Tales from the Terminal Room

June 2002, Issue No. 33

Archives

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Tales from the Terminal Room (TFTTR) is a monthly newsletter, with the exception of July and August, which are published as a single issue. TFTTR includes reviews and comparisons of information sources and search tools; updates to the RBA Web site Business Sources and other useful resources; dealing with technical and access problems on the Net; and news of RBA's training courses and publications.

In this issue:

• Monitoring Web Page Changes
  • Watch that Page, Infominder, Change Detection, Track Engine, Spy on it, Website Watcher
• Kartoo - a different approach to searching
• Updates to the RBA Web site
  • Delos Creditinfo
  • OneSource
  • Equifax
  • Yell Data
  • Postal Rates
  • Top 10 Sites
• Publications
  • Search Strategies for the Internet, 4th edition

Monitoring Web Page Changes

It is difficult enough tracking down relevant and useful sites, but keeping up with changes to the pages and services that they offer is an impossible task when you have more than a dozen or so to monitor. Link checkers such as the Xenu Link Sleuth (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html) can alert you to pages that have disappeared or that are redirecting users to another site, but changes to the content are equally if not more important.

That problem was solved when MindIt appeared on the the scene several years ago: you could monitor an unlimited number of pages, specify areas of the page to be monitored and have reports delivered direct to your mailbox together with a copy of the page. And all free of charge. It couldn't last and about a year ago MindIt started charging for the service. Then earlier this month the service was closed down.

There are, though, plenty of other page monitoring services out there. Some are free whilst other priced services offer limited facilities as a taster.

This review looks at six services: five are Web based and the sixth is a software package. You do get what you pay for, with the full range of features being offered only by the subscription based services. Although some of the free monitors are promising to increase their range of options, it remains to be seen if these will continue to be offered free of charge.

The features that we have concentrated on are: number of pages monitored, highlighting changes on a page, whether or not one can specify keywords to be monitored or ignored, and the ability to monitor password protected pages. Important: if you use the last facility you have to supply your ID and password to the monitoring service, so make sure that you are not breaching the terms and conditions of supply by doing so.

Watch That Page

URL: http://www.watchthatpage.com/

Features and costs
This is a totally free service run by ATS Consulting, a Norwegian company that specializes in software development. You can monitor an unlimited number of pages, which can be grouped into folders and monitored on a daily or weekly basis. You can also view changes to your monitored pages by date on the Watchthatpage Web site. You cannot, at present, monitor changes that contain certain keywords although the FAQ states that this option may be added soon.

Alerts
Email alerts can include the text that has changed on your pages or just list the URLs of pages that have changed.

Options for Web site owners
There are a range of "Watch this page" stickers from which to choose. There is also a "Premium Service", which appears to be free, that provides you with statistics on the number of users watching your page and how often. You can only monitor a page or site that you belong to. This means that you must have a user name that matches the page or site. For example you@company.com cannot monitor www.competitor.com, but can monitor www.company.com.

Infominder

URL: http://www.infominder.com/

Features and costs
Tracks up to 10 pages free of charge and allows you to associate categories and descriptions with a "minder". Within the advanced options you can specify how often, in days, the page is to be checked. The most frequent allowed for free is every 1 day. You can also specify the minimum number of changes that must occur before you are notified and any keywords or phrases that must appear in the changes.

Infominder Professional costs USD 14.95 a year for 100 minders, USD 99.95 for 1000, and USD 399.95 for 5000 minders. There is an enterprise version that costs USD 2995 for unlimited minders. The monitoring frequency can be increased to once every hour. There is an IE Assistant for Internet Explorer and Netscape (works with Netscape 6 and above and Mozilla 1). This places a Minder link in your personal or links toolbar. You can also import your current bookmarks/favorites from Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator for monitoring.

Alerts
The email notification includes the number of changes that have occurred, the number of characters that have changed and the altered text. There is a link to the Infominder page where you can view a copy of the page with the changes highlighted.

Options for Web site owners
"Mind this page" button available free of charge for a "limited time".

Change Detection

URL: http://www.changedetection.com/

Features and costs
Free of charge. You can monitor an unlimited number of pages but there is no option on the ChangeDetection site that allows you to view all of the pages that you monitor. This means that you can easily lose track of what you are monitoring. There are no options for changing the frequency of monitoring - it seems to be done on a daily basis - or for selecting text or keywords.

Alerts
The email merely notifies you that the monitored page has changed. The notification includes a link to the changed page and an option to "unsubscribe".

Options for Web site owners
A number of free "panels" are available for Web site owners.

Track Engine

URL: http://www.trackengine.com/

Features and costs
Free monitoring of 5 "bookmarks" or pages. This is essentially a demonstration for the priced service so, although you still have access to some very sophisticated options. For each page you can set up an easy to remember name or description and the monitoring frequency (daily, 2 days, 3 days or weekly). The Advanced options enable you to select the colour for highlighting the changes on the monitored page, and to track changes to hyperlinks, images, numbers and dates as well as the text. You can request alerts for changes that include specified words or phrases and tell it to ignore certain changes. You can even monitor pages that are password protected by supplying Track Engine with your ID and password.

A "Track Me" button is available for your browser's personal toolbar or links bar.

You can upgrade to "Big Breakfast", which costs USD 4.95 a month for 50 bookmarks.

Alerts
You can choose from 4 email formats:

Highlight new content and send page
Highlight new content and send link
Summarise content and send page
Summarise content and send link

Options for Web site owners
There is a complex Track Engine Web master package that costs USD 14.95 to set up with subscription fees that start at USD 27 a month.

Spy on it

URL: http://www.spyonit.com/

Features and costs
Free of charge for an unlimited number of pages. For each page you can set up a description and ask for notification when the page changes in any way, when a a phrase is added or when a phrase is removed. There is also an option for monitoring password protected pages.

Alerts
The notification only tells you that the monitored page has changed.

Options for Web site owners
None

Website Watcher

URL: http://aignes.com/

This service differs from the other services mentioned in this review in that it is a software program that sits on your PC rather than a Web based service.

Features and costs
Monitors an unlimited number of pages. Monitoring options include: ignore HTML tags, images/banners, numbers and dates. You can enter IDs and passwords for password protected pages that you wish to monitor. Pages can be checked once a day, once a week or on a specified day/days of the week. There is an option that allows you to specify the checking frequency during a day either in hours or minutes. It is possible to check a page every 1 minute but I would strongly advise you not to do this. It may be treated as a Denial of Service (DoS) attack by the target Web site and you could find yourself in trouble with your ISP. Once an hour is frequent enough for most purposes.

There is a 30 day free trial and the prices for registering the program are as follows:

Personal use - USD 29.95
Companies and educational organisations - USD 99
2-9 user licenses - USD 79 each
10 user licenses - USD 69 each
Site licenses (unlimited number of PCs on a single geographical site) - USD 1,500

Summary

Kartoo - a different approach to searching

URL: http://www.kartoo.com/

Kartoo is a new meta search tool that searches across most of the major search tools including Google, AltaVista, AlltheWeb, Hotbot and Northern Light. The site is based in France but the interface is available in English and Portuguese. In fact, it tries to work out where you are based from your IP address and automatically loads what it thinks is the most appropriate language.

The interesting part of Kartoo is not how it searches but the way in which it presents your results. Instead of the usual list Kartoo presents your search results as a map that shows the relationships between the different pages. The sites are shown as interlinked gold balls, bigger for more relevant sites and smaller for less relevant ones. The lines that connect the balls show the relationships between the sites. When you place your cursor over each gold ball a brief description of the site is displayed.

The Advanced option enables you to search for terms in the title of a page, URL, by site, domain name, sites that link to a known URL or just the text. You can also choose to use the Near operator, double quote marks for phrases (what Kartoo calls an "expression") and to look for images.

There are some drawbacks, though. The results map only works in the Flash version of the site. If you use the ordinary HTML version, Kartoo reverts to text results. I did not find it intuitive to use but perhaps I need to use it a bit more to get the hang of some of the cleverer features. I don't think, though, that I will ever get used to the irritating genie that keeps popping up all over the place! Nevertheless, worth a look.

Updates to the RBA Web Site

Company Financials & Annual Reports http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/finars.htm

Delos Creditinfo Ltd (http://www.creditinfo.ro/) claims to be the first company in Romania offering on-line credit reports, Business Information, and Debt collection. Information on over 300,000 Romanian companies is available including contact details, shareholders, company activities and financials. Delos also provides additional information on companies such as bankruptcy, debts, press release and newspaper articles. Reports vary in price from 2 to 40 USD

As well as Romanian companies, there is similar information on 60,000 companies based in Cyprus (http://cydata.fasma.ro/). Reports cost from 1 to 10 CYP.

Both services offer a credit card pay as you go option.

OneSource http://www.onesource.com/
OneSource is by no means new but has only recently been added to our list of sources, primarily because I have not had a chance to review it until now. OneSource pulls together company and market information from a wide range of services world-wide. It is often thought of as just a source of company financials but it also provides news, investment research and market/industry reports.

Their Business Browser pulls together the various information types so that you can easily move from one type of data - for example company financials - to another, such as an industry survey. The information available includes corporate and industry information, company profiles, news, business and trade articles, research reports, executive profiles, industry intelligence and financial data. Tabular information can be imported into a spreadsheet for further processing.

Business Browser is subscription-based, with an unlimited use fee structure.

Equifax Global Online closes
Just a few months after launch, Equifax announced the closure of its Global Online service on 26th June 2002. The individual country databases are still available:

Equifax Brasil - http://www.equifax.com.br/
Equifax Canada - http://www.equifax.ca/
Equifax Italy - http://www.sek.it/
Equifax Spain - http://www.asnefequifax.es/
Equifax UK - http://www.equifax.co.uk/

An off-line ordering service for international commercial reports is available via the UK Website.

Support for SMEs http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/sme.htm

BCS Business Europe http://www.bcsbusinesseurope.com/
Set up by the British Computer Society (BCS) and Business Europe, this site offers information and news for growing businesses. The advice is focussed on five areas: technology, eCommerce, sales and marketing, finance, and offices and people. Each area has a useful glossary of terms and relevant "how to" guides.

Direct Marketing http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/marketing.htm

Yell rebrands The Business Database as Yell Data
The Business Database (formerly at http://tbd.yell.com/tbd/) has been rebranded as Yell Data with the new URL http://data.yell.com/yelldata/. According to the press release, the service has been renamed "to align it more closely with Yell's family of brands and to further affirm Yell's position as a leading UK supplier of business data". This is the third change of URL in 6 months but thankfully they haven't messed around with the interface.

Miscellaneous Day-to-Day Essentials http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/misc.htm

Postal Rates http://www.postalrates.info/
A very useful site providing links to postal sites world-wide giving postal rates, postcodes, postal authorities and links to sites on philately.

Top 10 sites http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/top10/

Eleven "top ten" sites were chosen by the delegates attending the Key Business Sources Workshop on the 12th June. As they could not agree on which of the eleven to eliminate from the list we decided to keep all eleven.

1. Yahoo UK & Ireland http://www.yahoo.co.uk/ - good general starting point plus news and stock market information
2. Google http://www.google.com/ Excellent general purpose search engine with a useful option to view its own cached copy of a Web page, Advanced Search facilities, searching PDF files and other file formats, News and Usenet
3. Factiva http://www.factiva.com/ Excellent source for news. Priced service with subscription and pay as you go options.
4. BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/ Free source of news plus weather, background and supporting information for TV and radio programmes, and links to other relevant sites.
5. Bigcharts http://www.bigcharts.com/ Free share price information service, including historical prices, for the US, Canada, UK and several other countries.
6. Corporate Information http://www.corporateinformation.com/ - good starting point for locating business information of all types for countries world-wide.(The new site allows you only three searches a day free of charge.)
7. Hemmington Scott http://www.hemscott.net/ - good selection of free information on UK listed companies plus priced services for more detailed information.
8. RBA Business Sources on the Net http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/ This site!
9. Joint number 9 are: Gary Price's list of lists http://www.freepint.com/gary/listof.htm - as the name implies a list of lists including lots of links to company rankings of various sorts; and The Internet Tourbus http://www.tourbus.com/ - a twice weekly newsletter on viruses, spam, privacy, urban myths and hoaxes.
10. Official Statistics on the Web http://www.auckland.ac.nz/lbr/stats/offstats/OFFSTATSmain.htm - one of the best starting point for statistical sources by country, topic or subject.

Publications

Search Strategies for the Internet, 4th edition

The 4th edition of Search Strategies for the Internet is now available.

Publication Details:
Search Strategies for the Internet, 4th Edition.
Author: Karen Blakeman.
Publisher: RBA Information Services, April 2002.
Format: Loose leaf ring binder, 200 pages
ISBN 09527191 9 3 UK Price: GBP 35.00
ISBN 0 904314 00 7 Loose leaf pages only (no binder supplied), UK Price GBP 22
Prices outside of the UK available on request.

As with the third edition, the fourth edition is split into five sections:

1. Essentials of Internet search tools and search techniques
2. Individual search tools in detail
3. Strategies for locating types of information on the Internet, for example company web pages, people, news
4. Comparison Table and search engine Summary Sheets
5. ISO country codes used in domain names and the structure of URLs

Further details, contents list and order form are available at http://www.rba.co.uk/publications/search.htm

TFTTR Contact Information

Karen Blakeman, RBA Information Services
UK Tel: 0118 947 2256, Int. Tel: +44 118 947 2256
UK Fax: 020 8020 0253, Int. Fax: +44 20 8020 0253
Address: 88 Star Road, Caversham, Berks RG4 5BE, UK

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