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Net Gains (Jul 07, 98) |
If it's Tuesday … it must be Net Gains. And if it's the first
Tuesday of the month, it must be the bookmark edition of Net Gains.
This month, we have Sharad Popli, Director, QuantumLink Communications
Pvt. Ltd., surfing his favourite sites, and sharing them with
us. He's been hooked onto the Net for the past 7 years - while
"Internet" wasn't as yet in the vocabulary of most of
us. QLC is an Internet technologies company, and made waves when
it offered the first web based dial-in Intranet in India (called
Virtual Community, but now defunct), and later when it created
the first Miss World Website in 1996. More recently, QLC developed
The Postmaster (not the Kevin Costner movie, but a Java software
package), that lets a company offer personal, unlimited e-mail
ids to all employees over a single Internet account (download
your copy from http://www.mailserve.net/).
Being a techhie guy, most of Sharad's favourite bookmarks are
technology oriented bookmarks like http://www.sun.com (for the
latest on Java), and http://www.linux.org (Sharad's a big Linux
believer). Now that we're done with the nerdy URLs, we move onto
URLs that would be more interesting and useful to the rest of
us.
My Virtual Reference Desk (http://www.refdesk.com/) is one mammoth
collection of useful links sorted out into different categories,
that has become one of my favourite bookmarks since Sharad mentioned
it. The homepage of MVRD gives you direct access to news, magazines,
papers, business, sports, search and feature sites, saving you
the trouble of navigating through many layers to get to these
sections. There are links from this main page to more detailed
pages on research, fun, downloads, do-it-yourself resources, and
freebies (yes!). A "New Sites Added" page makes life
easier for regular users, since they can directly jump to sites
of interest to them since they last used MVRD.
Another very useful section is the "Ask the Experts"
section featuring links to specialist sites and web boards on
over 100 different topics. So the next time you have a doubt about
almost anything, you know where to get it cleared from.
The nice thing about the site is that each and every one of the
site's sixteen thousand plus links are verified regularly, and
dead or broken links removed, so you are assured of every link
leading to a useful site.
Bob Drudge, the creator of the MVRD, is by
trade a Family Therapist, who started the site three years ago
to try to bring some semblance of order to the Internet by organising
useful sites and providing fast access to someone searching for
particular information. Incidentally, his son, Matthew Drudge,
is editor of the successful Drudge Report, and is being sued for
$30 million by the White House!
Sharad's final bookmark is a site that is
host to an application that's taken the world by storm - ICQ (I
Seek You). Available for download at http://www.icq.com or http://www.mirabilis.com,
this program allows you to keep tabs on friends who are online
when you are (every ICQ user has a unique number). That done,
it's up to you to chat, send messages, e-mail, or transfer files
and URLs to them within seconds. The best part is that ICQ works
in the background, and only pops up to notify you when a friend
logs on, or sends you a message. Besides using it for keeping
in touch with friends, quite a few companies with leased lines
use it since it allows employees all over the world to co-ordinate
on work too. The latest version released just two weeks ago has
been downloaded by almost 10 million users from the download.com,
and is currently the most popular software on the download.com
charts.
There you have it - some of Sharad Popli's
favourite bookmarks. Do email me if there's any particular
Internet personality that you'd like to see here in the near future.
Or you could
log on to http://www.strategist.net/.