Please direct your questions, comments, subscription requests, and site submissions to geoff@kleinman.com
IN THIS MONTH'S REPORT
1) A Special Thanks And Welcome
2) Free Your Files
3) Something You May Have Missed at Yahoo
4) Run Your Own List
5) FasTV
6) What People are Really Searching For
7) What's On My Nightstand - Nicholson Baker
8) Correction
SITES IN THIS ISSUE
Lockergnome
Dundee List Hosting
DocSpace
Yahoo! Address Book
Topica
FasTV
Goto Search Results
Nicholson Baker Fan Page
Faxwave/Callwave
Tell A Friend
1) A Special Thanks And Welcome
First off, I want to give a special thanks to Chris Pirillo for his great review of The Kleinman Report in Lockergnome. Chris does a fantastic job with Lockergnome and I'm very happy to be included in his newsletter.
Over the past month, our readership has grown significantly (partly due to our mention in Lockergnome), so I want to extend a welcome to many of you who recently joined The Kleinman Report, I hope you enjoy reading The Kleinman Report as much as I do writing it.
While I'm thanking people, I also want to take a moment and thank all of you who have been faithful Kleinman Report readers over the past years. There are many of you who have been reading this report since late 1995 or early 1996. Your support has been amazing.
By the way, you're getting this newsletter a little late this month, as we've been busily moving the report onto a new mailing server over at Dundee.net. The folks over at Dundee are great and I look forward to continuing to use our new list server.
Lockergnome
Dundee List Hosting
2) Free Your Files
This month a new service launched that takes accessing and sending files over the Internet to the next level. DocSpace's new free services help address two major problems: how to access your files when you are using another computer, and how to send someone a large file without clogging their mailbox.
DocSpace Drive allows you to easily upload files to your own secure online drive, and access them from any computer connected to the Internet. Once you start using this great service, you'll realize the how powerful the ability to access your files from any PC can be. DocSpace Drive is free and comes with 20MB of storage space.
DocSpace Express makes securely sending files amazingly easy. Log in to Express, upload the file you want to send, enter the address(es) you want to have it delivered to, and it's off. The recipients will get a pickup note in e-mail and pointers to a secure login to retrieve the file. I've used this feature to send high resolution pictures of our five month old baby to family and friends, and it is fantastic.
Both Docspace services are free (with some file size limitations) and represent extremely significant offerings from a great new company. It's so refreshing to find a site that is so useful, and is still free.
3) Something You May Have Missed at Yahoo
Let's face it, Yahoo! is enormous. It's not only easy to miss something that they've added, it's pretty normal. This past month I stumbled upon Yahoo Address Book, a great online tool that helps you keep track of contacts online.
I had previously given up maintaining an address book as I kept running into the issue of needing contacts from my home PC at work, and from my work PC at home. Yahoo Address Book helps resolve this problem by putting your contacts at your fingertips no matter where you are.
One of the most impressive features of Yahoo Address Book is how easily it can synchronize with your existing contact manager (Outlook, Palm Pilot, etc). If you have a number of existing contacts, getting them uploaded into Yahoo's Address Book is a snap.
Yahoo's Address Book also seamlessly integrates with Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Maps, and Yahoo Calendar, offering one of the most complete contact managers around. Oh, and did I mention it's completely free!
4) Run Your Own List
Since I started The Kleinman Report back in 1995, I have been a great advocate for e-mail newsletters and mailing lists. The power to communicate to many people via e-mail is incredible. Recently a new company, Topica, launched a service that lets you easily create and manage your own mailing list for free.
Topica does a great job of making the complex process of managing an e-mail newsletter really easy, with all the features you'd find from a professional list hosting company.
For all of you who have dreamed of running your own newsletter, report or mailing list, Topica is there to help get you off the ground.
P.S. If you do create a list, let me know and I'll be one of your first subscribers :)
5) FASTV
CNN mentioned your home town (while you were at work). What do you do? Go to FasTV, a new kind of a search engine. FasTV searches through television programs by keyword; so, if your home town was mentioned, you can type it in the FasTV search box and view the clip of the show right at the point that they mentioned what you're looking for. FasTV is in its early stages, so right now they only have shows from the CNN family of channels, but they are working to bring on new channels by this summer. Watch this space because FasTV is going to be hot!
6) WHAT PEOPLE ARE REALLY SEARCHING FOR
Ever wonder how many people are searching for "love" (10,805)?
How about "lumber" (662)? These numbers come courtesy of a
little known tool over at the Goto.com search engine which
allows you to see just how many people are searching for a
particular word (at Goto.com). Although it may not represent how
people are searching on all the other search engines, it
certainly is an interesting way to look at the way people
search.
7) WHAT'S ON MY NIGHTSTAND - NICHOLSON BAKER
This past week I had the good fortune to meet one of my favorite authors, Nicholson Baker, author of The Mezzanine, Room Temperature, VOX (yes, the same one that Lewinsky gave to Clinton), The Everlasting Story of Nory, and many others.
I was curious about the effect the Internet has had on someone who I consider to be one of the better contemporary authors out there. Here was his extraordinary response.
"I like to use the Internet to find things. Like the other day, I was looking for the origin of the word "lumber". Each search engine came back with its unique grouping of results. It was like each one was a different collection of organisms, a unique entity. I like the fact that I can look at many sources for the answer, even including paper card catalogs, though they may be out of date. I actually like the errors in each search tool. It makes them unique, each one has their own errors and it exposes the wonderful humanity of the people behind it, all working to link information."
8) CORRECTION
In last month's report we had the url for Faxwave incorrect. You can access the free fax service through the companies main page: http://www.callwave.com
We've been using Callwave/Faxwave now since our last report. It's fantastic!
If you like this newsletter, don't keep it a secret. Tell A Friend !
Best Regards,
GeoffIn Case You Missed It: Last Month's Issue If you like this newsletter, don't keep it a secret. Pass it along to your friends using our recommend form.