Trapping Tags and Conversations - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 201

and not particularly useful to you, the trapper, but on the other hand the
amount of free technical support, spirited discussion, problem solving, and
other data low can be very helpful. But as I noted earlier, conversation trap-
ping is not without its problems.
the bummer of conversation trapping
he irst stumbling block of conversation trapping is credibility. When
you're searching with news search engines you can start out with a baseline
of credibility to which you can assign a story. You might, for example, con-
sider the Washington Post a high-credibility source, and give other sources
varying levels of credibility depending on how well you know them, what
they're reporting on, and so on.
With conversations, that baseline should be zero, since you can't assign any
credibility to what you're reading until it's corroborated or you have some
other reason to trust it. hat's not to say a lot of good information can't
be found in online conversations. But you don't know in some cases who's
posting, what the agenda is, where they got their information, and so on.
Another stumbling block is language. I've mentioned earlier in this topic
that in conversations people tend to be a little sloppier than when they're
writing for a Web page.
Yet another glitch is the fact that information gets old. It's usually not much
of a problem with news stories—when a situation changes, the news story is
updated to relect the new information. Sometimes, however, the updating
doesn't happen, and the same old, outdated information bounces around
and around. For an Internet-wide example of this, consider the case of
Craig Shergold. Craig had cancer and wanted to receive greeting cards—in
1989. Over ten years later, long ater Craig was cancer-free and long ater
he appeared on TV, letting the world know that the cards could stop, this
appeal for cards was still circulating around the Internet and only now
seems to be slowed down.
Keep all this in mind as you trap. You may discover over time that there
are some mailing lists you trust more than other ones. In reading through
the resources presented in this section, you'll learn there are ways you can
concentrate your trapping on one list if that works best for you. here are
many places online where you can watch conversations.