Monitor SideWiki for new comments

Google released SideWiki as a tool that lets people "add helpful information to any web page" and to read "other web site visitors' insights in context".

Why monitor SideWiki comments on your sites?

The fear throughout the business community is that SideWiki will become a device for competitors to trash your web site, and for cyber-vandals to add comments to your site that will be as helpful as the comments that graffiti artists add to bathroom walls.

How do I automatically monitor SideWiki comments?

UpdatePatrol 2010 Beta 2 and newer can monitor SideWiki comments for single web pages and entire web sites, alerting you in near real-time when somebody has used SideWiki to add comments to your web site.

When you add a URL to UpdatePatrol, prefix it with "sidewiki:" and UpdatePatrol will monitor the SideWiki comments for changes instead of the page content itself.

It is very important that you enter the URL exactly as it appears in your browser bar, as Google SideWiki is very sensitive about this. somesite.com, www.somesite.com and www.somesite.com/ are all different URLs to SideWiki.

Monitor SideWiki comments for an entire web site

Monitoring SideWiki comments for an entire web site is super easy. Simply add your URL to UpdatePatrol prefixed with "sidewiki:" and enable the Follow-Links option. This will make UpdatePatrol automatically add and monitor all links that it discover on your site, with the restrictions you may have configured. It will automatically prefix the links with "sidewiki:" so it knows that all found pages must be monitored for SideWiki comments instead of new page content.

Get an alert when new SideWiki comments are posted

UpdatePatrol will work silently in the background, notifying you either by sound, a pop-up message on the screen, or by email when a new SideWiki comment is found. If the alert is sent by email, it will contain the new and/or changed comment(s) it found.

Restrictions

Currently Google only expose the comments that are voted as useful by readers through their APIs. It is expected that they will fix this soon.