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BusinessWeek Online Alerts
Business News and Information Alerting System
http://www.businessweek.com/alerts
E-mail Alert Digests
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Table of Contents
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Click here to view the E-mail FAQ
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Click here to view the entire help
documentation in PDF format (requires Adobe Acrobat)
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Overview
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BusinessWeek Online Alerts for E-mail (only) is an innovative Business News and Information System
that allows users to apply unique filter mechanisms, so they receive only news and information of personal interest.
Utilizing patent-pending technology, BusinessWeek Online Alerts supports filtering of stories through categories of interest and/or specific keywords (Triggers), such that only BusinessWeek Online stories that fall within your Categories or the explicitly match your Triggers are delivered to you.
Once you've configured your preferences for E-mail alerts, you'll begin receiving an e-mail digest -- once per day -- containing only those headlines that match your Category and/or Trigger settings.
Nomenclature within this overview and all help file documentation is as follows:
- Important terms and concepts are generally non-bolded italicized text. Important information with emphasis will always be underlined text.
- Hyperlinked phrases and descriptors are blue underlined text, which are anchored to their respective and relevant portions of the documentation.
- Web page content used in configuring your alerts, such as button names or text field descriptors, are simple bolded text.
The following information is extracted from the individual help file contents spanning each of the various steps in configuring your e-mail alert digests.
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E-mail Signup
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To signup for BusinessWeek Online Alerts e-mail digests, click here and check the box to enable Deliver a daily e-mail digest to the following e-mail address and type in your E-mail address where you would like to receive your alerts.
Note this e-mail address may be different from your e-mail address used to register with BusinessWeek.
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Next select the type or format of your alert digests -- note HTML format is the default, so if you plan to target a wireless device, select Plain text format.
Selecting the Next > button will save your settings and display your selected Categories.
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Category Selections
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Categories serve as a broad filtering mechanism to the type of headlines you'll receive. Unlike the exact specificity of Trigger keywords or phrases within your Trigger list, alerts issued under a given interest category to which you select (subscribe) will be received regardless of the article headline or body content.
These predefined categories are defined by BusinessWeek and accessed by selecting the checkbox as shown.
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Category names are displayed in alphabetical order grouped by selected and unselected category names. To make changes to the default set of interest categories, simply click on the checkboxes to toggle the checkmark on or off.
Selecting the Next > button will save your category settings and display your Trigger keywords or phrases.
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Personal Triggers
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Unlike the broad filtering of Categories, Triggers serve as exact match filters applied to all incoming business news articles via a set of user-defined keywords, or Triggers.
Trigger keywords or phrases allow exact specificity and the highest degree of relevance to incoming alerts based on your specific personal interests. Whenever one of your Trigger entries exactly matches the identical word or phrase within a given headline, article description, or body text of an incoming news or information release, that particular article will be included within your e-mail digest.
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Personal Triggers can be edited by typing directly within the individual text fields.
Up to twenty (20) unique keywords or phrases are supported within the list of Triggers.
- Keywords can be single words or phrases.
- Capitalization is ignored, but exact spelling is required for
successful triggering to occur.
- Entering a full word instead of a partial word is suggested
(example, using "wine" will not trigger a story where the word "wines" is used).
Consider using both variations as Trigger entries.
- Phrases (multiple keyword Triggers) are order dependent relative to the
individual keywords, and as such, are generally very specific.
- Boolean AND operations are supported within a single Trigger, and will
match on any two specified keywords, regardless of their ordering or separation
by other words. The Boolean AND operator must be capitalized (and will be automatically converted) to be recognized
as a Boolean function. Only one Boolean AND operation is allowed per Trigger entry.
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Tool Tip: Deliberate thought and care need be applied when employing
Trigger phrases. The exact nature of their specificity is highly constraining
to the Trigger itself.
Examples:
- The Trigger phrase Sun Microsystems would match
all stories containing these exact words, in succession,
ignoring capitalization. Any alerts referring to Sun workstations or SUNW, etc.,
would NOT trigger as they do NOT exactly match the specified Trigger phrase.
- Trigger phrase expects AND beats would match headlines such as:
- Company X beats expectations and expects better fourth quarter.
- FDA expects many problems with drug and beats the drum to warn others
But would fail on "Company X beat expectations and
expects a turnaround", due to both keywords within
the Trigger phrase not matching exactly.
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Warning / Stop Words
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A number of Warning and Stop words are defined externally, which if allowed
to remain within the active Trigger list, would cause either ineffective matching
or an overabundance of Trigger matches. Notification of their inclusion within
the current Trigger list comes in the form of a popup message when attempting to
Save Changes to the Triggers tab.
Warning words differ in severity from that of Stop words, in that their inclusion typically
results in ineffective matching and will not prevent saving of the edits within the Trigger
list form.
Stop words would result in too many matches, however, and must be removed or altered prior to
saving the Trigger form.
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Examples of Warning words may include: "incorporated" (shown), "Corp", "Corporation", etc.
Examples of Stop words may include: "the", "." (dot), etc. Note special characters (non-alphanumerics)
will be replaced with a space upon saving the Trigger entries.
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Predefined Triggers
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Predefined Trigger Lists are named collections of Triggers that can be used to augment the set of Personal Triggers defined by you.
To view or select Predefined Triggers entries defined by BusinessWeek, use the pulldown menu to display the associated content.
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Once the pulldown is activated to a given entry, the associated entries will be displayed.
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Note individual entries are displayed as "Read Only", and as such cannot be changed.
Selecting the Finish button at the bottom of the page will activate the Predefined Trigger List to augment your own set of Personal Triggers.
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