We will briefly discuss broad categories in this post. In future posts,  we will pick each one of these categories and dig  a bit deeper.

Monitoring Web Pages

You can monitor Web pages of your competitors, customers, partners and industry publications. Web Monitr will detect any changes on these pages and send you email notifications. These notifications contain snippets of text from the change d portion of pages and links to a page where you can quickly see the changes highlighted. Here is a sample:

What can you find from these pages? Plenty, as it turns out. We list a few of them here.

• New product releases (of your competitors or partners)
• New partnerships (additions to various partner pages)
• Team changes (You may see only executive team changes on their site but don’t bet on the currency of information)
• New Jobs (Job postings are some times leading indicators of activity)
• News (It is good to keep yourself updated on news about your customers, partners and industry happenings)

Monitoring pages also gives you some other information. What if your competitor has no news releases, or partnerships or product releases for several quarters? Even lack of changes provide information.

Monitoring Discussion Groups

You can watch your own discussion groups as well as competitors’. Watching these groups after a new product or version release gives you lots of useful information.

• Difficulties customers face in using the products
• How products are being used
• Alternative products in the industry
• Evangelists among your customers who help others
• Amount of interest

If you are big company, you probably have a person monitoring discussion groups. However, when there are large number of groups, it may be useful to track them using a product like Web Monitr. Specify filters if you want to be alerted when specific comments are made or products mentioned.

Monitoring News

There are several ways to monitor news. You can simply read all your industry publications(I doubt whether any one has the time to do this well). You can depend on your PR agency or a clipping service to give you clippings of news about you, you competitors and your industry. The first may not work for you and in the second case some one else is doing the filtering of news.

There are a couple of automated ways (you still have to read the stuff) of getting news.

1. Blogs by experts in your industry
2. News feeds from your industry publications
3. Your industry portals
4. Use WebMonitr

If you use methods 1-3 you have to actively visit these pages and constantly look for items of news. If you use Web Monitr, news is brought to you in one simple digest form, in an email message. You can quickly glance through the message and figure out whether there is any thing interesting for you to dig deeper. I track over 600 pages a day and spend less than half an hour looking at them all. Only about 10-15% of those pages change every day (unless there is some unusual industry activity)

Monitoring Wikis

Imagine trying to monitor a product or industry wiki. It can be a monumental task. Fortunately, there is a simple way to do this. Every wiki supports a special page called “Recent Changes” (the actual name of this page may vary from wiki to wiki). If you simply track this page using Web Monitr, you will notice any new activity (additions, deletions). In large wikis like Wikipedia, the list of recently changed pages, themselves may run into several pages. I use filters to look only for specific changes.

Some interesting ways to track wikis include using Wiki Mindmaps and DbPedia, a service that mines data in a wiki and stores it in an easy to query database format.

Industry Buzz

For software industry there are several sources like Slashdot, Digg, Technorati. Most of these buzz creators take stories submitted by users (citizen journalists) and rank them by popularity. Just tracking the top pages of these sources provides you an idea of the daily buzz. Since the news stories have short descriptions with links, they are easy to consume in large quantities. Many of them also provide tag clouds. One glance at a tag cloud and you can cleary see what the hot categories are.

There are a lot of other sources I have not mentioned. These include standards, academic research, attention data and a wide variety of other sources. As information sources grow, you need a method to filter them based on your interests and receive timely notifications. Web Monitr can certainly help.

Social Bookmarks

Del.icio.us made social bookmarking popular. Social bookmarking services allow you to do the following:

• Keep your bookmarks on the web, so that you can access them from any browser
• Associate a description/notes with a bookmark
• Tag bookmarks with keywords – This allows you to easily retrieve bookmarks simply using tag names
• Share bookmarks with others
• Notify your friends about your bookmarks (by tagging them specifically for certain people)

Smart Bookmarks

Bookmarks are basically static. You create them and they just stay there, waiting to be used. When I was tracking technology, I used to furiously bookmark related resources. Soon to my dismay I found that they run into several hundreds. They became difficult to manage and keep track of. Tagging them helped a bit, but not a whole lot.

Ideally I would like to visit the bookmarks once in a while and see what has changed? For example, if I bookmark a competitor’s product page, I would like to go there once in a while and see what was changed.

This is why we created Smart Bookmarks and a service to manage them. We call this service Web Monitr. Web Monitr allows you to do the following (these are just the basic features).

• Create bookmarks while browsing pages (using one of our browser add-ins for Firefox or Internet Explorer)
• Specify a frequency to check the pages (the default is daily)
• Receive one summary alert for all the changed pages
• View the changes in a browser (the changes are high lighted on the page for easy review)
• Tag the pages for easy organization
• Share your alerts with others

There are several additional options (track pages more frequently, associate filters with pages, receive changed information as RSS feeds etc.)

You can try Web Monitr free.

Web Monitr combines many aspects of social bookmarks with a page tracking and alerting mechanism.