Case Studies - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 240

At this point, Fred has a low of news stories related to his interest and a
somewhat more limited low of discussion groups talking about his inter-
est. His next task is to ind Web sites dedicated to the topic in which he's
interested and set up page monitors.
Step 4: Monitoring pages
Fred knows that most of the news sources he's monitoring are general. His
next task is to ind Web sites that are more oriented toward outsourcing spe-
ciically and see if he can integrate any of them into his information traps.
He starts with the Yahoo Directory (dir.yahoo.com). Knowing that Yahoo's
directory is not a list of sites and is more of a subject index, he starts again
with a single-word search query— outsourcing . He inds the relevant cat-
egory and looks at the list of available sites. He inds half-a-dozen that seem
to have potential and spends some time reviewing them. In some cases, he
decides to monitor the front page. In other cases, he decides to monitor a
diferent page on the site. And in one case, he decides to monitor three dif-
ferent pages on one site—the front page, the news release page, and the page
of a journal relevant to outsourcing that is hosted on the site.
From there he moves to the Open Directory (dmoz.org) and tries the same
thing, inding a few more useful pages. He doesn't feel, however, that he's
getting full coverage of the outsourcing industry, especially as it relates to
Taiwan. So he goes to Google and tries a speciic search based on the search
that failed when searching forums: “begin outsourcing” advice . He gets
371 results and is able to narrow that down to 10 pages to monitor what he
did not ind through the directory. He's now more comfortable that he's
getting complete coverage.
Many information trappers might stop here, believing they're well on their
way to becoming informed. In Fred's case, however, there's one more cat-
egory of resource that he wants to cover.
Step 5: Monitoring stocks
In his research into outsourcing, Fred sees some publicly owned companies
whose names are coming up over and over again. hese companies have
made decisions about outsourcing to Asia—some of them are including it in
their strategies, some have pledged never to do it, and so on. Because Fred