Want to know when any of your friends, family members and business contacts are quoted in newspapers or get mentioned on one of the popular blogs?

You are probably aware of email alerting services called Google Alerts that will send an update as soon as Google discovers a news story or blog post that mentions your friend. You just have to create an “as-it-happens” email alert with your friend’s name and Google will help you keep a tab on him or her.

That’s one of the ways but wouldn’t it be nice if you could setup this kind of news monitoring for a bigger group of people – like your entire friends list?

Know When Your Friends & Family Make News

Meet newsly, an online tool that will automatically discover news articles and blogs that mention any of your friends. It gets you friends list from Facebook and LinkedIn and lets you know when they’re mentioned in news article or blog posts.

Newsly create a Pinterest style grid with all the mentions but you can also choose to receive alerts by email similar to Google Alerts.

Other than friends and professional contacts, you may also use the tool to follow news articles mentioning politicians, celebrities or your favorite people from the technology world. That said, if you friend shares a popular name, be prepared to see tons of useless news articles in your feed.

You can also use a tool like Yahoo Pipes to for tracking news stories written by your favorite journalists and bloggers.