I've been using Google Alerts for a while now. I found them mildly useful. However, I have now found that these alerts are very useful when you want to know who's talking about your software. I just got an alert this morning that PainlessSVN showed up on a cracker's website.

I find this extremely amusing. PainlessSVN is not even released and it's already garnering attention. Too funny! Best way to combat this is just to put out a LOT of releases. I'm hoping to put out v1.0 sometime in September.