Information trapping is a tool similar to RSS. Information trapping can be a useful when researching a topic to filter out irrelevant topics. An artical gave an example on how it would be useful. If you went to a search engine site and typed in elections you would get a bunch of info. on the democratic and republican parties. If you wanted information on a third party you wouldn’t find much luck. Information trapping can save you a bunch of time and have the topics you want filtered.
http://futureperfectpublishing.com/2007/09/03/information-trapping-an-interview-with-tara-calashain/
http://www.cyber-aspect.com/breviews/book_review.asp?rev=34
http://mendicantbug.com/2008/04/10/what-is-information-trapping/
Wow that’s a bit different definition than what I came across.. I’m not saying it’s wrong, cause I’m sure like all the other topics we cover information trapping has a broad definition, but I had seen it as the opposite of RSS.. With RSS, you pull information from sites at a regular interval to see if they’ve updated any infomation.. but with information trapping you have sites trap your information and push it to you whenever it comes around without you even having to give a second thought about it. At least that’s what I had thought it meant.
Comment by jimmydlg — November 26, 2008 @ 7:04 am
RSS is a type of information trapping because your RSS feed reader is automatically fetching information from a source and serving it up to you. The feed represents the trapped information. Actively hitting the website generating the content everyday would be the opposite of that.
Now active search as described in this post, where you go to a search engine and enter a query, is not information trapping. But setting up a google alert to get an email anytime some new result matching that query appears, would be.
Comment by Jason Adams — November 26, 2008 @ 2:17 pm