All above are reasons email is such a formidable tool to promote your business, stay in touch with your customers, send out special offers to your lists and acquire new business.

Of course, if you listen to naysayers, they will tell you email's days are numbered and that you had better start preparing to use some other form of contact to reach your customers! With all news about phishing and other forms of email fraud, it would tend to give credence to that opinion.

The fact is this: email is here to stay! The ease of use and huge base of installed users makes it a very hardy tool. That's not to say implementation and distribution will remain same; not hardly!

Gone are days you could install and run your own private mail server and reach 100% of your customers. As a matter of fact, many ISP's will no longer allow you to send out email in large enough volume to warrant trouble and expense of setting up your own server.

Another thing that will stand in way of setting up your own mail operation is email "whitelisting." Whitelisting is when you approach ISP's and list your company as being in compliance with their email policies, in hopes your email will reach intended recipient. Of course, all it takes is for one of your recipients to "forget" he/she signed up to receive your email and you are blacklisted for sp^mming.

Audio is friendly, direct and ideally suited to getting complex messages across in a short space of time.

It's now getting easier to add audio to net, thanks to increasing bandwidths and innovative new ways of compressing data.

The problem has been that CD-quality audio has traditionally been preserve of ISDN- and ADSL-equipped users. Basically, there has been too much data to fit down pipe.

But, borrowing on same techniques that are used to compress digital photographic images, it is now possible to compress sound to make it fit down a standard dial-up 56KBps modem line.

The trick is to compress audio in a way that doesn’t sound offensive to ear, but can still pass along line at about 3 kilobytes per second, given that a dial-up modem downloads at about 4-ish kilobytes per second.

The next trick is to use streaming technology that can start to play audio while it is still downloading. As a long as it is downloads fast enough you don’t get annoying stops and starts. You should also end up with a "buffer". In many cases, whole audio file will have downloaded long before user has finished listening to it.

The volume of online streaming audio grew by 118 per cent last year, according to market researchers US-based AccuStream iMedia Research and top ten internet radio stations received an average of 137.5m tuning hours in same period, up from 63m in 2003.

Typical audio formats are Real’s Radio Player (as chosen by BBC), ubiquitous MP3 (as featured on thousands of youngster’s personal hi-fis) and Macromedia Flash.

MP3SoundStream (http://www.mp3soundstream.com/cgi-bin/cppro/go.cgi?snichols1) uses Flash and works well as 98% of computers already have Flash plug-in and rest can easily download it. Flash takes MP3 file, combines it with an audio controller button and streams it for you off any server, which means low-cost and ease of use.

So once you have technology in place, what can you record? The answer is anything. Adding audio to an intranet lets you record a weekly message from CEO or a sales message. Or why not have a weekly news round-up?

The audio can either be recorded straight into your PC via a microphone and soundcard, or recorded on a Minidisc recorder and then digitised into computer. Once there you can add music, voiceovers, cuts and fades with a program like Adobe Audition or Sony Soundforge. Music can be bought online for just a few pounds and you can even use free audio editing programmes, like Audacity.

What was once preserve of BBC and other high-end radio studios is now available on a desktop computer near you - but only if you have skills to match.

FAQs (291 words)

Q. What is streaming audio? A. It is audio delivered to your computer that can be listened to while it is still downloading.