ResearchBuzz

After a week or so of serious barnacle-scraping and poking around, I ended up with about 200 pages in my Web page monitor and 282 feeds in my feed reader. There’s another fifty or so e-mail alerts I’ve got set up. Of course, I’ll probably do a little more adjustment, but so far I’m happy with what I’m finding, and I’m getting just enough overlap to feel confident about what’s being covered.

For the longest time I’ve concentrated on building information traps as an individual user, and not as part of a group. But today in a company meeting I started thinking about information traps and knowledge flow in an enterprise.

A couple of the senior people are getting more specific about what kind of information they want to receive — they want to know when THIS happens or when THIS happens or THIS happens. And that’s fine, but all the information is internal. Where, I wondered, is the external context? What about the municipal changes that might impact a business, or developments in an industry, or even changes and studies in consumer behavior?

Managing internal information flow is one thing. Managing standardized information flow (eg reports: “We have submitted a proposal to buy a truck!”) versus emergency communications (”Our truck just crashed!”) versus casual/ noncritical/nonrequested/social-level communications (”Hey, we painted our truck!”) is yet another thing.

Integrating that information flow with external context in the form of relevant facts/analysis from political/industrial ecology as well as the blogosphere and media is still another, and even bigger, thing. Information trapping on an enterprise level becomes information trapping (with an eye toward constant adjustment of traps based on what you find), information integration, and repurposing towards action.

I will be doing more experimenting on this and may have some more to say later….

It’s not often I see tools that are specifically for monitoring new content. FaveBot is a keyword-based search engine that monitors for a variety of content, including events, blog entries, and products, it’s free and available at http://favebot.com/ .

You’ll need to register to use FaveBot — registration requires just a user name and password (if you want to track events, you’ll need to add your location.)

Once you’ve registered you can choose to set up a “new tracking”. (I don’t know how many you’re allowed to set up; initially you’ll start with two.) The new tracking gives you a query box and the option to choose from several different categories of information, including blogs, books, dvds, events, podcasts, and videos. Unfortunately the list does not tell you WHICH resource you’re tracking (Google Video? YouTube? Something else?) You do get some hints on that from the notes underneath the new tracking list — you’re advised to use more than one word in your searches and are warned that the video results could get spammy.

Once you’ve chosen a topic/query you want to track, FaveBot immediately gives you a loaded RSS feed with your keywords (assuming it found any.) You can also filter your feed by the kind of content you’ve chosen, or delete certain items from the feed. FaveBot also makes it easy to add the feed to several types of RSS feed readers or get it by e-mail.

My first concern is that you don’t know exactly what resources you’re tracking with this site. I can make some educated guesses, but that doesn’t mean I’d be correct. There’s a second concern that might be yours but isn’t mine: why bother to come to FaveBot anyway? Why not just generate traps and feeds at the source site?

I’m not concerned about this because I see tools like FaveBot as a convenience; if you want to be able to track one topic across several sources this is an easy way to do it. (Of course, you have to know WHAT resources you’re tracking…)

One last thing. FaveBot has a blog, of course. FaveBot noted that it was actually prefiltering the blog search results — which apparently come from Google Blog Search — because of splogs. Eventually that was stopped. But I think it’s a good idea. Prefiltering incoming sources for annoying content like splogs and other feed cruft adds a tremendous amount of value to the service. Just something that ran through my mind.

So I’ve been spending the last several days doing a overhaul of my information trapping services. As you might imagine, I try to monitor a lot of data sources, and it had been a while — a few years — since I looked over everything and thought to myself, “Am I finding/getting everything I want to get/find?” The tools I’m using have been similar for the last several years, but the sources underwent a big shift this time.

Tool Time

The majority of my reviewing and sifting work is done with three tools:

1) A Web Page Monitor — I use WebSite-Watcher, which is available at http://www.aignes.com/. I’ve used it for ages and it’s AWESOME. I discovered visiting the software’s site over the weekend that there’s a Firefox extension available for it now, AND you have the option to install a portable version. I don’t have to rely on Web page monitors as much as I did before RSS became popular, but there are still plenty of pages that don’t have feeds available.

2) An RSS Feed Reader — I was using NewzCrawler for a while ( http://www.newzcrawler.com/ ), but since FeedDemon ( http://www.newsgator.com/ Individuals/FeedDemon/ ) went free I’m giving it a try. I HATE the way it’s initially set up so you can only see ten items at a time — that’s fine for small RSS feeds, but say you’re monitoring the retail releases section at Business Wire? You can go to the Options and view up to 200 items at a page, which is still not enough, but 20 times better. What I ultimately end up using is still up in the air.

3) A Text Editor — I have used UltraEdit ( http://www.ultrae dit.com/ ) for at least nine years. But now a registered version is $49.95, and it might be a little too high for me to recommend it without reservations. For machines where I don’t have UltraEdit — because, holy cow, I can’t afford $50 per text editor for every computer I use — I use NoteTab Light.

What I’m Watching

Using these three tools I went through a lot of the sources I have and made some serious shifts:

1) No more DMOZ. For a long time I monitored Open Directory pages for categories in which I was interested. But there’s so little going on in that directory that it’s not worth it anymore. Yahoo Directory’s not any better.

2) Lots more location-based monitoring. Thanks to Topix and Google’s location: syntax, I can monitor news in certain areas.

3) Lots more keyword-based monitoring. Google News and lots of other sources allow me to generate keyword-based RSS feeds. They’re not quite a majority of my feeds yet (I have way too much general curiosity) but man, they make my traps so much more useful and focused.

4) More love for certain sources. Certain sites like Bloglines have not been getting enough attention from me. I’m fixing that.

I’m still doing an overhaul, so I may do a followup, but I wanted to get this written down…