Let’s say you want to promote something cool (please don’t use this method to promote something obnoxious, ok?) and you want to get to the center of attention and do it fast. Here’s a method that should work frighteningly well.

Are you familiar with Tech.Memeorandum? If not, go check it out. It’s where the big conversations in the tech blogosphere are tracked automatically. Woe, woe to the person who uses this for commercial purposes – but if you are working in a nonprofit, social change and tech capacity what I would recommend is grabbing the RSS feed for Tech.Memeorandum and running it through a service like FeedRinse with filters for keywords of interest to you. For example, I just set up a filtered feed for memeorandum that will deliver items to me that contain the words “politics” and “blogs.” So I’ll know when there are big conversations online in the tech blog space about blogs and politics.

Pretty nice, isn’t it? Even better – I’ve set up the service immedi.at to IM me as soon as there are new items in that feed. So I’m going to get an IM whenever memeorandum finds emerging, multi-blog conversations online concerning politics and blogs. Is that awesome, or what? If you prefer email or SMS notification to IM, you can also skip FeedRinse and go right to Zaptxt.com, which also filters feeds.

That’s frighteningly powerful stuff, if you ask me. Can you imagine how awful it would be if the first comment on every post about, say RSS for example, was consistently posted by some hyperactive, obnoxious vendor in the RSS space? Yuck! So use these tools together with care and responsibility, ok?