FreePint Query - Monitoring Website Updates
Jinfo Blog

By Robin Neidorf

Abstract

We highlight FreePint's articles and reviews of products and services for monitoring website changes, media monitoring and competitive intelligence.

Item

We received a question from a customer in the scientific industry:

"We are investigating options for automating a process of searching multiple websites for updates, on behalf of one of our departments. I started in the "search" article category, and came across your review of InfoNgen, which is potentially helpful.

"Are there other tools you are aware of that could help track changes on selected websites and notify someone when changes occurred? Or other related tools that might help? Thank you!"

We replied:

There are in fact a lot of tools that tackle this problem from different perspectives. You'll find them covered in a a couple of our article categories:

• Competitive intelligence: it's now a standard requirement of CI professionals and departments to monitor selected websites for changes, so the products and tools aimed at this need (e.g. StrategyEye Digital Media, Comintelli Knowledge XChanger, Digimind Social, and Cipher Systems Knowledge.Works) will incorporate this feature.

• Media monitoring: PR and communications professionals also want to know about these types of changes, to support their work, and they turn to media monitoring tools to do so. Some of these have more customisation capabilities than others, so the applicability to your challenge will depend on exactly what's needed. One advantage of looking at these tools is that they may already be implemented somewhere else in the organisation, so you might have an in-house opportunity to experiment with one and see what it can do. Chris Porter's recent set of product reviews (summarised here) can get you started.

Simpler Ways to Tackle Monitoring

If a full-blown product is more power than you need, there are free tools available for monitoring change: Madhu Subramanian mentions a couple in her recent article about building your CI toolkit. 

With these tools, you need to dedicate the staff time to setting them up manually and monitoring results, but it's a low-cost and relatively easy way to get started and put tools directly in the hands of the staff who need them.

And the More Complex

At the other end of the spectrum, you can apply big data principles and technologies to create a robust system tuned to your specific needs.

Several of our contributing editors have commented extensively over the last year on the potential - and pitfalls - of big data for such tasks as web monitoring. James Mullan summarised some of his comments recently, and our 2013 Topic Series: Big Data in Action highlighted a number of providers (notably Connotate) that take on exactly this challenge of identifying change on the web and delivering it up in actionable ways.

Leveraging What You Already Have

Finally, plenty of aggregators and database publishers are recognising that organisations need to be able to incorporate their choice of resources in a searchable environment. If you have a contract for a tool like Northern Light, Nexis, Newsdesk or NewsEdge, check with your provider about anything they may be able to build onto their platform to meet your need.

The current FreePint Topic Series: News, and Beyond addresses these questions, as every organisation is now defining for itself what "news" means. If you haven't yet registered for notifications about this series (free), please do.

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