Trapping Tags and Conversations - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 214

But if you can get past those problems, you'll ind a lot to love in boards.
Generally they evolve into a community, so if you ind a good community
that acts courteously toward itself and exchanges good information, you
can anticipate the entire forum to generate good information even as it
moves forward into new topics. Generally, moderated boards (forums that
have a manager control the postings) are better than unmoderated boards,
but in both cases the information quality varies across forums.
I can recommend two places that will help you both ind forums and ind
messages on forums.
Building Queries for Forums
You thought building queries for mailing lists and newsgroups was different? Building queries for
online forums is even more different. in my experience, forum discussions are fairly disjointed.
The community i mentioned above also means that the group develops its own vocabulary,
history, and so on. for best results, i recommend monitoring the front page of a forum site and
watching for the keywords in which you're interested. The more general, the better. for some
less-active forums you might be able to get away with just monitoring the front page and not
using keywords at all.
some of the resources outlined in this chapter allow you to search many boards at a time. in that
case, again, stick to more general keywords and monitor search results pages.
Big-Boards
Big-Boards (big-boards.com) tracks and provides information on the larg-
est boards and forums on the Internet. And when I say largest I mean hun-
dreds of millions of posts by hundreds of thousands of users. here are over
1,800 boards listed in this directory. Very information-rich trapping areas,
as long as you can keep the information low to a usable level!
You may browse available forums in a subject index or search by keyword.
Each forum listing has an information page that provides a description of
the board, as well as a screenshot and number of monitors. Each listing also
has a stats page that graphically shows the number of members and the
number of posts per day, and gives a text listing of the number of users and
the average number of posts per week.