Just sign up for an account and choose the things you want to track. Trackle offers a couple dozen categories, starting with About Me: You on the Web, you in blogs, you in local news, and so on. Others include Finance, Health, Jobs, and Sports.

For each "Tracklet" you set up, you simply supply a few extra bits of information to customize the results: names, keywords, locations, and so on. But this is effortless, and when you're done you can monitor the results in the Your inbox tab.

Trackle can also send you an e-mail or text message when there's a new alert, either one at a time or as part of a daily digest. There's even a vacation-hold option that cleverly suspends notifications while you're on the road.

I'm loving this service. It's much more versatile than Google Alerts, and the prefab Tracklets make it a snap to get all kinds of useful information. Definitely worth a look.