As already said, if you are not familiar with syndication and aggregators, now is a good time to discover them. Information will reach you, rather than being looked for.

There is an excellent index of RSS services from all over the world. It can help you become almost hyper-text-independent. All information that is of interest to you will be aggregated. This is probably the next generation of Web exploration.

Many ways exist to search and download images by keyword/s. Nevertheless, copyright issues are usually raised. One source of graphics that is both extensive and free is stock.xchng. Its servers tend to be busy during daytime (America and especially Europe), but nothing else seems to beat it.

As a side note, Google Images will collect and index any image regardless of copying permissions.

If you are not familiar with syndication and aggregators, now is a good time to find out. Content is delivered to you, rather than you chasing content.

I am apprehensive of promoting MSN search, but their beta version has a nice feature that I am excited about. You can get common searches delivered to your RSS aggregator. The idea is very simple. Just replace the text in red with your favourite search query and replace whitespaces with a +.

http://beta.search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=othello+master&format=rss

Plenty of free music is distributed over the Internet by artists who wish to promote themselves and share their work. UNIX/Linux users can use wget to mass-download that music without any manual intervention. This means that hundreds of songs can potentially be downloaded to your hard-drive automatically and on a daily basis. This method (which personally I consider unethical) is exposed in Jeff Veen’s item where you can pick up the simple instructions.

Sample files are located on this domain although they do not reflect on personal preference.

Also see the newer item which expands on this method and gives a clearer background.

S⁵ is a token that explains its essence: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System. Alternatively, it can be perceived as a tool which constructs presentations for a modern Web browser to interpret. The author, Eric Meyer, has incorporated yet another improvement. At midday today I will present my work using S⁵:

• Version with no videos
• Version with videos

The experience of choosing a Web host is very baffling. One has to rely on word of mouth and the features provided by the host are rarely understood. I have had bad experiences with slow hosts that offer little or no support, but my current hosts, catalyst2, have been impeccable. Their service scope is global and I warmly recommend them.

Quite arguably, the number of links pointing to a Web site indicate its popularity. The Google PageRank system is somewhat controversial, but here are some of the most popular sites on the Web, as viewed by the PageRank machanism:

Title:	PR	Backlinks
Adobe	10	82,500
Adobe Acrobat	10	306,000
World Wide Web Consortium	10	117,000
Macromedia	10	27,800
Energy.gov	10	40,200
Intel Corporation	10	38,100
Apple – QuickTime	10	43,300
Yahoo	10	581,000
Keio University	10	3,470
Elsevier.com	10	29,600

See Search Engine Genie for full listings.