Telling the webmaster is a good idea - they don't necessarily know that other people are linking to them, though a "link:" search on alltheweb.com (which does link searches better than Gurgle) is a good plan before making any changes to an address. I've done this when moving a web site to a different domain, contacted webmasters who had links to the old page, and some of them thanked me for that. It also helped with getting visibility of the new site on search engines.

Anahata