Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
maintaining a Web site on a subject and you need to monitor the Internet
for new sites and information that will help you generate content? Are you
trying to get publicity for something and need to monitor the Web for simi-
lar stories? Are you trying to keep up to date with a certain health condi-
tion? Having a sense of why you want to set up information trapping will
help you design a better information trap.
What sources do you want to search?
A wide variety of sites on the Internet are available for trapping—they vary
in scope, kind of material, and credibility. What kind of information do
you want? Do you want to limit yourself to highly credible sources? In that
case, you'll probably want to search just government resources and news
search engines. Don't mind less credible results? hen you could expand
your results to search engines in general. Want to hear what people think
about a topic? hen you could monitor discussion lists or blogs. here are
many diferent types of resources available to monitor; choosing the best
resources for your needs is one of the things I'll show you in this topic.
Where do you want to search?
Answering where you want to search overlaps with the previous “what
sources?” question. If you answered that question suiciently, you're well on
your way to answering the “where” question, which addresses the geographi-
cal factor you need to consider for your research. Many search resources
these days let you narrow your search results to a particular region, country,
state, or city. Not all topics require geographic restriction, but sometimes it's
useful. Say you want to create an information trap on a sports star. Unfortu-
nately, he has a very common name, but by setting up the trap to include the
name of his team's city, and perhaps even his own hometown, the informa-
tion you receive in your traps is more likely to be focused only on him.
how often do you want to receive results?
If you've created a series of information traps, and you can handle the low
(or deluge) of information that comes back to you, you may want to see
results each day. If you're in a rush, you may even want the results on an
hourly basis. On the other hand, you may have only a certain amount of
time to devote to your research, so you might elect to receive updates only
once a week. When answering this question, it's important to consider how
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