It’s often useful to find out what’s being said about particular topics or news stories – and fortunately, there are a range of tools to help take some of the grunt work out of this labour intensive task. So, rather than having to visit each individual site, forum or blog that might contain information that you want to read, use some of these tools instead.

I’ve put together a selection of some of the tools I’ve come across and used previously, as well as a quick summary of some alternative options – including some paid-for applications. If you have others that aren’t mentioned here, please leave a comment and share your experiences. Thanks!

PR Filter – (http://prfilter.com/) is a relatively recent addition to the range of tools that can be used. Their About page says, “finds the press releases journalists and bloggers want to see. It provides one tool to efficiently find stories out of thousands it aggregates each day from the main paid newswires and selected company news feeds.” It’s definitely worth adding to a collection of utilities.

Socialmention.com – (http://www.socialmention.com/) says that it offers “Real-time social media search and analysis”.  It’s a quick and easy tool to use to search for specific keywords, keyphrases and topics from across the social media universe. In my experience though, despite offering some handy filters (ie the ability to search in blogs, comments, videos, news, etc.) – in reality, the site was very slow. This might have been a temporary blip though, which is why I’m still including it in the list.

Netvibes – (http://www.netvibes.com) – this is probably one of the better tools out there for searching and aggregating results relating to the various social media, forums and blogs out there. It presents the results in a handy dashboard format and allows you to sign in and save your settings so that you can return to your results periodically for updates on what’s happening. With its original settings, it’ll search for keywords and key phrases across Twitter, WikiAnswers, Yahoo, Socialmention.com and Topsy.com. It also allows you to click some tabs to access original Google search results for news and/or videos of your search terms.

Boardreader – (http://boardreader.com/) has its strapline saying, “Connecting Communities through Search”. Essentially, what it does, is allows you to search through forums for keywords and phrases, presenting them in an aggregated summary, where you order the results by relevance or ‘freshness’.

Boardtracker – (http://www.boardtracker.com/) is similar to Boardreader in that it allows you to search across various forums and discussion boards. At the time of writing, it was claiming to “Search in 2,380,685,052 live discussion posts” – which is pretty impressive by anyone’s standards.

Topsy – (http://topsy.com/) bills itself as “Real-time search for the social web”.  It’s quick and easy to use, but as the results are already captured in the Netvibes dashboard, it’s perhaps superfluous to have this as a standalone service.

Twazzup – (http://www.twazzup.com/) – appears to be a Twitter tracking tool. But if you use any of the main Twitter interfaces, such as Tweetdeck (http://www.tweetdeck.com/) or Hootsuite (http://hootsuite.com/), then Twazzup is really not a necessary addition. Equally, using Netvibes also includes a Twitter monitoring tool anyway.

Addictomatic – (http://addictomatic.com/) – alongside Netvibes, Addictomatic represents one of the more useful monitoring tools available. Its blurb says that you can “instantly create a custom page with the latest buzz on any topic”. As with Netvibes, the application pulls in information from a wide variety of sources, including Twitter, Bing, Google Blog Search, Flickr, YouTube, Blinx, Yahoo Web Search, Truveo, Twingly, Ask.com, WordPress.com, Wikio and Friendfeed – and presents them in an easy to use format. It even allows you to customise the news sources that it uses, although only from a pre-determined list… you can’t add your own right now unfortunately. Still, it’s a very useful tool and one that I’ve bookmarked for using again.

Icerocket – (http://www.icerocket.com/) – another aggregator style monitoring tool, it allows you to specify whether you want to search blogs, web, Twitter, MySpace, News, Images, or Big Buzz? The design and layout may be preferable to some, but I think I’ll still stay with Netvibes and Addictomatic.

Seesmic – (http://seesmic.com) – not tested yet, but it does offer a range of platform tools, including Web, Mobile and Desktop. Their description makes it sound similar to Tweetdeck, so for now, I’ll stick with what I know and am comfortable with.

There are also some paid alternatives, which you might want to consider for business critical monitoring services, such as:

– but with so many good, powerful, free alternatives, you’d have to question why you’d need to or want to pay for something that’s so readily available elsewhere.