Check out their comments on the Substack post for some alternatives. I also may have a guest reporter sharing their thoughts on that soon. It’s definitely never boring, watching the web change in the AI age!
Moving on to this week’s tool, let’s talk about monitoring changes to webpages. That’s a need that has existed for a long time but nonetheless has gone through several changes over the years.
My current rec is Klaxon. It’s free, easy to use, and – my favorite – made by journalists for journalists. In fact it’s run by MuckRock, a fantastic nonprofit that I’ve talked about on here before. (And, in full disclosure, have worked for before.)
They recently updated Klaxon to make it even easier to use. Klaxon now runs as a browser extension, for Chrome or Firefox, that notifies you when part of a webpage changes.
You just highlight the part of the webpage you want to watch and save the alert to your MuckRock account. (If you don’t already have an account, you should.)
Klaxon can be set to monitor the page every hour, day or week. It also saves the page to the Wayback Machine, so that you can see various versions of it over time. Keep an eye on those pages, reporters!
One more thing...
Did you miss the last TFR? Some musings on what has happened to Google Search