The season of garage and lawn sales is here. It's always interesting the things you can find. Like they say, "One man's trash is another man's treasure." Last year at this time I picked up a Logitech Quickcam USB camera for a mere two dollars. It sat in drawer for the better part of a year until I stumbled upon a posting on the GeekDad blog that encouraged me to pull it out and put it to use.

The blog posting mentioned a few free programs that could be used on older computers to put them back into service. One of the programs was named MonkeyJam, and this application introduced me to the world of penciltest or stop motion animation. Working with both a scanner or a web camera, MonkeyJam allows you to take many individual pictures and stitch them together to form an animated movie.

Once I got it installed, a fairly painless operation, it was fun to watch how quickly my kids took to the program. It didn't take long for them to run for their Lego. In fact, a quick Google search with the terms "monkeyjam lego" results in over 2000 hits including a fairly detailed Star Wars Phantom Menace Lego video among the top ten (I loved the plastic screen used as a force field and the jump sequences are not bad). MonkeyJam has a fairly limited feature set, but one interesting feature lets you combine more than one layer in your movie. This provides some simple ways to combine separate images into one frame including "darken", "multiply" and "blend". I'm guessing you can use this to combine character animation with a moving background.

Have you ever worked through a set of instructions describing how to put something together only to find yourself sitting there at then end of the task, book in hand, scratching your head wondering why there are seven extra parts in the box and why your project has a distinct lean to the left? Or have you ever tried to follow someone's directions to a family picnic only to get hopeless lost? I'm a firm believer that good documentation not only saves you time, but also saves you from a lot of frustration.

There's one such place on the Internet where "do-it-yourselfers" are trying to rid the world of bad instructions, and they freely share their step by step plans (dubbed "instructables" as opposed to instructions) on how to do almost anything. From laser engraved laptop tattoos to wood burned engraving with a stencil and a magnifying glass, the web site Instructables.com has an amazing variety of instructions written by anyone with the knowledge and enough literary and computer skills to submit them. While not every set of steps should be considered "good instructions", or even safe instructions, you learn a lot by browsing through this web site.

To find your way around the web site, you should start from the "Explore" menu. Here you will immediately see a list of the most popular instructables (who would have thought you could mold a carbonite Han Solo in chocolate?) and a simple click here will also reveal the most recent additions to the web site or the instructables with the top number of views, ratings or comments.

I've written a few columns on topics of social networking and the Internet in the past. Little did I know how popular the phenomenon had become until I was invited to join Facebook. Sites like Facebook.com, Orkut.com, MySpace.com and LinkedIn.com allow you to quickly build a list of your friends and associates, and share any number of personal details with your network, all in the name of keeping in touch.

Each of these sites has their own flair or style, but most have similar feature sets. You begin by editing your own profile, detailing as much or as little about your interests, likes, dislikes and personality as you choose. While this exercise was a little painful to perform for my own part (I'm more of an introvert than others), I muddled through on my adventure using Facebook. Next, you'll need to build your network of friends or contacts. This can be done in a few different ways. You can easily send invitations to people you know to see if your friends, family and coworkers are as adventurous as you are. If a person is not a member of the site, they would need to sign up before being added as a contact. Once connected, your friend would be able to see your profile and any updates that you make to it. They would also be able to send you messages through the site with a few clicks, and most likely share photos or videos that you or your friends upload.

Another way to grow your network is to flip through the lists of your friend's friends on the site. Using this feature on Facebook, you will quickly see that there are other people you know that you might not have initially thought of adding to your network, and a few more clicks will have them on your list. For the socially inclined (again... not really my one of my strong personality traits), I can see how growing your list of contacts can be somewhat of a rush. I've used the LinkedIn site, which caters more to business professionals, for over two years and have managed to add over forty contacts without too much trouble. With Facebook, a site initially popular with the college and university crowd, my friend list grew to 30 in a short week. I'm almost afraid to see what would happen if I tried out MySpace, which has been more than popular with teenagers.

There's an old saying that "an apple a day keeps the doctor away." I'm not exactly sure where it originated, but the axiom points to the idea that regular doses of something small can contribute to a bigger gain. Besides the better known activities that we should do regularly for our physical health such as exercise and eating right, there are also a lot of things we can do for our mind and our soul. And wouldn't you know it, we can turn to the Internet for our daily dose.

For those of us who gather inspiration for the wise words of others, there are several "quote of the day" websites available. Check out www.quotationspage.com/qotd.html for a set of four daily quotations including convenient buttons for e-mailing and getting more detailed information on each entry. Another site for quotes you could visit is brainyquote.com, which includes quotations categorized by topic, author name and author type (such as athlete, inventor or writer). I found the brainyquote site when looking to add content to my Yahoo! my.yahoo.com personal page.

If quotations are not your thing and you're looking for a way to enrich your vocabulary, you could try reference.com's "word of the day" found at dictionary.reference.com/wordoftheday. Here you'll find regular words and definitions ready to make your conversations sparkle with a roseate shine (roseate was Saturday's word). There are several other sites that offer daily words as well such as the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster. A simple Google search for "word of the day" will lead you to many others including words in languages other than English.

We're all creatures of habit aren't we? Our bad habits hard to break and dragging us down, our good habits carrying us yet going unnoticed. How we use the Internet is likely to bring a few habits of its own. Not to bring up any of the nasty habits that the Internet can foster, let's look at a way our quest for new and useful information can be improved.

Let's say that you're a news junkie, and you like to keep on top of international affairs, politics or science news. You might visit several sites during the day to remain fully informed. Would it be convenient to visit just one website and get all of your news? If you answered "Yes", then read on.

To keep up with the insane increase in the number of blogs (on-line journals) appearing on the Internet, blog reading programs and web sites were born and have flourished as a new way to read on-line information. The group of standards that allow story distribution (called syndication or web feeds by others) have allowed readers to pull together blog posts into one place for quick access. And now, since blogs are not the only type of web sites that use this form of distribution, we can take advantage of the technologies to read many different types of content.

Many Bits of Life columns over the past year have covered open source software projects of one sort or another. From Internet television applications to the Linux operating system, open source software packages for the most part are free to copy and distribute to your heart's content. But, it is the access to the source code (the instructions written by programmers, telling the computer how to operate) that makes these applications free, not merely the fact that the developers often don't charge for their handiwork. With the source code, you are free to modify the program to suit your own needs. You are not locked into the design of the original creators, and you are able to fix bugs and work with the community of software users at large to improve the applications that you come to rely on. It is this sense of freedom that makes the open source applications appealing to more than just software developers.

As computer programs of any particular type become a commodity, it's common to have open source alternatives crop up. There are open source operating systems, databases, programming languages, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, content management applications, web and application servers and even audio and MIDI sequencers. I believe this wide-spread adoption of the open source mentality is well understood in the space of computer software, and it is starting to spread to more real-world and physical projects.

Take for instance the ambitious OScar project. It's goal is "to develop a car according to Open Source principles." They are taking the idea of shared design into the automotive world. It looks like their progress is slow and steady to date, but they have grand visions of reinventing mobility as we know it today. On a smaller scale, the Megasquirt project details a DIY programmable fuel injection controller. Consider it a way for you to get your feet wet dabbling in community designed automotive hardware before building a whole vehicle.

It's a well known fact that Microsoft's early years were focused by the mantra "a computer in every home." A year ago Bill Gates reported that they were only about fifteen percent of the way towards their lofty goal, I'm sure due in some part to the distractions they have had along their way. In recent years, the computing landscape has been changing quite rapidly.

Mobile technologies are poised to take over the world. The computers inside our cells phones are many times more powerful and capable than the ones that Bill Gates and Paul Allen worked on when they first started Microsoft. Today, computers running Microsoft software are found in many more places than the desktop at home or in the office. Microsoft has moved from the desktop, to the laptop, into the palm of your hand in the form of personal digital assistants (PDAs) and cell phones, and even into automobiles (putting new meaning to the term mobile computing). Microsoft Windows software is everywhere.

With a press release early this December, Microsoft announced their latest effort to gain a foothold in yet another new area... robotics. A Q&A session with Tandy Trower reveals that Microsoft views the current state of affairs with robotics technology to be in a similar place in time as the PC industry was when Microsoft began. There are big companies with lots of money to spend doing amazing things with big robots that take lots of power to run. These companies use robots to build cars and move containers around a shipping yard. On the other hand, there are hobbyists and small companies building robots on a smaller scale. There are a lot of different "platforms" for designing, programming and running the new breed of in-house robots.

It's a crazy, fast-paced technological world that we live in. When that technology gets to be a bit too much for us, it's helpful to have someone that you can turn to help for. For those of us who are more technically adept, a quick Internet search might solve our most troubling problems, but for those of us who struggle with our computers, having a helping hand is much more effective. But we can't always have someone walk over to our desk, and show us where to click or what to type.

But, for those of us who use an operating system like Windows XP, a speedy Internet connection and technically savvy friend somewhere on the planet, you can get your help. Thanks to a feature called "Remote Assistance", a friend or coworker can virtually hold your hand and help you through your computer troubles.

Now, wouldn't it be great if you could get your granddaughter to help you program your VCR from her dorm room? That would involve connecting your VCR to the Internet, and that's just what engineers at a company called SUN had planned for you back in 1992 when they invented the programming language called Java. These days, you might use a Java application when playing a game in your web browser. It could also be powering an enterprise level application where you work, but Java's original roots were intended to be planted in the soil of small appliances, all connected together though a network.

Even though Java's original design didn't work out exactly as planned, there have been many small steps toward the same vision of network connected devices. Take for instance the proliferation of the X-10 technology. You can buy simple and complicated devices that are controlled through your regular home power lines. X-10 allows you to turn lights on and off, control irrigation, open your garage door and any number of other things in your home or office. With the proper network connection, you can use X-10 to control your appliances from a remote location.

Web sites today are no longer the static and unchanging pages of yesteryear. These days, the popular websites (at least among those on the bleeding edge of technology) are all about interaction. Whether you are interacting with the website itself, interacting with a service or interacting with other people in the known universe through the site, websites today can be more participatory than information.

No longer are we relegated to be just consumers of information on the Internet, we can be producers with an increasing ease. You can quickly create your own blog to share your opinions or most personal thoughts using Blogger.com and a myriad of other services. To show off your photography skills, or the latest mug shots of your new kittens, you can post your photos on flickr.com or one of the many other photo sharing sites. You can create your own discussion groups on any topic through Yahoo! or Google. Wikipedia.org allows anyone to create pages or edit them in an on-line encyclopedia. Sites like Newsvine.com and Topix.net let you comment on global or local news events, or even write your own news. You can now publish text, photos, audio and video, all with a bit of creativity and a few clicks, and all for free.

All of these trends are pushing the average Internet user towards interacting with the world and increasing the amount of Internet content. Why? Not surprisingly, most indicators point in the direction of increasing ad revenue for the website owners. But there is also a surge of Internet applications (websites that "do something") which focus on bringing people together and sharing information. Sites like Meetup.com, Flagr.com and Scrapblog.com are in this genre, and the list of what some call "Web 2.0" applications is growing.

There is an old saying that it is a poor workman that blames his tools. The same could be said for anyone that complains about not being able to find anything on the Internet. It's true that your typical single word search, "tools" for example, on any of the popular web search engines will return anywhere from over 240 million hits (search lingo for individual web pages found) on Microsoft's Live.com search engine to nearly 2 billion hits on Google. Wading through a list like that to find what you're really after is an impossible task, but you shouldn't blame the search engine. Using a single word search to find something on the web is like using sandpaper to clean your glasses... in your attempt to see things more clearly, you end up making things all the more blurry.

If you want to make your searches more effective, you are going to have to learn to use your tools more effectively. Just as a master carpenter would use different tools and techniques to transform a piece of stock into a beautiful table top, so you should use more than one method to build your search. The most simple and effective way to improve your search results is to use phrase searching. This allows you to find web pages that contain two or more words in a particular order. Most search engines will perform phrase searching when you enclose the words in double quotes. If we change our single word search from "tools" to "carving tools", the number of hits on Live.com is reduced to a mere 138 thousand hits and Google's results are now just over 353 thousand hits, a reduction of about 99.98% on the pages you now need to wade through. Not bad for adding just one more word, but there are still enough pages to make the task of reading them all humanly impossible.

Combining your phrase search with additional terms (search lingo for a word or other group of letters or numbers) will give your search more context and can reduce the number of results even more. For instance, if you were interested in buying chip carving tools, you could try your search again with: "carving tools" chip purchasing canada. If you don't find what you're looking for with a given set of terms, you can try swapping out words with their synonyms. In our example, you could use the word "buying" instead of "purchasing" or even the phrase "for sale".

One of the first columns I wrote for a newspaper mentioned a website that detailed the "cluetrain manifesto", a website that "kicked up some dust" in April of 1999. The site presented several reasons why the Internet was bringing about surging changes in the world of business. A book followed shortly after the minimalistic website, and now seven years after the cluetrain was first presented the full text of the book is available on-line. I'll have to admit that I didn't go out and buy the book then, but I am digging into it now.

The cluetrain manifesto website at http://www.cluetrain.com/ begins with the insightful proclamation, "A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies." The site then continues to list ninety-five short theses relating to this revelation, all stacked into one page.

After rereading the front page of the site some 2 years after first seeing it, I think I'm beginning to understand the underlying message; the Internet enables real people to talk to each other about the companies that they work for and with, and oh how people are talking. The technologies, websites and programming of the Internet might have changed a bit over the past seven years, but the ongoing conversations are still as human and as relevant as ever.

For the consumer, Internet conversations about businesses are a godsend. If you are having a problem with a particular camera model for instance, it's not at all hard to find out if others are having the same issues. Sharing your story of how you went about getting a free replacement can guide others to do the same. Customers can "band together" to gripe or rave about a product, form a user fan group, or form the start to a class action lawsuit.

For businesses, Internet conversations might strike fear into the very soul of your company. What if a customer found out that we skimped on materials when we built our latest widget? What if our newest product X gets bad reviews? Is this fear necessarily a bad thing? I believe it can focus a company's every move when management knows it is under this constant scrutiny. Business transparency is becoming an increasingly attractive trait when consumers are choosing a company to work with. And, since people are talking about your business anyway, why not take advantage of, participate in and encourage the conversations? There are an incredible number of ways now for a company to involve their customers in defining products and directing the business to a more profitable path.

I've noticed that some large companies, whether they had the manifesto or not, are taking the cluetrain ideas to heart. Microsoft (you know, Mr. Gates and his crew) and SUN (a manufacturer of server hardware and creators of the Java programming platform) both allow and encourage employees to blog regularly. For example, I like to follow Tim Bray's "ongoing" page. Tim is the "Director of Web Technologies" at SUN and had started his blog prior to his joining the company. I appreciate that they have allowed him to continue writing in an incredibly open fashion. Blogs allow your staff to put a human face on your business, and give customers valuable insight into the inner workings of the company and an opportunity to make comments and suggestions.

If you run your own business, you might want to consider providing a place for your customers to talk to each other and with you and your staff on-line. Some CEOs are starting their own blogs, and many are opening up user forums for their products. Who knows? One of those on-line conversation might lead to an idea for a new break through product. Give the cluetrain manifesto a thorough read and see what you, your employees and your customers can come up with. All aboard!

If you find yourself responsible for planning a public event, you'll want to use every possible means to get the word out, right? Short of hiring a town crier, how do you spread the word? After submitting notice to the regular list of places, the newspapers, newsletters, and paper fliers on bulletin boards, is there any other place to turn?

In the electronic world, there is an increasing number of places to announce your events. Since the early days of the Internet, there has been USENET newsgroups with groups focused on events or general topics of discussion. Locally there are kw.events and kw.general for Kitchener-Waterloo (although it looks like kw.events has been quiet for some time). There are also groups at the province level named ont.events and ont.general. One of the easiest ways to read and "post" (or submit) a message on USENET is to use Google Groups at http://groups-beta.google.com/ which has a fairly simple interface. Newsgroup software for dealing with newsgroups used to be commonplace on personal computers, but these days is not so popular. While likely not growing in numbers, people that read newsgroups are no doubt loyal in their reading habits, so you might be able to inform some members of the community with this method.

Another on-line option for announcing your event is the Upcoming.org website which is growing in popularity. Once you sign up for an account here, you can post and categorize a message about your event, and anyone will be able to see it (whether they have an account or not). Once nice feature about Upcoming.org, is that it you can subscribe to a web feed of events for a geographic area. A web feed allows you to use reader software to keep track of several different feeds at once. If you read several blogs for instance, your reader software should also be able to handle the web feed from this site and for your area of interest. Each time a new event is added, all subscribers would get the message next time they opened their reader.

September 29th this year marks the beginning of the third annual Entrepreneur Week. Held in the Region of Waterloo, this premier event fosters the connections a new entrepreneur might require to be successful in today's business climate. It seems our region has a long history of producing people with the entrepreneurial spirit, and the week's sponsors will be there to encourage the next round of budding businesses. Featured speakers include notable entrepreneurs such as Heather Reisman (President and CEO of Indigo Books), David Caputo (CEO of Sandvine) and Jim Balsillie(co-CEO of RIM) just to name a few.

With such strong support for startups, it makes me wonder why there are not even more entrepreneurial success stories in our area. Shouldn't we be churning out new talent on a monthly basis? I think part of what is holding us back is that startups are most often associated with high financial risk, endless hours of hard work away from your friends and family, and the isolation felt outside of the corporate environment. Not exactly a pretty picture if you are thinking of taking the plunge into self employment.

But entrepreneurs should take heart. The picture of working on you own doesn't have to be set in a dungeon or a dragon's den. In the book "Startup Garden", author Tom Ehrenfeld speaks of the benefits of self-employment saying, "... you have more control over your own destiny – and realize a more immediate link between your behavior and the success of you business... You have the chance to truly design the job you want, and to create a product or service you deeply believe in."

It seems nearly impossible to get away from computers these days. There's a computer in your television, one in your cell phone, one in your car and most likely one at work (whether it's on a desk or deep in the heart of a milling machine). The digital world is increasingly replacing the physical objects and establishments we grew up with. Television listings, once the realm of a weekly periodical or newspaper section are now beamed down from a satellite into the receiver in your living room. Voicemail, e-mail, text and instant messenging are taking the place of face-to-face meetings with people. There are doomsayers who say the Internet will spell the downfall of books, newspapers and magazines. Is it all as bad as they say?

Fortunately, I don't think it is that bad. We see some things being replaced, but with new technologies we see new possibilities. The Internet is increasingly making a mark in the familiar institutions that we know and love, allowing more and more people to participate. Take television for instance. Sites like YouTube.com, Yahoo! and Google video are gaining popularity at an incredible pace. Now anyone can make their own television shows, and the number of viewers are staggering. It's like "America's Funniest Videos" without the prize money at the end of the show. Efforts like Al Gore's Current TV and the CBC's Zed are getting this user generated content onto traditional television stations.

While some choose to relish in the fact that the Internet provides a level of anonymity (on the Internet, know one knows you are a dog), websites like Meetup.com are facilitating group meetings with people in your area. The website Platial.com is like an dynamic atlas generated by users of the site, and it is touted as a way to "connect people, neighborhoods, cities and countries." Upcoming.org is a great place to publicize and discover local happenings in your area. All of these websites are digital ways to bring real people together.

You may have noticed from previous columns that I regularly refer to the web site wikipedia.org. Wikipedia is an on-line encyclopedia that contains pages, or articles, on almost every topic imaginable. It's a great place to start any research project on the Internet. It's not uncommon to type a word into a search engine and see a page from Wikipedia in the top ten results. Try searching for something like "acid rain" or "norm abram" to see what I mean.

The web site for Wikipedia is built using a type of software called a wiki. There are many different variations of Wiki software produced by several different companies and communities. Wikipedia in particular uses the software package called MediaWiki, which is free and open source software. Using MediaWiki you can install your own wiki web site that looks and feels much like the Wikipedia site. Maintaining a knowledge base on a specialty topic would be a good use for such a wiki.

On Wikipedia, it's easy to sign up for your own account, and you can be adding or improving Wikipedia's content in seconds. Well, maybe seconds is a bit hasty. First, you will need to learn the fairly straightforward markup that helps you format the text of an article. For articles that exist already, you simply click the "edit this page" tab at the top of the page. Doing so will display an edit box containing the entire contents of the article ready for your updates. You will notice that items appearing as headings on the article page will now appear as varying numbers of equal signs around them. This is the Wiki markup for a heading, with the number of equal signs indicating the level of heading. Italic text is marked with two single quotes on either side, and bold text uses three single quotes. It's a little unusual at first, but you can use the tool bar to help you out and you get used to it after a few edits. For making small changes on Wikipedia, you can also opt to edit a single section within an article rather than the whole page. Just click the "[edit]" button to the right of the section heading. A quick change, preview and a save will make your changes visible to the whole world.

This week's column outlines some of the surprises I found recently while taking a closer look at one of the Internet's longest running business success stories. Amazon, known best for it's on-line book store in operation since the mid-nineties, is now selling a lot more that books. Not only has their inventory expanded to include music, videos, software, and video games on their Canadian site Amazon.ca (and many other items on their US site), but you can also sell your own new and used items there. The Amazon Marketplace allows individuals to list items for sale, and in contrast with eBay.ca, it doesn't cost anything until a sale is made. Additionally, for people or businesses that might sell many items they have a "Pro Merchant" account that makes this easier and cheaper.

If you find that you don't have any items to sell, but would still like a piece of the Amazon pie, then the Associates program might be for you. It allows you to make money by referring people to the Amazon site. With an Associates account setup, you can add links and search boxes on your website that will direct people to the Amazon web site. If a visitor to your site follows such a link and then makes a purchase, you will receive a commission from the purchase.

One of Amazon's differentiating features in their early days was their recommendation system. As you perform product searches and make purchases through the site, it builds up a history of your on-line activity. When your data is combined with that of all the other site users, the system has an uncanny knack for recommending other items that you may be interested in. To this set up, they have now added a wish list feature. Site users can set up a list of items that they would like others to buy for them as gifts, with the purchasers being able to see what others have already bought.

While Amazon's on-line stores are most likely it's bread and butter as a business, they have added many other useful on-line services to their roster. For instance, their search site at A9.com pulls from a large array of topic specific search engines and databases. With some quick experimentation, I found that you could add a search for electronic parts. Reaching back to my college days, I recalled working with a 555 timer microchip, and I was able to use A9.com to quickly locate a data sheet for a Phillips version of this chip. By default A9 offers blog, news, movie, people, yellow pages and other searches. One surprise I had was the book search offering. I did a vanity search (where you enter your name in a search engine), and found a forgotten reference where a local author had mentioned me in his book acknowledgments.

Amazon has made a few acquisitions over the years and has pulled together some interesting technologies. The Alexa.com website is often referenced when people want to discuss how popular a new web site is becoming. The Alexa "web crawler" (software that follows web page links within and between web sites, building an index of the information on the pages) powers A9 and Microsoft Live web searches, and also provides information for the Internet Archive's Way Back Machine, which is a great way to walk backwards in Internet time by the way. Amazon also owns the Internet Movie Database, touted as the world's biggest movie database listing movie, television and actor information for nearly video you can think of.

One of my biggest surprises found while researching this column, was to find the return of Bill Maher to his wisecracking persona made famous on his show "Politically Incorrect". As of the beginning of June this year, he is now the star of a weekly on-line video called the "Amazon Fishbowl", where he provides us with the standard monologue and celebrity interviews we've come to know and love. The pilot episode featured Stephen King and Paul Reiser, and has been followed up with an impressive list of other well-knows, all rolled up with the obligatory links back into the Amazon web site where you can purchase the books and DVDs being talked about in the video. Amazon certainly has a few surprises up it's sleeve, and is worth another look. I didn't even mention the Mechanical Turk!

If you are at all like me, you spend far too much time trying to personalize your computer. You can download screensavers, mouse pointers, or different gadgets like stock tickers or weather watchers for your desktop. Personally, I like to find at least one new desktop wallpaper each week from my favourite photo sharing Flickr.

But, have you ever had the desire to change everything on your PC? What would you say to trying out a different operating system on your existing hardware? You are likely a little hesitant with some concern for all of the personal files that you have stored on your system, right? You might be surprised to know that there are a few different ways that you can experiment with a different operating system (OS) with little risk of damaging your files.

You could begin your experimentation with Linux. Linux is a free and open operating system developed in many different "flavours" (known as distributions), by many different companies and individuals around the world. If your system has enough memory, you can use a "Live CD" variant of Linux, to boot your computer and have it run the new OS from the disc and from memory. Without writing to your harddrive, this method doesn't harm your files and allows you try out the features and applications that come with Linux, without committing to replacing your Windows OS.

The global network known as the Internet has long been touted as a method of communication, of connecting people. Academics used the early Internet to share research information. As lower cost connections became commonplace, e-mail messages became the standard for passing along personal stories and for communicating with businesses.

During the dot-com boom, Amazon.com the now well-know on-line store became popular in part due to a feature that allowed customers to rate what they had bought through the site. Now, a product's "Amazon rating" and comments are one of the first places some people check when considering buying a commodity item. The data provided for and by the community has become a great value to Amazon as a company and it's customer base. The rate and comment model has been much copied by other retailers since.

Take for instance the site Threadless.com, an storefront for selling T-shirts. It has taken reviews a step further. It doesn't seem too radical at first glance, except for the fact that all of the products are creative works by users of the site. Designs are voted up the list until they reach a point where they are deemed worthy of becoming a real product, at which point they are sold through the site. User input has been driving the site since 2000.

Blogs are growing at an alarming rate on the Internet. According to David Sifry the founder and CEO of Technorati, their numbers are expanding at such a rate that there are now sixty times more blogs than there were just three years ago. For all of the media attention and hoopla heaped onto them however, blogs are little more than on-line journals with entries listed in reverse chronological order. The technology behind a blog is actually not that spectacular.

What is spectacular is the effect that blogs are having on the average person's ability to communicate with the world. They provide a hi-tech printing press with an instantaneous reach that spans nearly the entire planet. Within seconds of typing a journal entry, it is globally available to be read by anyone with an Internet connection. This gives consumers a voice and the ability to either praise your product or criticize it. Word of a bad product or poor service can spread like wildfire in the blogosphere (the world of blogs).

So what is a business owner to do? How can you know what your customers are saying about your product or service? Luckily, there are several blog-specific search engines which will allow you to find any mention of your company's name. One of the first sites to make blog search available was Technorati.com

The Internet as we know it today is built on interconnected web pages held together loosely by those underlined words and fancy images known as links. More formally, hyperlinks are a reference from one web page to another. First envisioned in the context of microfilm nearly forty years ago, it's doubtful that the originators of the idea could have envisioned how they are being used today.

From the earliest days of the web, researchers and others in academic environments began to harness the power of links, collecting their favourites on their own personalized "homepages" or organized on topic specific pages. This task required knowledge of the HTML language to create the pages, and access to a web server for saving the pages. As the web grew and free web page creation sites became popular, the homepage craze followed and more people began sharing their links and other cherished bits of information.

Today with the onslaught of web pages on the Internet, people are crushed under the weight and volume of pages. Saving your own bookmarks in an organized fashion is almost impossible, even with improvements made to web browsers. Search engines allow you to find pages when you're not sure where to locate that interesting tidbit, but once you find it, keeping it is another story. A browser bookmark might suffice, but if you go between computers between work and home, or want to show a friend or business associate a web page using their computer, then you might be out of luck. Fortunately, there are several web sites that allow you to store and share any number of bookmarks, with no HTML coding required.