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November 04, 2007
Email Alerts, Our Quick, Easy, Annoying Friend
Background
My next few blogs will revolve around a few information trapping techniques we have been learning about in my BIT 330 class. This week will include e-mail alerts and next week will be RSS Feeds. For each, I will include a quick synopsis of how I utilized the information trap as well as the pros and cons to each and how they related to my investigation.
For those of you who may not know what Email alerts are, I will quickly explain it. You can go to a number of different sites and enter in a search query, Yahoo Alert, Google Alerts, or GoogleAlert are all viable options. Once your query is set, the system will send you periodic emails with information on your search
My Alerts
A few weeks ago, I set up multiple email alerts through two alert systems, Google Alerts and Yahoo Alert. I set up these alerts on a topic for my personal wiki (a class project) - Michigan Basketball. To clarify, simply emailing alerts on "Michigan Basketball" would be email alert murder, so I had to be more specific. I won't go through each query I placed, but they were very similar in nature to something like this:
"Michigan" "Basketball" University Beilein
I'll touch more about queries later in the post. Now onto what I found.
Pros
Consistent Data Source
One thing I really enjoyed about email alerts was the consistency. There was ALWAYS information available for me to use towards my research. To put this into perspective, I had six separate queries set up, meaning I would receive six daily emails with information links to stories regarding my topic. The constant information was refreshing as I looked to keep pace with new stories and articles on Michigan Basketball.
Additionally, there was a wide breadth of information which was provided. Within each email it provides News Alerts, Blog Alerts, as well as Web Alerts. This ability to see different kinds of information was refreshing to receive at once.
Efficiency
Its incredibly efficient and easy to not only set-up email alerts, but to view them. They get sent to you on whatever time table you desire, and are essentially as easy as a click of your mouse. They save you search time and energy to do other things that you enjoy, such as reading your favorite information technology publication.
Cons
Consistent Data Source
No, you aren't crazy, you did see this as one of my Pros. Why? Yes it was nice to get information consistently and know when you were going to receive it, but I hated the clogging of my email box. As a person who gets many many many emails a day, email alerts started to, at some points, get annoying. Its great when you get information when you want it.....it's not so great when you don't want the information and are still receiving it.
Inconsistent Quality
Initially, I had to work really really really hard to try and get quality data for my alerts. I either had search queries which were too broad and brought in too much irrelevant information or too little and barely helped much at all. After figuring those out with more efficient queries, I had troubles with duplicate links. Links between queries would be the same, leading me to the realization that multiple email alerts about similar topics can be very frustrating to skim through.
Overall Thoughts
For me, the annoyance of the emails and the frustrations with the quality were too much for the efficiency and consistency to overcome. However, If you are someone who can deal with the email clutter, email alerts will be perfect for you. Make sure you establish a well submitted query (to ensure relevant data) and you should be ok in your information trapping. If you can't take the clutter, you may want to consider creating an email specifically for your alerts. One of my big peeves was receiving information when I really didn't want to -- a seperate email account gives you the power to retrieve the information when you want while still letting the information highways do the work.
In terms of the alert providers, I preferred Google over Yahoo. Google seemed to not only return more relevant information, but enabled me to more quickly refine and change my queries. Yahoo seemed to take more setup time -- but it also had more power (alerts to cell phone, pda, etc.). I did not need these additional alert pathways, but if you do, Yahoo might be the way to go.
In total I hope my blog helped you get some insight into the world of email alerts, look for next weeks blog on RSS Feeds!
Posted by grantrob at November 4, 2007 06:42 PM