Hi newtothis,
Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) send an email to you dependent on your settings – immediately or once a day. You tell them that you want to monitor “garythescubaguy” and any reference to that keyword will trigger an email to you.
I use it to monitor syndication of press releases, new links and a billion other things. What it essentially does is monitor the Google databases and lets you know when something happens, like a new link to your website.
Monitoring the SBM (social bookmarks) that I put in place using Google Alerts is more of a technique that I use to monitor what SBM’s are working so |I can fine tune resources.
I have done extensive (and I mean EXTENSIVE) research on SBM’ing and can tell you that they will enhance your rankings. Typically it only works for 30-45 days…but it works. Especially if you are in the top ten and need a little boost to test the waters to see if you should spend a bit of money on SEO to gain a few positions.
You don’t need votes on these or have a network of people also voting. Of course that would be beneficial, but its not necessary. Onlywire is a pretty cool tool for this, if they would support it a little better, but its worth using.
One more thing, I use roboform and install evey SBM (firefox) plugin that I can get so the task of SBM’ing becomes a “one-click” task.