Phil Bradley trawls the internet to find the answers to this month's readers' queries.
Q I recently got a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) with e-book reading software. Do you know of any sites with e-books that I can download and read for free?
A You’ve not told me what sort of software – there are several different types. However, all is not lost, because there is an excellent site that provides out-of-copyright books that you can download for free (www.manybooks.net/). According to them, they have more than 10,000 books you can download and read in 10 different formats, so you should find something there to while away the hours on the train!
Q I heard about a site where you can put in the name of your favourite musician and get recommendations of other musicians and bands that are similar. Any ideas?
A A friend recommended Musicplasma (www.musicplasma.com/) just before Christmas and I’ve been having great fun trying it out. You put in the name of the musician and it quickly comes back with others – the closer they are physically on the screen the more similar they are.
Q Recent news suggests that Microsoft is getting into the weblog business. Do you know anything about this?
A You’re quite correct, and it’s called Microsoft Spaces. You can personalise your space, add in photographs, link into particular websites by using the Microsoft toolbar, add details of the music that you’re interested in and much more besides. It’s really aimed at the end-user, so it’s very quick and easy to set up – it took me all of five minutes to be up and running. You can find it at http://spaces.msn.com/ though personally I’ll be sticking with Blogger (www.blogger.com) partly because I prefer their software and because it links in with the Google Toolbar which I use. I simply can’t be doing with yet another toolbar on my system!
Q I’ve got a lot of photographs that I’d like to share with friends. I don’t have webspace myself, so I can’t put any there; do you have any suggestions of sites that might publish my pictures for me?
A You want to get yourself right over to Fotopic (www.fotopic.net/). It’s free, quick to upload photographs and you get a lot of webspace – enough for about 1,500 pictures (depending on size).
Site of the month
My site of the month is the School Library Association (www.sla.org.uk). It’s designed (as one might expect) for school librarians and has a great deal of information, both for members and non-members of the SLA. The fact that I was involved in the design, implementation and creation of the site is nothing to do with it of course!
Phil Bradley is an internet consultant, trainer, web designer and author. Visit www.philb.com for free information on internet introductions, search engine articles, web design tips and a host of other free information. New: 3rd edn of The Advanced Internet Searcher’s Handbook is now available! If you have any questions about the internet send an email to philb@philb.com with the subject header ‘column query’.
Updated: 10 February 2005