I was home sick for the day so I had a lot of time to stumble around the Internet. I found this great site that lets you compare all of the big online mapping services like Yahoo, Google, Ask.com and NASA. I think Google won every time but the site is interesting.
Yahoo announced today that they will be removing all size limits to email storage on free Yahoo email accounts. The service will begin rolling out unlimited storage in May. Yahoo is also debating a lift on storage limits for Fliker.com photo sharing accounts.
Yahoo hopes that lifting the storage limits will lead lock customers in for good.
Even if Google does match the offer, the real loser in this battle is Microsoft and Windows. If you can access your email, calendar, documents, and photos from any computer anywhere no matter what operating system you are using, Microsoft will have a difficult time finding a market for future versions of Windows.
Too often I see computer users of all experiences taking too many steps to visit a web site. If they know a web site address, they first go to a search engine like Yahoo! or Google and type the address there. Then they click Search, wait for the results and click the site they want to visit.
Instead of going through all those steps, type known addresses in the long white address bar at the top of the screen and press the Enter (return) key on your keyboard. And don't forget to use favorite for frequently visited sites so you don't have to type at all. Search engines are for research not browsing.
Technology has spawned many strange new words from blog to podcast to spyware. Captcha is a new term that you will be seeing more of in the coming months. In fact, chances are good that you have already dealt with captchas. A captcha is a scrambled mess of characters (like the ones pictured in this article) that we have to reproduce in a box before submitting a web form.
The purpose of captchas is to thwart bad guys from releasing programs (web bots) that can automatically fill out forms all over the web. They do this to leave spam on sites that allow comments or to send bogus orders to e-commerce sites. Captchas work well at stopping these hacker bots because they can't 'read' and verify these characters.
Picking out an Internet provider in the good ol' days of the Internet was easy. All you had to do was pick a company that wasn't owned by AOL and you'd be OK.
Today the choice is much tougher because you must choose between dial-up and broadband. And if you choose broadband, you must choose which type of broadband is best for you.
Here is a handy guide to help you decide.
Dial-up – Dial-up Internet the slowest way to connect to the Internet, but it is usually the least expensive if you are comparing actual costs of service. However, there are other disadvantages besides lack of speed.
This article is a repeat from the newsletter last week, but I thought I would post it all by itself for two reasons. First, I have had a lot of comments on it this week. Second, all these tech names will create more yahoo search terms and we will make a few cents from it. Here it goes…
I bought a new computer last week. The new system is dual core, 1 GB of RAM, 200 GB hard drive and DVD burner and card reader.
I remember the first two or three computers I purchased. I remember how exciting it was to
I have had several clients tell me that they use the same username and password for everything so they don't forget.
While this is a personal decision, I just thought I would provide one good reason why it's not a good idea to only use one username and password.
Let's say that somehow a bad guy gets a job working for your ISP (Internet Service Provider) or perhaps he gets a job working for your newsletter about singles who collect stamps.
Typically these kinds of sites can't see your password, but they can reset your password. If this particular shady individual resets your password then you won't be able to get into the stuff related to that site that you want.
I noticed in the news that AOL has officially made all of its services free. They have also lowered their rates to $9.95 for dial-up service.
Their pitch is that all of their content including email is now free. They are really trying to get people to sign up for their free email.
So, I figured, what the heck. I will sign up for it if it's free. Just so I can review what a free AOL service is like.
If you haven't heard us say it before, AOL is not an Internet provider. Perhaps they were at one time, but today their specialty is advertising. They charge subscribers for a service that's primary purpose is to show those subscribers advertising. Every link in the AOL software is advertising based. Whether you click on shopping, weather, Internet security or news, every link in the AOL program is put their because someone paid for it to be there.
We talk frequently of the new and useful tools that Google offers. One of the best is the Google News service. Google uses their powerful search technology to bring you news stories from many angles. If you really are a news junkie, you can use Google Alerts and RSS to get those news stories routed to your email or customized portal page like My Yahoo or even Google’s cutomizable home page.
To use the Google Alerts or RSS feeds, simply search for a topic at Google News, then click on the "News Alert" link on the left side of the page or the the RSS feed button. Take some time to really look around Google News…you won’t be disappointed.
We talked with Paul Forster of Indeed.com on the show today. Indeed.com is a job hunting site that lets users search the largest job database available on the Internet. Click the link to listen to the interview and learn more about this extremely helpful and easy to use web site. Some of the topics we talked about included:
· Vertical Search vs. Google and Yahoo!