Case Studies - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 247

engines don't keep archives for more than about 30 days, and most online
news outlets also have a limit to how long they keep their stories online.
he second way is to ilter your alerts straight into the garbage. If you're sure
that you won't be able to read your alerts for a long time, or you're not quite
inished with the topic (so you don't want to unsubscribe from the alerts
completely), ilter into the garbage.
You might be thinking, “Ah, that's not much diferent from just deleting
them from my inbox!” It is. You'll ind that the unused, unneeded alerts
will drown out the current work you're trying to do. Go ahead and take the
time to remove the alerts from your main e-mail. It will make it a lot easier
to pay attention to your current tasks.
Shutting down page monitors
If you are using WebSite-Watcher or another client-side page monitor, shut-
ting down your page monitors is as easy as never activating that sotware
again. his simplicity comes with a tremendous disadvantage, however.
You can't keep track of page changes as they occur over time.
With Web-based monitors that send you results by e-mail, it's diferent. You
can ilter those just as you ilter e-mail. And you can keep track of several
changes that appear over time. But like regular e-mail alerts, be sure to take
the time to ilter the unneeded alerts where they need to go—either into the
garbage or into the archives.
Branching Out from These Basic Patterns
he purpose of this chapter has been to give you a bird's eye view of how
people in two diferent situations might use the tools that we've discussed
so far in this topic. While you don't have to follow these steps exactly (and,
indeed, lots of references to smaller resources have been let out) this should
give you a basic pattern on which to base your own trapping strategy. Build
on it from there.