Case Studies - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 243

Ethel starts with Feedster (feedster.com), and begins the process of tracking
her name, her URL, and her site's name. She decides to go with all RSS feed
alerts in her blog searches—she's not interested in getting any notiications
via e-mail. Ater she's set up these feeds, she wonders if she should be moni-
toring blogs for mention of her site's theme—consumer advocacy. Ater all,
if she inds relevant blogs, she could ask them for links or begin a dialogue
with them. She does a quick search for “consumer advocacy” and inds a
small number of results scattered over a couple of weeks. Pleased, she adds
these to her RSS feeds.
Continuing her search, Ethel visits some other blog search engines, such
as Technorati (technorati.com) and Google blogs (blogsearch.google.
com/), and generates several more feeds to add to her feed reader. With
those added, she's conident that she'll be notiied quickly whenever some-
one mentions her or links to her blog. She'll also have several chances to
build her proile in the community by reading and responding to consumer
advocacy posts on other blogs. If she goes a step further and registers with
Technorati, she'll be able to get even more information about who's linking
to her blog.
Of course, blogs are not the only place where people discuss and link to
things. here's group discussion, as well.
tip
when Fred was setting up information traps, he was able to
evaluate his queries by the initial number of results he was getting.
ethel won't be able to do that in the searches for her name or her
blog's urL. if she's only started, she might not have anyone link-
ing to her at all! ethel will have to set up many of her initial traps
on faith and see what kind of results she gets. if she's getting too
many mentions to keep up with, she may have to adjust her traps
to exclude popular results (like from newsisFree, newsisfree.com)
or try some other adjustment to cut down the low.
Step 4: Monitoring group discussions
Ethel, like Fred, proceeds to Google Groups and Yahoo Groups to set
some traps. Yahoo Groups is a tough one, because she can't search the
entire database at one time, but has to pick groups that she thinks would
mention her blog or her topic of interest. (Ethel can do a Yahoo Groups