Trapping Tags and Conversations - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 208

Yahoo Groups
You don't, strictly speaking, need a Yahoo account to read Yahoo Groups
(groups.yahoo.com), but I recommend it. Many of the groups don't let you
read the archives unless you're a member, and by signing into Yahoo you'll
easily be able to sign up for groups. Some groups don't ofer public access
to their archives at all. You have to be given permission to join the list, ater
which you can read the archives. I ind there are few enough of those that
they don't hinder my information trapping.
Yahoo's mailing lists are set up under a sort of hierarchy. Yahoo has set
them up into a searchable subject index that's very Yahooesque. But you
may ind keyword searching to be your best bet.
he rules for keyword searching for mailing lists here should be much
like what you used with Google Groups: moderate to very general words.
Because Yahoo Groups ofers only mailing lists, it can provide you with a
little more information in its search results, including extended descrip-
tions, a count of the number of people who are subscribed to a mailing list,
and whether the mailing list archives are accessible to members or not.
When you decide to subscribe to a mailing list and click on the name of
the list from the search results, you get a little more information about the
group—like how many new members it's gained and how many links, pho-
tos, and messages it's added in the past week. Pay attention to this! he
activity of the list is going to determine your strategy to keep up with it, and
how much use you might get out of it. A group with hundreds of new mes-
sages a week should be approached with more speciic and narrower queries
than a group with only a few dozen messages a week.
And that's how we get to talking about trapping. As you may have already
guessed, your strategy with Yahoo Groups is going to be diferent than your
strategy with Google Groups. For one thing, you can't search the entire
body of messages at once—you're going to have to irst identify useful
groups, then search them individually. How you go about that depends on
the group itself.
Public groups—groups which have no restrictions on membership or post-
reading—will ofer RSS feeds of the latest posts. he RSS buttons are in the
same area as the latest posts ( Figure 9.11 ).