Trapping Topic-Based Information - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 152

frequently—state sites will ofer RSS feeds for their Web sites (some even
ofer e-mail alerts—try to take advantage of that).
he second thing to look for is some kind of membership ofering. Some
government Web sites ofer free registration so that you can create your
own My State page, which allows you to specify what you're interested in
and get everything on a customized page. Sometimes that's it—no e-mail
alerts or RSS feeds—but a customized page is easier to monitor and pro-
vides more information.
In a few cases, depending on what state you're looking at and what you're
looking for, you may ind that nothing really meets your needs for monitor-
ing. In that case, you can either monitor the agency home page that most
closely matches your interests or you can monitor the home page of the site
itself. Neither is ideal, but either one is better than not looking at the site at
all. You can also try searching the state Web site for your query words, and
monitoring the query results, but search engine quality across state Web
sites varies a lot. Be careful.
Federal sites
As you can see, the state Web sites are a leap in complexity compared to the
city Web sites. So you might imagine that the national sites are another leap
of complexity. And that is the case, but I think there's been a longer, more
consistent efort on the part of the U.S. government to develop its Web pres-
ence than there has been for the states as a whole.
here are many places from which you can monitor U.S. government infor-
mation, but there's one place in particular where I like to start looking.
FirstGov
FirstGov (irstgov.gov/) is an efort by the U.S. government to create a portal
of easily accessible government information. And it's done a pretty good
job! Of course, it's a tough task. here are tons of government agencies and
what seems like ininite programs and departments in which you might be
interested. Don't despair! Start with the RSS Feed page, move to the A-Z
Agency List and then try the search engine. Note that the search engine is
not searching every agency Web page. It's just searching an overview list of
the types of agencies available. So keep your queries more general.