*** ANSWERMAN INTERNET EXTRA *** For the week of December 23, 1996 Happy holidays! This is the weekly newsletter for the community of Internet users on America Online. This week, AnswerMan's Focus is Internet Agents. Plus, check out the free book of the week. =*=*= IN THIS ISSUE =*=*= Free Book of the Week -- Internet Starter Kit AnswerMan's Update -- Agents do the work for you Eagle's Exploits -- News Profiles and Smart Bookmarks Upcoming Weekly Focus & Chats -- What's coming in 1997 The End -- How to contact us or unsubscribe =*=*= WHAT YOU CAN DO THIS WEEK WITH ANSWERMAN =*=*= Go to keyword: For: AM FOCUS Links to Internet agent tools & free online books ANSWERMAN Internet message board, daily tips, more good stuff AM CHAT Read transcripts of Internet chats that you missed AM GLOSSARY RTFM to decrypt that Internet jargon NET HELP Get quick help for your Internet questions Here are direct links for AOL 3.0 users: Go to keyword AnswerMan AnswerMan Focus =*=*= FREE BOOK OF THE WEEK =*=*= Did you know that there are free books about the Internet, on the Internet? In fact, AnswerMan went searching and found more than 25 online books on every aspect of the Internet. With them, you can delve into Net culture, learn how to make a Web page, and get experts' picks of great Web sites. All of these books are available on the Web, in their entirety, for free. Gotta love the Internet for stuff like that. For the next several weeks, AnswerMan will be highlighting one of these online books. This week's pick is the Internet Starter Kit by Adam Engst -- this is actually two different books, one for Mac and one for Windows. These excellent books are among the best general Internet guides available on paper or on the Web. You can find the Internet Starter Kit as well as the complete list of online books by going to keyword AM FOCUS and clicking on "Free Books About the Net". If you use AOL 3.0 (if you don't have it yet: run, don't walk, to keyword UPGRADE) just click on the link below. Happy reading. Here is a direct link for AOL 3.0 users: Free Books =*=*= ANSWERMAN'S UPDATE -- Agents! =*=*= by Kevin Savetz (AnswerMan) This week's AnswerMan Focus is Internet Agents. No, not the sort of agent who gets you an acting job then takes 10% of your income. On the Net, "agent" is a general term for a computer program that searches for information on your behalf and delivers it to you -- rather than the other way around, where you spend time searching for information yourself. Some of today's Internet agents are complex, some are very simple. Every agent knows how to search for and deliver a particular kind of information. No matter what the agent is searching -- news or stock reports, Web sites or newsgroups -- the idea is the same: tell the agent what information you want, and wait for it to deliver it to you (usually via e-mail.) Most agents will even repeat the search for you on a regular basis. -.-.- URL-minder -.-.- We'll start with a simple but useful example. The URL-minder is a one-trick pony of an Internet agent. It keeps track of changes at Web pages. Tell it the URL of a the site that you're interested in, and URL-minder will send you an e-mail message notifying you whenever that site changes. You can give it the URLs of several sites -- you can even have it keep track of FTP sites or gopher resources. I like it feed it the URLs of the front page or "what's new" page of sites that are updated on an irregular basis. URL-minder is a great way to keep track of changes to your favorite sites. But that's all it does -- it won't tell you what changed on a page, just that it changed. (See CJ Eagle's column about Smart Bookmarks for a Web tracking agent that does a whole lot more.) URL minder in on the Web at http://www.netmind.com/URL-minder/URL-minder.html -.-.- InReference -.-.- InReference is another favorite Net agent, and a powerful one at that. You can use it to search for postings on Usenet and mailing lists based on subject, keyword, date, author and other criteria. Useful, but the cool part that makes it an agent is the fact that it can do your search on a scheduled basis and e-mail the results to you. For instance, I use InReference to keep tabs on gossip about my favorite musical groups. Whenever anyone on Usenet mentions Negativland or They Might Be Giants, InReference takes notice. Once a week (more often if I wanted,) it e-mails abstracts describing the relevant messages. From there I can get the full messages if I want. InReference is a great way to keep track of subjects that interest you on Usenet without having to sort through the morass of other stuff there. Agent technology at its best. InReference is on the Web at http://www.reference.com/ -.-.- Mercury Mail -.-.- I've talked about Mercury Mail in this newsletter before, but I'm mentioning it again because some of its features are perfect examples of Internet agents -- and pretty darn useful too. Take its stock function: go to its Web page and tell it what companies you're interested in. Every day, Mercury Mail will send you the closing quotes as well as any news about those companies. Or, use its customizable reminder service, with which Mercury Mail will tell you about birthdays and so on. To access the agent tools mentioned in this newsletter and learn about others, go to keyword AM FOCUS and press "Internet Agents" -- or if you're using AOL 3.0, just click on the link below. Mercury Mail is on the Web at http://www.merc.com/ Here are direct links for AOL 3.0 users: URL minder InReference Mercury Mail More agents! AnswerMan Focus AnswerMan Community Center =*=*= EAGLE'S EXPLOITS -- Two AOL agent tools =*=*= by Aminie D. Elsberry (CJ Eagle) The use of agents can make your online time more of what YOU want, rather than spending your time trying to FIND what you want. With an agent at your side, the information that you want comes to you -- no fuss, no muss -- as a program does all the work of searching for it. There are two such agents built into America Online: News Profiles and Smart Bookmarks. -.-.- News Profiles -.-.- First, let's look at News Profiles. News Profiles searches AOL's vast news sources for articles that match your interests, and whenever it finds something of interest, e-mails the news item to you. With it, you can create "profiles" using keywords to describe your interests. Every day, your profiles will be compared to the day's news from the Associated Press, PR Newswire and Business Wire. Relevant articles are e-mailed to you. You can have up to five profiles per screen name. There is no additional charge for the News Profiles service. It's simple to create a news profile. You give it a name and set the maximum number of articles per day that you want to receive from it. Then identify the keywords the News Profile will use to search articles on your behalf. You can even narrow your search by defining words that must or must not appear in the article. For example, if I wanted to find articles about or by Martha Stewart, I would use those two words. But if I don't really want to read any articles about Martha's gardening, I can exclude articles that contain the word "garden" or "gardening". Kewl, huh? You can modify the News Profiles that you created at any time: You can turn them off or on (turning them off while you are away on vacation is a good thing), or edit the profile -- maybe you are getting too many articles that don't relate to your interests (in which case add words to narrow the search.) Or, you may not be getting any articles (in which case you can expand the search). For more information and to start using News Profiles, go to keyword NEWS PROFILES. -.-.- Smart Bookmarks -.-.- On to Smart Bookmarks! Smart Bookmarks is a program that allows you to automatically maintain copies of sites that you choose, including their images and links, on your hard drive. After Smart Bookmarks downloads a site to your computer, you can enjoy it while NOT logged on to AOL -- everything is on your hard drive. The software also allows you to schedule agents to check for Web pages that have changed -- like every Tuesday at 2:00 A.M. when everyone is sleeping -- and put those changes on your hard drive, too. So you'll always have an up-to-date, personal copy of the site available, even when you're off-line. You can use Smart Bookmarks with the most popular search engines, including Yahoo, WebCrawler, Excite, and DejaNews. Smart Bookmarks can automatically re-run your search at any search engine, showing you any new hits since the last update. Nifty! Smart Bookmarks is an add-on to the AOL software. In order to use it you'll have to download and install it -- it's available for Windows only. For more information and to download the software itself, go to keyword SMART BOOKMARKS. Here are direct links for AOL 3.0 users: Keyword: News Profiles Keyword: Smart Bookmarks AnswerMan Focus AnswerMan Community Center =*=*= THE WEEKLY FOCUS & CHAT =*=*= Every Sunday, AnswerMan hosts a live chat to close out that week's Focus topic. Here's what's coming this Sunday, December 29, at 6PM ET: Using Agents to Search the Internet. What's faster than searching the Internet? Having a tireless program search it for you! This hour, AnswerMan will take your questions on how you can use "agent" technology, and share more great agent sites. Every week, AnswerMan focuses on a particular facet of using the Internet. Here are the Weekly Focus topics we'll be covering in the near future: Dec 30 - Jan 5: E-Mail Mailing Lists Jan 6 - Jan 12: Welcome to the Internet Jan 13 - Jan 19: Internet Relay Chat Jan 20 - Jan 26: Internet Phone Jan 27 - Feb 2: Streaming Audio Here is a direct link for AOL 3.0 users: AnswerMan Chat and Transcripts. =*=*= THE END =*=*= That's all for this week. Got comments about this newsletter? We want to hear them! Send 'em to AnswerMan. The e-mail address is "AnswerMan@aol.com". We would hate to see you go, but if you must leave, there are two easy ways to unsubscribe yourself from this newsletter. You can use either. #1: Send an e-mail message -- To: LISTSERV@LISTSERV.AOL.COM Subject: UNSUBSCRIBE Body: UNSUBSCRIBE ANSWERMAN #2: For AOL 3.0 users only: Click here then press "Unsubscribe". Copyright 1996 by America Online. All rights reserved. This newsletter should be shaken, not stirred.