Congratulations to Shaun Shull, the inventor of new social media monitoring site Zudos. By coming up with a name whose only rhyme is ‘kudos’, they’re almost guaranteeing good headlines. Which I have awkwardly resisted.

The same thing goes for something like del.icio.us – you’re almost compelled to write about ‘tasty features’, ‘yummy deals’ and other such pap. Not so sure about flickr, in this regard, which rather invites headlines along the lines of ‘on the blink’…

But I digress. Zudos is an aggregator and a search for social media. You start with a blank screen and enter a name. It returns blog posts on the subject, YouTube videos, del.icio.us bookmarks, podcasts, tagged photos, mainstream media sites and voted stories from Netscape.com.

My first impressions are that this is a rather excellent tool for anyone involved in PR or reputation management. Suppose you work for a large multinational, for example – getting the latest from all of these sources on your desktop whenever you need them would be a godsend when it comes to both taking a barometer of the world’s opinion and acting on individual cases. Of course, it’s perfectly possible to search for these things elsewhere – but nowhere can you do it on a single screen. It also works really well – results take about 3-4 seconds to compile.

Missing features? It’s a bit churlish to complain, but a combined RSS feed for your results would be golden. It’s a shame that there’s no digg or reddit results, either, since I believe these both have larger audiences than Netscape.

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