Information Technology Reference
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has to go. Or you may ind that a source has become so overwhelmed with
advertising that the diiculty of getting to the news outweighs the quality of
the news. Time to get rid of it. You may also ind that a site is almost never
updating anymore, or has gone of in a wildly diferent direction. Get rid of it.
If it comes back, you'll hear about it from your general topic sources.
Here are some other signs that you may need to get rid of a source or a query:
. You never actively use the information that your trap inds. (his
may also be a symptom that you have too many queries and are get-
ting overwhelmed with information. Evaluate your sources.)
By the time you get a good story from that source or query, you've
already gotten it several times from other sources.
.
When you get something from a source or query and you think, “Oh,
argh.” Go with your gut instinct and get rid of it.
.
A Dynamically Changing Activity
If there were only one thing that I could really get across to you about the
whole idea of information trapping, it would be this: it's not a static process.
You will constantly need to evaluate your results—not merely as informa-
tional items, but as elements of your monitoring strategy.
By shiting your focus from wandering on the Internet to setting traps for
the information you want, you now can save a lot of time and efort in keep-
ing abreast of the topics that interest you. I grant you, it's a lot more time
consuming to set the traps up than it is to just ire up your browser and start
suring. But you will more than make that time back in the long run.
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