Keeping Up - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 323

I used to spend mornings checking my traps; now I tend to check them in
the evening. It seems to work better when I do it all at once instead of over
the course of a day—it's easier to catch duplicates, get a sense of trends in
coverage, and so on. I go through the RSS feeds and monitored pages sepa-
rately and manage the e-mail alerts as I get my e-mail.

For every item I get, I try to do one of three things:

. Put it in a text ile to be acted on.

Pass it on to someone who will be more interested in it than I am.
. hrow it away or ignore it.

.

he temptation is always there to save something for later, of course, but I
try to resist it. Virtual objects have a tendency to pile up and become use-
less because you never have the time to actually read or act on them (at least
they're indable via computer indexing programs). If I absolutely must keep
something, I try to relegate it to a storage text ile that I don't normally use, but
which I can easily search if I suddenly have a need for some stashed story.

If you decide to put of dealing with some of your gathered information in
this way, be sure to save entire articles rather than just pointers to articles.
Some sites don't keep their news archives up for more than 30 days or so,
and you might ind yourself looking for a story that was relegated to a pay-
per-view archive months ago. Full-text articles also make searching a little
easier as well.

So you want to be monitoring every day, at a regular time that suits your
schedule. If this isn't possible, commit to checking your traps at least three
times a week. By developing a regular habit of checking your traps, you'll
get a sense of the cycle of news for your topic. In the case of my trapping
topics, weekends and holidays are really slow; Monday and Tuesday are
torrentially busy, and the rest of the days are busy enough. hings may
be diferent for you. If you're tracking a particular sport, for instance, you
may have very busy weekends and then months when very little is going on
because of the of-season.

Knowing the average day-to-day activity of your topics is what allows the
gut feeling to come into play. For instance, sometimes I'll notice that a
weekend has been a little busier than usual—a rumor here, a story there—
and then I start wondering if something's going to come down early in the
week. Oten I'm right. Other times I'll notice a certain story repeating over