1. What Is Information Trapping?

For a long time—and especially around 1994, when the World Wide Web was just getting its jumpstart—the Internet appeared to many as a vast pool of information just sitting in cyberspace. People who used the Internet for research “cast their nets” by entering queries into a search engine, and then pulled in “fish,” in the form of information. Once they had the information they needed, they didn’t bother to repeat the search, unless enough time lapsed and the information changed.

Nowadays the Internet is in a constant state of flux. No longer a static repository of information, Web content changes minute by minute. From bloggers posting their thoughts online and news sources adding timely stories, to Flickr users showing off their latest photographs and the explosion of online video and podcasts, information is being added at a breathtaking rate.

This continuous flow of information provides an opportunity to not only conduct Web searches of relatively constant information, such as a phone number or the capital of Idaho, but to continuously monitor live information, such as the expansion of area codes or the population growth of Idaho over time, to stay abreast of topics that are of interest.

This idea of using ongoing information “trapping”—constant information gathering that’s as automated as possible—instead of relying only on static, single instances of Web searching is what this book is all about. And as you’ll discover, many tools are available for trapping information.

The Benefits of Information Trapping

Picture this: You get up in the morning and go to your office. You’re in the middle of a project on online retail sales. Before information trapping was a reality, you would spend some time visiting various specialty magazines and conducting online news searches, looking for more retail statistics. With information trapping, you initially set up information-gathering traps for information and statistics about online retail sales, and then each morning you simply open your RSS feed reader and/or e-mail application, sit back, and read through the information your traps have found. You can save and organize whatever data you want. As you move on to the other work you need to accomplish, your information traps are busily scanning the Internet to provide you updated information the next time you do your research.

The primary benefit of information trapping, versus running a static search every time you need up-to-date information, is saved time. Once you’ve set up the traps, information flows to you and into an infrastructure you have organized; you no longer need to go out and seek it. This puts you in a better position to gather information and learn about your topic than if you simply ran searches on search engines whenever you had the time.

The usual process for getting information from the Web looks something like this:

1. Run a search on a search engine.

2. Evaluate the results.

3. Refine the query.

4. Repeat this process until you get the information you need.

This process works fine when you need basic information, or you’re searching for information that you will need only once. However, when you’re trying to get information about something for which you have an ongoing interest, performing these steps over and over can get tedious.

Compare this process to the process of information trapping:

1. Consider your subject and carefully develop search queries.

2. Evaluate possible resources to search.

3. Set up your queries.

4. Receive and evaluate the results.

The downside to information trapping is that setting up your traps takes more time initially than just running a single query on a search engine. The reason? Once you’ve created a search term or set of resources to be monitored, you don’t have the ability to refine your queries, so you have to do your tweaking in advance. However, once they’re established, information traps run just fine on their own, and you don’t have to continually remember to keep running queries to stay abreast of your topic. You’ll receive results for as long as you’re interested in getting them—days, weeks, months, or possibly even years. And over time, you can refine your search as your interests change or as the topic itself changes.

Asking the Right Questions

I’m going to spend a lot of time in this book talking about techniques, resources, sites, and software—the stuff you’ll need to make your information traps a reality. But before I get to that I want you to be aware that one of the most important tools for effective information trapping is your own brain. Your brain is what guides the process and determines the kind of content you actually want to see. It’s essential that you ask the right questions before you begin.

This section details the questions you should ask yourself each and every time you design an information trap.

Why trap for this particular topic?

There are literally millions of topics that are suitable candidates for information trapping, but you still need to think about why you want to trap a particular one. Being able to answer why you want to trap it influences the resources you choose and the way you organize your information. Are you maintaining a Web site on a subject and you need to monitor the Internet for new sites and information that will help you generate content? Are you trying to get publicity for something and need to monitor the Web for similar stories? Are you trying to keep up to date with a certain health condition? Having a sense of why you want to set up information trapping will help you design a better information trap.

What sources do you want to search?

A wide variety of sites on the Internet are available for trapping—they vary in scope, kind of material, and credibility. What kind of information do you want? Do you want to limit yourself to highly credible sources? In that case, you’ll probably want to search just government resources and news search engines. Don’t mind less credible results? Then you could expand your results to search engines in general. Want to hear what people think about a topic? Then you could monitor discussion lists or blogs. There are many different types of resources available to monitor; choosing the best resources for your needs is one of the things I’ll show you in this book.

Where do you want to search?

Answering where you want to search overlaps with the previous “what sources?” question. If you answered that question sufficiently, you’re well on your way to answering the “where” question, which addresses the geographical factor you need to consider for your research. Many search resources these days let you narrow your search results to a particular region, country, state, or city. Not all topics require geographic restriction, but sometimes it’s useful. Say you want to create an information trap on a sports star. Unfortunately, he has a very common name, but by setting up the trap to include the name of his team’s city, and perhaps even his own hometown, the information you receive in your traps is more likely to be focused only on him.

How often do you want to receive results?

If you’ve created a series of information traps, and you can handle the flow (or deluge) of information that comes back to you, you may want to see results each day. If you’re in a rush, you may even want the results on an hourly basis. On the other hand, you may have only a certain amount of time to devote to your research, so you might elect to receive updates only once a week. When answering this question, it’s important to consider how much time you have to devote to your information trap. If you’re uncertain, be a little conservative. It’s easier to turn up your frequency than to dig yourself out from under a pile of information.

How do you want to receive your results?

Not too long ago, if you wanted to monitor information online, you had one choice for delivery—good ol’ e-mail. Nowadays, you can still use e-mail, but you’ve got other choices, including RSS feeds (which I discuss a lot in this book) and SMS (“short message service,” which a growing number of mobile phones support). You don’t have to limit yourself to only one delivery type. You may decide that you want to get most of your results by e-mail, but there’s one important topic—about which you want to be alerted immediately—where SMS is the better choice.

You’ve probably heard a lot about RSS, and you might even have heard some people say that “e-mail is dead” or something like that. Trust me: E-mail is not going anywhere. The important thing is that you choose a delivery method that’s comfortable for you. If you’re not comfortable with RSS, use e-mail. Or use SMS. If alerts were available by carrier pigeon, I’d tell you to use those if that’s what you like best.

Take a few minutes and muse on the questions above; we’ll explore some of the answers you might have—and how to use those answers to implement well designed information traps—later in the book. If you already have a topic in mind and you have solid answers to the questions above, you’re well on your way to setting up your first information trap!

Getting Practical

This chapter hopefully rewired your brain a little bit so that you now think of the Internet as a dynamic pool of data from which you can harness and automatically cull certain types of information that interest you on an ongoing basis, without having to fetch it yourself.

In addition to learning how to think about the Internet in new ways and understanding its potential, you’re also going to need to expand your Internet toolbox. Sure, you’ll be using your familiar Web browser, but you’re also going to be learning about and using RSS, page monitors, and e-mail alerts. Let’s get started!