Yahoo has an email alert service that supports RSS update. In other words, if an RSS feed is updated, Yahoo can send you an email informing you of the change. For many things, an RSS reader is sufficient, but for those that check his RSS feed once a day, email alerts about RSS updates are more timely.
- To set this up, go to http://alerts.yahoo.com/ and select the Feed/Blog option.
- In the alert setup screen, give the URL of your RSS feed, and select the method of notification. In addition to email, you can also be updated by Yahoo Messenger or SMS.
- And that is it. Below is a picture of the alert email.
If you are interested in being notified of changes to a webpage, but the webpage does not have an RSS feed, you can pair the Yahoo RSS/Blog email alert with a service like Page2RSS, which lists changes to a webpage as a RSS feed (a feed-creating tool).
In some sense, this is very similar to service offered by ChangeDetection.com.