On these sites you can dig up information on anything from current world events and your favorite Spanish soccer team, to cattle tagging regulations in Argentina (no kidding) and exploding online auction markets in mainland China.

News from around world on virtually any subject waits literally just a few keystrokes and a mouse-click away.

An incredibly useful feature offered by many of these sites includes email notification based on your keyword search criteria.

So instead of paying a "clipping" service to find articles and send them to you, these websites will do it free.

Now how could you use this type of news notification service?

Well, imagine you own stock in a specific company. You could subscribe to a number of different news services and have them send you breaking stories about company, CEO, affiliated companies and anything else you choose.

Or, let's say you deal in a very specific industry, such as real estate investment publishing.

You could sign up to get notified any time a news story gets published about changing regulations, interest rates or other factors affecting your business.

All this online news certainly does not rate a substitute for morning coffee, local and national news, and an important ritual to start day, but it has a place, especially for extremely specialized areas of interest, hobbies, or business news.

Watch for many new services, software, and opportunities to arise from this growing and dynamic area of online publishing.

Next time you can't see small text clearly on a website, try holding down "CTRL" key and then moving scroll wheel on your mouse up and down.

The text in your web browser (and some programs) will increase and decrease in size as you roll wheel back and forth.

This little trick provides an excellent means of quickly getting what you need from websites with tiny text.

~^~ Slow Surfing? ~^~

If your Internet Explorer web browser starts giving you problems, you might want to clean up your "Temporary Internet Files."

Most people don't realize it, but when you leave a web page, it doesn't leave you!

Most of time you keep a copy of websites you visit on your hard drive and, over time, they build up.

This collection of old web pages can eventually cause your surfing to slow to a crawl and even cause errors!

Here's one way to clear out those old files. Click your "Start" button, then "All Programs," "Accessories," "System Tools" and "Disk Cleanup."

After an initial check of your hard drive (which can take some time if it's first time you've ever launched utility), you can check boxes of files you wish to delete.

To speed up your surfing, at a minimum, make sure you delete "Temporary Internet Files."

~^~ Surfing Shortcuts ~^~

To quickly cycle back and forth through a series of web pages you've visited, hold down "ALT" key and tap your left and right arrow keys.

Left arrow takes you back while Right arrow takes you forward.

The Page Up and Page Down buttons allow you to quickly move up and down any web page without struggling to find scroll bar slider on right side of page.