While the weekly AASHE Bulletin is undeniably the best way to keep tabs on the campus sustainability movement (naturally, I'm not biased at all), it cannot captureeverythinghappening in this very broad and deep movement. Fortunately, there is a cool tool available to help you when you want to get even more news about a particular area of the movement.

If you haven't used Google News Alerts to keep track of issues that are important to you, I highly recommend you try it out. When I was the Environmental Sustainability Coordinator at Duke University, I used a Google News Alert to keep tabs on *anything*happening that related to "Duke" and "environment." It was surprising how many times I'd find out about an initiative taking place across campus that I wasn't aware of. It also helped me know when we were successful in getting the news out about Duke's greening efforts.

News Alerts are also a great way to learn from other campuses and communities. If your campus is working on getting vehicles running on biodiesel and purchasing local food for the cafeteria, try setting up an alert forcampus biodieseland"local food" cafeteria(with the quotes). You will be amazed at how many people are working on the same problem and facing the same hurdles.

I also like to use News Alerts to keep track of all kinds of issues that are of special interest to me. For example, I have a Google News Alert for the wordsenvironmental justice. Of course, you can use it for less weighty topics as well. (Go Phoenix Suns!)

Tip #1:When signing up for News Alerts, search Google News to make sure your search terms are turning up the kinds of articles you want. Sometimes you will have to tweak the search terms by grouping words into phrases by putting quotation marks around them.

Tip #2:When you've finished Tip #1, sort the search resultsby date.Now look and see how many articles Google finds each day on average. If it is only 1 or 2 per day, you may want to have Google News send the articles to your inbox "as it happens." Otherwise, you will likely want to use one of Google's two digest options: daily or weekly.