since I know a few of you use Google Reader (I’m sure it works fine in other feed readers too, but Google Reader just makes it even easier).