Web alerts
A while back, I asked whether anyone used a good web alert system. All the services I had used were out of business. Some people suggested RSS aggregators such as NetNewsWire, which is useful, but only if you're monitoring sites available in RSS. NewsGator is my current favorite RSS alert system. The alerts come straight to my Outlook inbox, though NewsGator should put the source of the item in the From field, and doesn not.
Anyway, back to general web site change alerts. Cory Doctorow suggested Infominder, which I've been using for a month or so. It works well, but picks up meaningless changes, like a weblog's comments count. And the web interface lets the user rank monitored sites by number of changes, but not by the volume of new characters, which is a better measure of the freshness of the page. I shouldn't complain: there's nothing else out there. Web alerts [nickdenton.org]
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