Business blogging tips and news for professional bloggers

In Part 1 of this series, I explained why and how to monitor the blogosphere to help your business blog.  Now here are (in my opinion) the best, most effective free tools to help you mine the global conversation for references to you, your business or topic that interest you.

There are two types of mining tools that I highly recommend you use: feedreaders and search feed generators.  You simply use these generators to make a bunch of search feeds and then stick them into your favorite feed reader .  That way, you'll receive automatic updates whenever someone publishes new content that contains one of  your specified search terms.

Feedreaders - The best I've found for free are:
NewsGator Online (I personally use this one)
Bloglines
Rojo
Google Reader
NewsAlloy

Search feed generators - Here are my faves:
Technorati
Ask
Google Blog Search
Sphere
IceRocket
BlogPulse
PubSub

I plan to review each one of the above resources in greater detail as I continue this series.  Feel free to let me know of other tools you want me to cover.

Part 3 will explain the "sticking the search feed into the feedreader" thing in more detail.

If you have any suggestions on how to monitor other blogs for mentions of topics that pertain to your business blog, please share them with the rest of us!