Monitoring web sitesRSS and other tools

Monitoring web sites

• Why monitor?

• What?

• How will we monitor?

• How will we get the results?

• Why monitor?

o Well – we are journalists, right?o Our own stuff

• How will we monitor?o Do it yourselfo Get an agent to do the hard work

• How will we receive the result?o E-mailo RSS feedo Other types

• What will we monitor?

o Sources, interest groups etc.o News siteso Search enginesoWeb in generalo Blogosphere

An example: Update Scanner

• A firefox extension to monitor web pages for updates.

• Useful for websites that don't provide RSS feeds.

Platform for monitoring

News

Monitoring search engines

Monitoring blogsMonitoring web pages

Windows Mac OS X Web•Newzcrawler •Feedreader •FeedDemon •Awasu •Etc.

•Newsfire •Netnewswire •Pulp Fiction •News Mac Pro •Etc.

•Bloglines •NewsGator •My Yahoo! •Google Reader•Etc.

When you need a RSS feed…

• www.feed43.com• www.feedyes.com• www.feedfire.com• Etc.

A feed consists of 2 (or 3) things

• A title• A link• Text (not always)

We only need to know two tools:

• {%} means: ”something I want”• {*} means: ”stuff I don’t want”

• And then we need courage…