One very important speaker was Dr. Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law professor, speaking on threat represented by corporate interests to creativity of web. A creativity being regularly squashed and supressed by legal wrangling and debate.

I attended Dr. Lessig's talk given to web developers at Web2001 9-7-01 and expected a lively debate when I visited his discussion forum at Harvard Law web site. To visit and see posts over a year old is disappointing and worries me. I purchased his book, "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace" at show and highly recommend it to all small business webmasters.

Dr. Lessig strongly advocates that creativity not be stifled by intellectual property owners asserting control over software and coding of web pages. This basically represents a viewpoint (and only in my own humble opinion, not Dr. Lessig's) in support of Open Source computing and freely available content for web with appropriate copyright protections extending only a short time to allow compensation of creator.

As a list owner that distributes content freely to web publishers and a columnist that publishes in multiple small business forums and portals around web, I am disturbed by control being sought by information "owners" over content.

Entering "Free Stuff" in Alta Vista will yield a colossal 521,442 results. Over half a million web pages! Here are some guidelines to sift wheat from chaff.

1) Beware of programs written by amateurs and enthusiasts unless you particularly enjoy experimenting with your computer. If you are running a business you probably don't have time. Any program with very basic readme files or little or no support files I avoid like plague. Experience has taught me they waste time trying to work out how to use them, they jam up registry files on computer and don't uninstall properly if at all. This kind of FREE stuff can turn your computer into a mess, degrading performance of other programs. If you do want to try them out, keep a separate partition on your hard disk dedicated for that purpose.

2) Don't get side tracked with shareware. If you are prepared to pay for programs, fine, look at shareware. After a brief trial period you will often be expected to pay for full version. Personally, I don't spend time on these unless I am looking for something specific, or shareware program is particularly good.

3) Subscribe to one or two good lists to keep you informed of FREE stuff. I get these delivered to my mailbox every week, spend about two minutes looking through headings and if something really catches my eye, I investigate using criteria above. A good one is: http://www.jumbo.com

How to identify REAL bargains? If program comes from a professional, well established company you are on to a winner. A 30 second look at their web site will tell you what kind of outfit it is. If a generous help file is supplied or if regular updates are published, you know program is here to stay and it is worth investing time and energy in learning it. An example is Pegasus Mail, mentioned in top FREE programs below. I was tempted to buy Eudora Pro. I had used free Lite version and really liked it. Fortunately, just before I parted with cash, I discovered Pegasus. This program does everything Eudora Pro would do for me and it is FREE. An unbelievable bargain. It is now my default mail handler.

Take a look through this list of top FREE programs and services. There is gold here:

EMAIL HANDLER Pegasus Mail is an excellent email program. Multiple signature files, multiple filters, various identities for multiple email accounts, spell check, it is all here in one easy to use program. http://www.pmail.com

EMAIL MERGE WorldMerge sends personalized messages to mailing lists. A brief advertisement is included at foot of message when using FREE version. Unless that is a major problem for you, this program is an absolute bargain! http://www.coloradosoft.com/associate-jump.cgi?ID=2085