Tracking web site changes

[Marcia Rodney]

a Colorado colleague, David Selden from the Native American Rights Fund, http://www.narf.org, wrote me asking for web site alert/monitoring tools, subscription OK. While familiar with the products listed at the somewhat out-of-date http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/alerts, NARF is looking for personal recommendations so I offered to ping the CI community. David writes that NARF wants to:

1) Track multiple web sites for new content or modified pages (we want to track 250+ web sites!)

2) Track for specific changes that meet Boolean search criteria

3) Optional - Allows us to track certain directory of web site, i.e. www.narf.org/icwa (all pages in that directory) instead of whole web site www.narf.org

I thought a roundup of this sort of thing might be useful to several of us, so I turn to the collective ning. If anyone has any suggestions as to tools, please let me know. David can also be reached at [e-mail]

Thanks!

Marcy Rodney

[Tom Hawes]

Marcy,

This is the tool that I have used. It is inexpensive but valuable (to me).

http://www.aignes.com/

-- Tom
Strategically Thinking Blog: http://tomhawes.wordpress.com
Website: http://www.jthawes.com

[Marcia Rodney]

and it's got the 30 day free trial, where's the downside? Any functionality you especially like or get frustrated with, Tom? And thanks for responding!

[Tom Hawes]

Marcy,

I liked that the tool was very fast. It can check hundreds of pages in a couple of minutes. It did everything that I wanted it to do. In some ways it was too powerful for me since it had so many options for tracking changes. (I haven't used the tool since I changed work about a year ago so some of my recollections are fading a bit.) Hope this helps.

-- Tom

[Marcia Rodney]

it does indeed, I shall pass this along to my colleague. You know, I'd like to see more chat re tools on the ning, so I appreciate your time.

[Tom Hawes]

Marcy,

I am writing a series on starting Competitive Intelligence on my blog. One of the steps is about accumulating the tools. It contains a list (not exhaustive) of tools that I think are important when starting. Of course there are many other tools which might be appropriate for more mature operations or for different settings than I am describing. Here is the link in case you are interested.

http://tomhawes.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/ci-series-7-accumulate-the...

-- Tom

[Jayanth]

Thanks Tom,
the software works like a charm....

[Carlo Velten]

Dear Marcy,

it looks like our new tracking applications could work for you. Our company Qitera (www.qitera.com) has built a search and collaboration platform that lets people and teams capture, share and search critical information within the organization. On top of that platform we have just released 2 new applications targeting professionals from the CI/MI-world.

I would appreciate to get in touch with you. Here you will find some first information
http://qitera.blogspot.com/2009/07/qitera-launches-new-applications...


Best regards
Carlo

Founder / Qitera