What Is Information Trapping? - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 6

much time you have to devote to your information trap. If you're uncertain,
be a little conservative. It's easier to turn up your frequency than to dig
yourself out from under a pile of information.
how do you want to receive your results?
Not too long ago, if you wanted to monitor information online, you had one
choice for delivery—good ol' e-mail. Nowadays, you can still use e-mail,
but you've got other choices, including RSS feeds (which I discuss a lot in
this topic) and SMS (“short message service,” which a growing number of
mobile phones support). You don't have to limit yourself to only one delivery
type. You may decide that you want to get most of your results by e-mail, but
there's one important topic—about which you want to be alerted immedi-
ately— where SMS is the better choice.
You've probably heard a lot about RSS, and you might even have heard some
people say that “e-mail is dead” or something like that. Trust me: E-mail
is not going anywhere. he important thing is that you choose a delivery
method that's comfortable for you. If you're not comfortable with RSS, use
e-mail. Or use SMS. If alerts were available by carrier pigeon, I'd tell you to
use those if that's what you like best.
Take a few minutes and muse on the questions above; we'll explore some of
the answers you might have—and how to use those answers to implement
well designed information traps—later in the topic. If you already have a
topic in mind and you have solid answers to the questions above, you're well
on your way to setting up your irst information trap!
Getting Practical
his chapter hopefully rewired your brain a little bit so that you now think
of the Internet as a dynamic pool of data from which you can harness and
automatically cull certain types of information that interest you on an
ongoing basis, without having to fetch it yourself.
In addition to learning how to think about the Internet in new ways and
understanding its potential, you're also going to need to expand your Inter-
net toolbox. Sure, you'll be using your familiar Web browser, but you're also
going to be learning about and using RSS, page monitors, and e-mail alerts.
Let's get started!