Track news story changes with Update Scanner for Firefox

The Update Scanner add-on for Firefox is one of my favorites.

You give it a set of Web pages to watch and tell it how often to check them, and it notifies you when they change.

It’s ideal for keeping up with Web sites that don’t offer RSS feeds, or checking changes on just a single page of a large Web site (for example, a company’s listing of open jobs).

You can also use it to see exactly how a news story changes as it evolves online.

Here’s an example: I set Update Scanner to watch a page that showed an Associated Press story about President Barack Obama planning to call for tighter restrictions on banks.

Update Scanner has options, as you can see in the screen shot below, including setting how often it checks the page (as often as every five minutes, though it gives you a warning if you choose this).

Another option is to highlight changes to the text.

If Update Scanner checks a page and sees a change, it alerts you with a small box in the lower right corner of your Firefox window.

Clicking on the link in the alert takes you to the page. Update Scanner highlights the changes (if you’ve chosen that option) and offers you a chance to see both the old version of the page before the change and the new version.

As you can see, this is useful for learning which parts of a news story change from one update to the next.

The changes to the news story above are relatively minor, but on fast-paced breaking news stories you may get frequent updates bathed in yellow highlighting. Such is the nature of online news!

Update Scanner only uses highlighting for changes, not strike-through text, so it appears it won’t show you when text is eliminated.

However, you can see for yourself where text has been eliminated by looking at the older version of the page (via the “Old Page” link) and comparing it to the newer version.

Do you find this useful? Do you know another good use for Update Scanner? Leave a comment below!