Page Monitors - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 50

When to pay?
lots of the resources you're going to see in this book are either free, with the option to pay for
additional services (like trackengine), or available for a fee only. if you're doing information
trapping for a company, you'll have to see if your company will foot the bill to pay for page-
monitoring or other services. if you're on your own, you are probably wondering how much
money you should pay for your traps.
almost every resource mentioned in this book has a free trial available or a limited offering. For
those that provide a free trial, it's a good idea to give it a go irst, and see how you like it. test,
test, and test some more. if you have fairly limited needs, you might be able to get by with a
limited, free offering. or maybe you'll use several different free services. the rest of the services
mentioned in this book are inexpensive enough that you can add at least a few of them to your
toolbox without spending an excessive amount of money.
the page monitors that you pay for have a couple of big advantages. First of all, they're usually
more stable in monitoring the pages you've set up, and who wants their information traps to
vanish? second, they tend to have better customer support. When you're paying for something,
you want to make sure you're getting your money's worth, right? You don't have as much
leverage when a service you don't pay for goes plotz.
that said, i still don't recommend paying for a Web-based page monitor unless you will be
monitoring fewer than 100 pages. if you will be monitoring more than that, it makes sense to buy
a client-side page monitor, because for less than $50 you can get Website-Watcher and monitor
literally thousands of pages, as i have done for years.
infoMinder
InfoMinder (infominder.com/webminder) combines two types of tools—it
tracks both pages and RSS feeds. It's a fee-based service, but a 30-day free
trial is available. (he trial version is limited to 10 pages/feeds.)
Once you've registered for the trial (and conirmed your registration) you
get—well, nothing but a blank page! But that's okay. Look for the Add Page
option, and then ind and use the Advanced Form, because for an informa-
tion trapper, the basic form doesn't amount to much ( Figure 3.5 ).