Open Jason lists sites which read the Web, with various emphases (with respect to sourcing), and let you know.

13 Alerting Sites | OpenJason.

The brilliant David Stephenson has, as some readers may know, done some serious thinking and writing about new media/social media and disaster response. (Put “Stephenson” in our search box and you’ll get some of our earlier pieces. Better yet, go to his site and read his work).

Apart from Google Alerts, which I use, for instance, to track public developments in the Robert Levinson case, I haven’t used these. But I think they generally need to be tweaked a bit, depending on the search terms involved, to get the signal-to-noise ration under control. In some cases, duplication and republication may be a problem.

There’s a good opportunity here to do some objective testing with a common set of search terms. Does this sound like a decent crowd-source project?