That makes it hard to keep track of new developments. To see who is doing what and how successfully. To generate ideas for your own business. So what you need is a strategy to help you keep abreast of what is happening on internet and specifically, in your area of interest - in as little time as possible.

Here are some tips and resources to help you to keep track in only minutes a day.

First you'll need a couple of sites you can count on to give you accurate and timely information on internet. Here's a good one: Nua Internet Surveys.

http://www.nua.ie/surveys/

This site houses a wealth of information on internet, its size, scope and influence. Here's an example of a recent article:

Report Examines Profitability of Business-to-Business Web Sites

"42 percent of three-year-old business-to-business Web sites in US are now profitable, with another 14 percent expecting to turn a profit within next year, according to latest report from ActivMedia...."

Hot on heels of spiralling stock indexes and dot-com failures, many people are just plain leery of anything that has an "Internet" label. As a result, many online business owners are shutting up shop, figuring that returns just aren't worth investment of time and money.

But wait. Let's take a deep breath and look at what's really going on here. You should be encouraged.

THE GOLDRUSH

In beginning Internet was new frontier. With all those metaphors being bandied about all over place - talk of gold rushes, pioneers, gold nuggets just lying there for taking - "go west young man (or woman)", echoed in our ears, "stake your claim to your share of Internet riches".

And so every man and his dog and every woman and her cat slapped up a website and started publishing an ezine. After a while, our pioneer started making actual money charging for advertising on her website and in her ezine and selling latest information product and business was plentiful.

THE PLATEAU

After a while, things started to level off. No longer experiencing heady rush of exponential growth on a weekly basis, things started to level out. Business remained solid, however, and our pioneer, now thinking of himself as a capital E "Entrepreneur" figured, OK, this is end of first big growth phase. It's time to start consolidating. And so our entrepreneur started investing in already-formed relationships, concentrating on existing customers, developing his "List" of contacts and joint venturing like crazy to try and sustain momentum.

THE SHAKE-OUT