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Throughout this semester, I've learned a lot about to utilize the many tools available for information trapping. I had a basic understanding of some of these tools before I took this class. At the same time, I am learning about others for the first time. If you are interested in taking this class, I would recommend paying attention to the following topics. Below is a list of the tools that I have found most useful/important for finding information on the web.

Bloglines

This was one of the first things we did in the class and it has turned out to have the most impact on how I receive my information. Learning to use Bloglines (and more broadly, RSS) saves time and effort for me in looking for information. Once I discovered how useful these tools are, I started to only check my Bloglines account daily instead of my usual system of checking news sites (freep.com, espn.com, etc.). As good as RSS is, you also have to know what you're looking for. At times, its good to go and raed something that you might not have known that you were looking for and this has made me regress a bit to checking some of my former sources for information. But there's nothing wrong with that. RSS is about being sent information about topics that you're interested in, and I know I will use this in the future.

Everyzing

I came upon this tool rather late in the class but it is no less useful. Podcasts seemed to me to be the bandwagon that I never jumped on. I hear a lot of other students talking about Podcasts of classes, or news etc. Yet I never really used digital multimedia (audio, video, etc) as anything other than entertainment. After finding Everyzing's RSS feed feature, I've found that these tools can be just as useful as having an article sent to you. An RSS feed from Everyzing allows you to be updated each time a new audio/video resource is uploaded that matches your search criteria. I used it to good effect to monitor the Red Wings. Every time a new radio interview or clip from Barry Melrose' podcast was added, it shows up in my Bloglines account. This means, I don't have to sit around and hope I see Melrose on Sportscenter, or listen to AM1270 all of the time to hear Wings coverage. This ability to use digital multimedia as a reliable news source instead of just entertainment has been something that I will surely use in the future.

General Search

Though I did particularly enjoy using the two tools described above, I also learned a lot about search as a whole. Before I took this class, I thought it was perfectly fine to only search through Google or Wikipedia for information about something. This class has taught me about the vast wealth of resoures available in search. More importantly, it has taught me that the world of search is ever changing and that it is only to your advantage to widen the scope of your searches by utilizing different tools. Whether they are specific search engines or databases, or just utilizing a greater number of searches through the two main search engines, spending time and focusing your search is always to your advantage.

One Thing I Might Change

Being the first time that this class has been offered, it's no surprise that there are some things that could be improved. The one thing that I might change would be having two separate business and personal Wikis. In completing them, it seems I am just making two of the same projects. At the same time, I understand having a personal one might encourage people to explore different things than the business topic among other advantages. Of course, there's no way for me to really say having one is better. I would at least recommend thinking about setting up the term project Wiki's this way.

My Favorite RSS Feeds

I have subscribed to dozens of RSS feeds since creating my Bloglines account. Some of those have worked out well while others have crashed and burned. Of the successful ones, two seem to stand out the most:

Red Wings Snapshots on Mlive.com
I found this feed doing a simple search for "Red Wings" on Bloglines. Basically, this RSS feed provides links to any article or new commentary that is added to the popular sports discussion page on MLive.com. What I had thought was mostly used for keeping up with prep sports as a kid, Mlive has provided the most up to date, interesting, and comprehensive news on the Red Wings that I have ever found. From interviews with players at practice, to notes about their minor-league affiliates, this RSS feed gives an in depth look at the team that just can't be found in national sports stories or even in local newspapers.

Church of the Customer Blog
While this RSS feed doesn't (always) pertain to my business and personal topics, it is always an interesting read (and it comes in handy for my marketing class). I found this blog while surfing through Bloglines about some of the PR problems that GM has had. The blog happened to mention GM and I subscribed to it just by chance. Though it hasn't provided much help for my BIT class, I'm still glad I found it. With a fair amount of humor and some rather good writing, I think I will keep up on this blog for a long time.

E-Mail Alerts

Using e-mail alerts for the last few weeks has made it clear what these tools work for and what they don't. Here are some of the things I've learned.

1.) RSS > E-mail alerts for news

Maybe this is a bit obvious, but I've learned that e-mail updates aren't (for me) the best way to receive my news. Having the news delivered to you is always good, but I realized after the first week of receiving dozens of news updates via e-mail that this would not be the best system for me. For example, I set up a Google Alert query for both GM and Red Wings news. By the next day, I had twenty plus e-mails,most of which I just forwarded to a folder in my inbox. Long story short, using an RSS feed aggregator like Bloglines is a better way to receive news because it keeps updates seperate from email and is a better way to organize things you've viewed and haven't viewed. Though I may seem to be bashing e-mail alerts, learning this lesson helped me realize how e-mail alerts could be used effectively.

2.) E-mail updates are great for pages that aren't updated daily

Having a page monitor send you an e-mail when a page has been changed or added too is a great way to keep up to date and to save time in getting information. I set up a page monitor like this for GM and Red Wings press releases. These don't seem to change as much, and an e-mail alert helps me to receive the information without having to check the site everyday. I have since found these very useful for monitoring sites that have job listings as well as some specific sites with products that I am interested in (when is the price of a PS3 going to go down??)

From the beginning, it became pretty clear to me how e-mail alerts would be best utilized. With the way I organize my e-mail, it's just not practical for me to receive everyday news through e-mail. For that, I'll stick to RSS. But for those specific items that you want to monitor, but don't want to sit at the computer all day clicking re-load, e-mail alerts (and page monitors) work well for me.

Google/Yahoo! Groups

Yahoo! Groups
Searching “Detroit Red Wings” (not in quotes) on Yahoo! Groups, I seemed to find only some rather poorly constructed and small fan pages. Some were for specific players while others were for “ALL Detroiters” interested in politics. Clearly, my first search didn’t go to well.

I tried focusing my search by putting Red Wings in quotes. Doing so actually made my search even worse. Apparently, the Yahoo! Groups search isn’t afforded the same tools as the normal Yahoo! search. This search gave me the same Detroiters politics group, as well as DavesDirtyRatBastardsHuntingClub at #2! The first actual Red Wing related find in this query is the same Kris Draper group from the first search.

All in all, I wasn’t impressed with the Yahoo! Groups search and wouldn’t use it to find any kind of information. Ever.

Google Groups
Maybe I’m just partial to using Google, but I was relieved to visit the Google Groups page after my experience at Yahoo! I don’t know how they do it, but somehow most every time I use something with the name Google on it I feel satisfied.

Google allows you to either “search groups” or “search for a group.” Naturally, I tried them both using my search for Detroit Red Wings. Google gave me 5 different groups related to the Red Wings. Right off the bat, this search is a lot slicker than Yahoo!’s. However, the rest of the results in this search don’t seem to be very useful. There are a few advertising some memorabilia for sale, and then a preview of a December 22, 2003 game against the St.Louis Blues.

I moved back and used the “search for a group.” Somehow, it gave me a bunch of irrelevant groups (from obituaries to “pinball-related issues) and didn’t include the more relevant groups that it found in the first search. Searching for Red Wings in quotes produced nothing different.

Google Groups did work better than Yahoo! Groups, but neither returned very important information or sources. Maybe its just that I searched for sports, but they seem to just find very small (and irrelevant) sources. I won’t be using these searches for anything more than entertainment in the future.

RSS > You > Me

While my last blog entry was an interesting (edit: completely wrong) read, I slipped up on completing our RSS Basic exercise. In an effort to correct this, here is some more information about my experiences with RSS. Specifically, this is an account of some of the other searchable feed databases that I have used to add to my Bloglines account.

For the purpose of comparison, I chose to search “Detroit Red Wings” within each of these databases.

Blogdigger
My first search was sorted by date and found a lot of information form a lot of different sources. For whatever reason, I used to not be comfortable reading from people’s blogs. After being introduced to Bloglines, RSS, etc, I’ve become more comfortable in this regard. Some of the sources found in this search I never would have clicked on in the past. When I did, I found a good array of information from different points of view (a New Jersey fan talking about how well Brian Rafalski has fit in with the Wings for example). To my surprise, searching by relevance didn’t give me many relevant feeds or information. The first results were feeds that didn’t even work while the others were just news articles that mentioned the Red Wings.

Google Blog Search
My first search gave me the best source on the Red Wings that I have found so far (Red Wings Snapshots on MLive). I now check this site everyday through my blogines account and it has proved not only a good resource for my term project but also for keeping up to date with the team. I also found a good source from another personal blog called “The Red Wings Corner.” While this is more subjective (opinions on new jerseys, etc) it is an entertaining read. Google Blog Search searches by relevance first and then allows you to further sort by date. Somehow their relevance search works a lot better than Blogdiggers.

Rojo “The best free RSS and Atom feed reader”
The so-called “best free RSS reader” did not perform well enough for me to vote it the best. In fact, my first simple search just returned the same blog/article about a 1950’s Red Wing/Devil players funeral from multiple different sources. Not a very good result for my first search. When I made a more specific search (just for feeds) it actually returned zero results! It turns out that you have to register in order to use Rojo. When I did so, it returned some of the same results as Google Blog Search, but definitely nothing to differentiate it enough to call it “the best.” With the added inconvenience of signing up, I would probably just choose Google Blog Search every time.

For me, Google Blog Search seemed to be the most intuitive and helpful searchable feed database. I will continue to use it (along with adding it to my Google Desktop) in the future.

RSS > You

Everyday, it seems, I’m bombarded with the notion that we are in the midst of the “Information Age.” While I know the meaning of the phrase and what it refers to, I’ve never really felt like I could get my information any easier than I used to. I know we’ve come a long way from logging on to the Prodigy network from a 28.8 dial-up modem, but I generally feel like I’ve always gotten my information in the same way. I wake up everyday and log on to CNN to read a few headlines, click over to Forbes or Businessweek for a quick update, take a peek at ESPN and the Freep for my sports, and surf over to Autoweek for a little useless info about cars that I can’t afford. Being a man of habit, I never had a problem keeping up this daily regimen of information gathering. In fact, I thought I had a pretty good little system going. I kept my bookmarks in order and am a certified tabbing master (Why wait for a page to load when you can be reading another one?).

But this week my carefully designed method was made obsolete after learning how to utilize RSS feeds. RSS is the Ipod to my Walkman, the Palm Pilot to my Post-It Note, the radio to my Carrier Pigeon. Using Bloglines to manage RSS feeds is so slick, I haven’t even felt like I’m doing anything different. Within 8 minutes of creating my Bloglines account and learning to manage RSS Feeds, I had forgotten all about my archaic quest for information that I used to put myself through each morning. Clicking one link to my Bloglines account and having all of my feeds there in front of me is exponentially easier and faster than my old method. Now when I hear that we’re in the midst of the Information Age (no diminishing quotation marks necessary) I feel like I’m a part of it.

The Deep Web...

Its only our second week and I've already been broadsided by a topic that I knew nothing about: The Deep Web. Who knew that every time you use a search engine (any search engine) that there are parts of the web that they just can't touch? I'm actually a bit embarassed that I made that assumption. I probably should have figured that out on my own!

With the web growing larger and larger everyday (along with the efforts of search engines like Google to be able to reach into the deep dark realm of the Deep Web) its even clearer to me how valuable this class will be. Our lessons on the Deep Web have also made me realize the importance of taking advantage of our U of M library. Though I've used the library rather often in my years here at U of M, I haven't come close to utilizing all that the library has to offer.

Now, on to information trapping!

In the (web search) garage, I feel safe

As my first Ross elective, I am hoping that BIT 330 will be a fulfilling class that I can put to good use in the real world. If our first day was any indication, I think that this class will live up to my expectations. With a wealth of information available at the click of a mouse (touchscreen, stylus, etc) the web provides us with an ever changing and ever growing resource for accomplishing just about anything. In this dynamic environment, a course in web-based information retrieval seems the perfect way to further prepare myself for the business world. On top of being practical, the many opportunities for creativity and fun (who knew?) should make the class a pleasure to take (as long as I stay on the right side of the curve).

Class #2, here I come...