Case Studies - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 246

Different Strokes
As you can see from these two case studies, diferent needs are going to use dif-
ferent resources. A resource that's essential to one trapper may be all but useless
to another. hat's the irst thing to remember. he second thing to remember
is that your initial set of traps is not static. To keep up with the changes in your
topic, be it internal or external, you will have to change them over time.
In a perfect world, you would be able to monitor all traps indeinitely. You
would never have to back of, or do other things, or drop your topic, or
anything. In that world you could let everything putter forever. But it isn't
a perfect world, so in addition to knowing what to look for and how to look
for it, you also need to know how to shut things of.
Shutting Off the Flow
he project is done. Or another project is coming along and you're drown-
ing in work. Or some emergency has occurred and you need to stop moni-
toring your traps right now. In the cases where you have to put your trapper
hat aside for the moment, there are several diferent ways you can back out
of information monitoring, depending on what you're monitoring.
Shutting down rSS
Shutting down RSS, if you're using a feed reader, is no big deal. Just stop
reading the feed. Preparing it so that you have a way back in is a little
tougher. A lot of news is going to go by while you're preoccupied. Consider
using Blogdigger (blogdigger.com) to save old posts from RSS feeds, but
remember it's not a panacea—if you leave an RSS feed unread for more than
30 days or so, you're going to leave some things unfound and unread no
matter what happens.
Shutting down e-mail
You have two options for shutting down e-mail, and they both involve ilters.
he irst way is to ilter all your mail straight into an archive. hat way you'll
have it when you need it. However, some old alerts, especially for news
searches, will get too old to be found in 30 days or so. Most news search