Trapping Topic-Based Information - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 160

If you have more of a general interest in a country, you're going to have quite
a task. If the front page has the latest news on the country's workings, like
Iceland, monitor that. If it doesn't, try to ind the What's New page (in my
experience there's usually some permutation of a What's New page). But
don't rely just on the country's site. Find the major media for that country
and monitor its headlines—the front page of that media's Web site or RSS
feeds. You might also want to ind that country's embassy in your country
and monitor it too, but really, a general interest in a country is a huge thing
to try to encompass. If there's any way at all to do it, narrow it down.
When You Want What Isn't There
My space is limited in this topic—there are only so many trees in the world.
And you may ind that the speciic topic for which you want to do informa-
tion trapping is not presented in this chapter. In this case, you can start
your own hunt for search engines and other large-index resources to moni-
tor. I can suggest two techniques for doing that: the easy, incomplete way,
or the much more diicult, but more thorough way.
the easy, incomplete way
he easy, incomplete way is to visit some general searchable subject indexes
like Yahoo Directory or Dmoz, and browse through the directory to the
more general categories for your topic. From there, look for a subtopic
called Web Directories, or Directories, or Search Engines ( Figure 7.26 ).
his list of Web directories will introduce you to deep sources of informa-
tion about your topic that will include What's New pages to monitor, point-
ers to news sources and search engines, and other data-rich places at which
you can trap information. he one downside is that searchable subject
indexes usually do not include everything, and you may miss some things.