How can you get your daily dose of Web news without spending half the day trying to find it? Create a personalized news page on Yahoo! or Excite.
Both portals let you customize the day's headlines to get plenty of news about the Internet. If you want to track a specific publicly traded company, you can add its stock ticker to your page. Click on the symbol, and you'll receive quotes and links to stories.
Coordinates: Yahoo!, my.yahoo.com; Excite, my.excite.com
To stay on top of what's happening on the Web, get "Geoff's Gems," a daily email newsletter. The newsletter is the handiwork of Geoff Baum, 31, cofounder and director of marketing for Garage.com. Baum spends two hours a day scouring the Web so you don't have to.
How does Baum suggest that you stay afloat in a sea of Web information? First, he says, you gotta start somewhere. "The Web is a huge library, but you can't stop and look at every book. You have to decide on a core group of information providers and stick with them as your base." Also, tap into your network. "The best search engines are human ones. My friends subscribe to lots of information services and email newsletters. I ask them to alert me to new things." Finally, don't forget to connect the dotcoms. "Insight comes from the connections you make. If you make it a practice to keep up with developments every day, then you begin to see different perspectives. That's the ultimate point of collecting all of this information."
Coordinates: Geoff Baum, geoff@garage.com; "Geoff's Gems," www.garage.com/geoffsgems.shtml
Charlie Cook, 46, a marketing consultant based in Greenwich, Connecticut, is the human supersleuth of search engines. On his Web site, SearchIQ, he rates dozens of search tools, from well-known directories to obscure meta-search engines. SearchIQ also hosts a directory of hundreds of specialty search engines that cover specific topics, from U.S. patents to UFO-related sites. "If it exists in the world, then there's something about it on the Web," Cook says. "But can you find it?" The real problem with searching: Even the best search tools only cover a small percentage of what's out there. To sort through the confusion, Cook is an advocate of meta-search engines -- essentially, search engines of search engines. Some of his little-known favorites: RedeSearch.com and C4. For superfocused searches, such as determining whether a phrase is trademarked, look for a specialty search engine on that topic. It's easier to find a needle in a small haystack than in a big one.
Coordinates: Charlie Cook, cdc2@searchiq.com; SearchIQ, www.searchiq.com
Thanks to the Web, you can reach tens of millions of people around the world. But you can only persuade them to pay attention with writing that's customized for the medium. Amy Gahran, 33, of Boulder, Colorado, is the founder of "Contentious," a Web zine for writers, editors, and others who create content for online media. What's her primer on how to write like a Web pro?
Cut the fluff. "Web users want questions answered quickly. If you're writing about a product, stick to the basics. Flashiness turns people off."
Don't write, organize. "Web users get information from all directions. So every page must stand on its own. A piece should have an introductory page, with links to and from all subsequent pages. And every page that follows should clearly identify, at the top, the larger piece of which it's a part."
It's all relative. "The Web is a one-to-one experience. People are willing to listen if what you're saying relates to them. Use the second-person 'you' more often than you would in print."
Coordinates: Amy Gahran, amy@content-exchange.com; "Contentious," www.contentious.com
Email
Digg
StumbleUpon
Facebook
Buzz Up!
LinkedIn
