Information Technology Reference
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An Ear to the Ground, a Nose to the Wind
Every time you research all the potential traps for a set of queries, you'll come
across blogs, or portals, or information sites, that cover your topic but do not
get as narrowed or focused as you need them to. I recommend you pick a few
of the best ones—not all of them, just a few—and read them regularly, either
via Web page monitor or RSS feed. his does two things for you: it keeps you
up to date on new information sources and teaches you new concepts.
he queries and sources you monitor can keep you up to date on new infor-
mation sources that are relevant to your content, but your queries may
be too focused for that to work well. You may get all kinds of sites about
antique woodworking, for example, but nothing about general woodwork-
ing directories, which may be useful for you to monitor for antique wood-
working sites. Use your queries to be as speciic as possible, and then do a
little general overview monitoring to hit all the topical stuf that can help
you add new sources down the road.
Monitoring topical overview sites and news sources is also useful because
these types of sites track all the trends for the topic you're monitoring, and
because they're general sources, sometimes they will expose you to and
teach you about a new concept or idea faster than if you had relied only on
your queries. Which means that you can start experimenting with those
concepts in your queries sooner rather than later.
It's unlikely that you'll have a problem inding topical Web sites that match
your interest as you work on generating your speciic monitoring queries.
If you do, however, try a searchable subject index like Yahoo or the Open
Directory Project.
Reevaluating Your Sources and Pruning
Your Traps
I'm being very glib, aren't I, recommending that you add queries when you
might be feeling like you're quite overloaded as it is? It's just as important
to remove queries that are no longer productive, or which aren't quite what
you're looking for, as it is to add new names and concepts as you ind them.
Sometimes you'll discover that two sources you're monitoring are overlapping
more than a reasonable amount (perhaps ive to ten percent), so one of them
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