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That’s what we used to call it at one of my previous companies. You have to register and then you can type in your search phrase(s) and Google will search and send you email with the new hits. It was a good idea 4 years ago when we did it and it looks like it’s still a good idea.

Came across O’Reilly’s Meerkat today although it’s apparently been in operation for quite a few months. What is it? Here’s what O’Reilly says about it:

“While maintaining the original association of a story with a channel, Meerkat’s focus is on chronological order — the latest stories float to the top, regardless of their source. ”

It’s an interesting site that my writing skills can’t really do justrice. It has to be experienced to really be understood but I’ll do my best to describe it. There are “profiles” that restrict the stories that are displayed on the main page. Along with or instead of that you can select categories or specific channels to be displayed. And, of course, you can search the stories. If you register with the O’Reilly Network you can create your own profile.

If you get your online news from more than 2 sources and more frequently than once a week, read on! — RSS readers can simplify your life.

In a nutshell, RSS is an XML-based standard for publishing information in smallish chunks a lot like stories or news articles (go to this article on about.com — it’s got a good explanation of RSS). Typically, the article will be the same as the original article and will have live hyperlinks to the original story in case you feel you’re missing something. In practice, a lot of sites will “publish” an RSS feed that is IDENTICAL to what’s on (some of) their pages. For instance, CNet.com publishes their Tech News through this 20-story RSS feed. You can get news stories from that site via your RSS reader and not have to go to CNet’s News.com site (here is CNet.com’s list of RSS feeds). Computerworld and InfoWorld have RSS feeds, too, (here and here, respectively) as do a lot of other places. Now, imagine that you can get all of this information in ONE place (your RSS reader) as opposed to going to each of those sites. See how it can save time and effort?

How do you find RSS feeds? There are two main sites that publish lists of news-related RSS feeds: NewsIsFree.com and Syndic8.com. Besides that, just about every weblog has an RSS feed and you can find list upon list of those at places like weblogs.com. And if you don’t wanna download and install an RSS reader you can use bloglines.com — it’s an online service that provides RSS reading capabilities via your browser.

See http://email.about.com/cs/rssfeedreaders/. It’s got an introduction to RSS and why you might like it as well as a review of 10 of the most popular readers.

Personally, I use the bloglines.com online service. For a local client, I’m undecided between FeedDemon (still in beta but it will ultimately be a commercial product) and WildGrape’s NewsDesk (free).

Actually, it turns out that just about every ad in the San Jose Mercury News is online at http://newpaperads.mercurynews.com. You can browse by category (“Electronics & Appliance Stores”) or by advertiser. You can even set up an email alert so you’ll be notified when an ad shows up that matches your search criteria. Typically the ad will be displayed in a smaller format which can be zoomed. Today’s Fry’s ad, for instance is here. There have been 19 Fry’s ads in the Murky News in the past 7 days!

www.techbargains.com lists deals and rebates on technical merchandise, from both online vendors as well as brick-and-mortar stores.

eCost sells online and has a list of bargains that will expire soon. Sometimes there are good deals (SMC EZ Connect 802.11b Wireless PC Card for $17 due to expire in 38 hours) and sometimes not so hot.

… at http://www.microsoft.com/reader/promotions/free_shop.asp. The books are

“I Am Madame X” by Gioia Diliberto
“Open Innovation” by Henry Williams Chesbrough
“Joy luck Club” by Amy Tan

… but the default MTU size on Windows XP systems will often reduce the throughput of PPPoE connections. You need to check out your provider’s MTU size and adjust accordingly (thanks to Scot’s Newsletter for this). In it he makes reference to SpeedGuide.net, a site I haven’t been to in a long time, spending instead, a lot of my time on the DSLReports site. But the SpeedGuide.net site has got a lot of good information on it that DSLReports only has in its forums like its Windows 2000/XP Registry Tweaks as well as downloads like the TCP Optimizer which will optimize your settings for your provider.

Some of the stuff is wildly out of date (a review of Tiny Software Personal Firewall V1.0 from 2000?) but the downloads and the tweaks and the news are worthwhile. Just wish they had an RSS feed.

BTW, check out the current issue of Scot’s Newslettercause he’s got a review of VoIP residential provider Vonage.

There’s a nice collection of online tools at http://www.dnsstuff.com that can give information based on IP address or domain name including DNS server response time, traceroute, reverse DNS lookup, CIDR/netmask lookup and ping. Thanks to 07/10/2003 Lockergnome Windows Daily for this site.

I think I heard of these two before but Dan Gillmor’s weblog entry brought them to mind again. Give it a shot.

In case you have something against going to Gillmor’s journal, go to Google and search for “French military victories”. Click the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button instead of the “Google Search” button.

The other one is to search for “weapons of mass destruction” and hit the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button.