Trapping Topic-Based Information - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 149

eBay third-party services
RSS Auction, at www.rssauction.com, actually ofers two levels of RSS feed
generation. he irst one looks an awful lot like eBay's advanced search
page! Fill that one out and specify how long you want the feed to be active
(from 1 to 12 months) and RSS Auction will generate a feed for you. he sec-
ond one will generate a feed of items being ofered by one particular seller.
With both searches you have the chance to mail the RSS feed to you (though
I don't know why you'd do that; eBay's e-mail alerts are just ine). RSS Auc-
tion also sends out alerts for searches of Buy.com and Half.com.
Shopping and price researching can be fun, but let's shit gears. Let's shit
gears a lot. Let's go from things you might want to pay for to things you've
already paid for via your taxes: government services. While government
sites are not as advanced as some sections of the Internet in ofering moni-
toring services and RSS feeds, they're getting better all the time.
Trapping Government Information
One thing I like about tracking government information is that it's so prac-
tical; by setting a few information traps you can become a more informed
citizen and learn things that help you take advantage of government services
in your community. Let's start with the smallest common unit of government
sites, the city site, and then expand to state sites. We'll then look at national
services and do a quick overview of international government sites.
city sites
Maybe you know the Web site for your city. In case you don't, let me teach you
a couple of tricks. Take the name of your city and plug it into a full-text search
engine as part of the phrase “city of” . Every time I try this trick it pops the
oicial city site up to the top of the results. If you're not sure your results rep-
resent the oicial site, look for one of three things: a URL ending in .us, a URL
ending in .gov, or a description along the lines of “oicial site of the city of.” If
you're getting oicial sites, but not in the state for which you're searching, add
the state name as a keyword ( “city of Springield” Missouri ).