Google Alerts are worth exploring, if you haven’t already tried this useful service.
If you want to know what your competitors are doing or about the latest market activities in a particular sector, Google Alerts will do it all for you! It will monitor the web for any new content that’s likely to interest you and email it to you.
You can set up a folder in your Inbox and direct the alerts to it so that they don't get lost or clutter up your main emails.
It’s then worth spending half an hour occasionally to scan them to see if there’s anything useful.
Similarly, if you want a clearer picture of what’s happening overall, you can use Google Trends to subscribe to relevant topics. Just looking at the current ‘hot searches’ will give you a clue about the burning issues of the day.
For more information, go to www.google.co.uk/alerts or www.google.com/trends.