Keeping Up - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 324

and over and over again, and I'll wonder if that means the story is suddenly
going to change in a dramatic way, and oten it does. Once you're used to the
rhythms of your topic, you'll have a “Hey, what's up?” feeling when you're
suddenly getting a lot more, or a lot fewer, alerts.
When you get that instinctive feeling about a topic you're trapping, you dei-
nitely want to pay attention to it. It's that feeling that sometimes lets you know
it's time to make changes to the keywords you're monitoring.
Know When to Hold 'Em, Know When
to Fold 'Em
Most keywords for which you're monitoring are going to be nouns. (I can
think of a few times when you'd use verbs and other parts of speech, but let's
stick to nouns.) And a noun, you may remember from your Schoolhouse
Rock, is a person, place, or thing. How oten you will need to change your
keywords and what to look for really depends on whether you're monitor-
ing a person, place, or thing.
Trapping a person
A lot of people monitors are centered on companies—you want to see what
the CEO is up to, what the CFO said last week, and so on. It's easy to know
when to alter these—when a person leaves the company, is moved out of the
position you wanted to monitor, and so forth. Sometimes I will leave a per-
son monitor in place if the individual let the company in an extraordinary
way. If he or she was prosecuted for criminal activity and forced to resign
from a company, I may continue to monitor the name a little longer. I do
this because that person's actions most likely will “echo” in the company for
a while, and will be referred to again and again as the company deals with
things like investor lawsuits, restructuring, and realigning its business.
You might also monitor a name in the context of a topic. Take Peter Drucker,
for example. Because Drucker is a famous name in the world of business,
you might have added his name to a monitored source about corporations
to glean quotes from him, references to his topics (many of which are con-
sidered classics in management), and so on.