If you are reading this, you have found the new YackTrack blog! As announced in this post on RegularGeek, this blog now contains all of the previous YackTrack posts so you can follow the story from the beginning. In addition to previous posts and the obvious YackTrack news, there will be posts on topics relevant to YackTrack like social media monitoring, distributed conversations, and brand and reputation management. Keep on eye on the pages here as well. Much of the static content for YackTrack, like help and tools pages, will make its way to the blog.

Just launching a blog is not enough though. YackTrack itself has been updated as well! First, you will notice that the user interface has changed again. Yes, I know it was redesigned only a few months ago, but the redesign did not properly represent what the service does. So, you will notice less darkness as well as sexier dialogs Thanks to YUI, I was able to upgrade the dialogs, clear up a few defects and provide better cross browser support. As with all significant UI changes, there will be bugs, so if you find them just let us know. You will also notice that the “chatter” tab and “home” tab have been replaced with one Search item. One of the big complaints I received was confusion regarding the two different searches, so simplification was needed.

Lastly, YackTrack now supports Google Sidewiki, Flickr and YouTube. Flickr and YouTube can be monitored for keywords, but generally do not make sense for URL searches. Google Sidewiki launched to much controversy, but it does provide a decent way to retrieve comments for a URL. Support for Sidewiki will likely change in the longer term as Google builds out more API support.

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