Tracking Web Site Changes and Lost Web Sites
Here are two sites that can help you track and find lost web sites
With the advent of RSS, page change detection sites have pretty much disappeared. However, here are two sites that can help you track and find "lost" web sites.
ChangeDetect offers a free service that tracks web pages you select, monitors content for changes, and sends an automatic email notification to you whenever your web pages are updated. (Ads are included in the e-mails, so be forewarned).
Internet Archive, a.k.a. the Wayback Machine, archives literally tens of thousands of sites on the Internet, tracking changes in the site's content over time. You can use it to find a lost article or web page, or to see how your favorite web site has evolved over time.
We use the Internet Archive here at K12IMC to locate web sites that have suddenly moved. Our trick is to get the latest version of the web page, select 8-15 words of text from the page, and search for those words in Google (surrounding the word string in quotes). Many times we've been able to locate a lost web site using this procedure.
Annotation
Tools like ChangeDetect can be used to monitor student maintained web sites. Get a heads up as soon as new content is posted.
You can also use the Internet Archive as a teaching tool to show how attitudes (and web styles) have changed over the years.
Since one source of power on the Web is its dynamic for constant change, change detection tools and RSS feeds are essential time-savers for you. however, the frequency of alerts can vary. You may want to try a combination, depending upon your online schedule of activities.
