Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
You have the option of having the alerts sent to your e-mail address, to
Yahoo Messenger, or to a mobile device, such as your cell phone.
tip
to have alerts sent to your cell phone, you must register your
mobile device with Yahoo, which involves specifying the type of
device it is (cell phone, pager, or something else), the manufac-
turer, the wireless carrier, and the phone number. Yahoo gives you
the option of specifying the maximum number of alerts you get a
day, but be forewarned: it's no fun being an information trapper if
your wireless service provider charges you a zillion dollars a month
for all the alerts you're getting. if your service provider charges
you per wireless alert, make sure you severely limit the number of
alerts Yahoo can send you per day.
If you're interested in a topic that may precipitate a bulletin, such as pol-
itics, international relations, and so on, you may ind the breaking news
alerts useful. (Be sure to get the bulletins, which will minimize your alerts.)
However, if you're more into old woodworking equipment or treatments
for shingles, breaking news may be of minimal interest to you. In cases like
these, you'll want regular news alerts.
When you choose News from the main alerts menu, you'll discover that
you have three types of news alerts available: breaking news (you've already
seen the options for those), keyword news, or a daily news digest. Go for
the keyword news. Again, e-mail alerts are best when you can ilter them by
keyword. You won't save much time in your trapping if you're looking over
an entire daily digest's worth of news.
When choosing keyword-based news alerts, you won't be able to specify
where you want the news to come from, but you will be able to specify what
keywords you want included and excluded from your queries.
Once you've speciied the words, you're set up to receive alerts. You can go back
and add more alerts or review what you already have set up (
Figure 4.3
).
If these alert options aren't speciic enough for you, and you have no objec-
tions to RSS feeds, consider Yahoo News RSS feeds instead. hey have many
more options, including allowing you to search categories of stories and
specify the language of stories that you're searching. We'll look at more
Yahoo options in later chapters.
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