TOURBUS: Thursday, September 26, 1996

DRIVER: Patrick Crispin

TODAY'S TOURBUS STOP:
SEIDMAN'S ONLINE INSIDER


This week's "mega blunder" award goes to my partner in crime, Dr. Bob
Rankin, who accidentally sent every one of you a letter asking you for your
old e-mail address.  It seems that dear Dr. Bob received a letter from one
of our many TOURBUS riders asking him to update the rider's subscription
address, and, without thinking, Dr. Bob accidentally sent a "what is your
old e-mail address" letter to the *entire* TOURBUS list.

What makes this even more humorous is that over 2000 of you have been kind
enough to send Dr. Bob letters telling him what your old e-mail addresses
were.  Needless to say, Dr. Bob wanted me to express his gratitude to
everyone, and to remind everyone that you really do NOT have to send Dr.
Bob your old e-mail address.  As a matter of fact, I get a sinking feeling
that if Dr. Bob receives another "old address" letter, he is going to pelt
his computer with pasta.

Speaking of the many uses of noodles [gee, my segues are getting worse,
aren't they?], I am pleased to present the folks who are making this week's
edition of our little bus of Internet happiness possible:
*---------------------( THE NOODLES ARE COMING!! )-------------------*
The Flying Noodle has a cool collection of gourmet pastas and sauces.
Mention The Tourbus and we'll take $5 off your first order over $20.
*--------------------( http://www.flyingnoodle.com )-----------------*


ROADMAP96
Before we get to today's TOURBUS stop,  I need to engage in a quick bit of
shameless self-promotion.  Everyone on the bus should know by now that I
recently wrote a completely *FREE*, 27 lesson Internet training workshop
called "Roadmap96."  Roadmap96 teaches you how to use the Net, covering
topics ranging from E-mail to Gopher to FTP.  What you may not know is that
thanks to the kind folks at the Internet Network Information Center (the
InterNIC), Roadmap96 is now an on-going project ... and new workshop
sessions start every two weeks!

If you know ANYONE who may be interested in participating in the next
Roadmap96 workshop session, just have them send an e-mail letter to LISTSERV@LISTS.INTERNIC.NET

with the command

     SUBSCRIBE ROADMAP96 YOURFIRSTNAME YOURLASTNAME

in the body of their e-mail letter, replacing YOURFIRSTNAME and
YOURLASTNAME with their first and last names.  That's it!  :)

I am really excited that Roadmap96 is an on-going project, and any help
that you can give me to promote this workshop would be gratefully
appreciated.  Oh, by the way, you might also want to tell your friends that
they can find HTML-ified versions of the 27 Roadmap96 lessons at http://ua1vm.ua.edu/~crispen/roadmap.html or http://www.campus.mci.net/roadmap96/


SEIDMAN'S ONLINE INSIDER
As much as members of the Internet community like to downplay the influence
of the Commercial Online Services, the Internet community does so at its
own peril.  As can be witnessed by the *THOUSANDS* of TOURBUS riders whose
only access to the Net is though AOL, CompuServe, or Prodigy, the
Commercial Online Services continue to exert a profound influence on the
state of the Net.

Unfortunately, for people like me whose access to the Net is through an
Internet Service Provider and not through a Commercial Online Service,
finding the latest, inside information from the Commercial Online Service
industry can be a tad bit difficult.

Fortunately, Robert Seidman, an "editor at large" for NetGuide magazine,
writes a free, weekly e-mail newsletter called "Seidman's Online Insider."
The Online Insider is "a weekly summary of events in the Consumer Online
Services Industry."  This means that Seidman focuses on the commercial
online services like AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy [and I just want to say
that I really miss e-world ... *sniff*] as well as the Microsoft v.
Netscape and AT&T v. MCI wars.

What makes Seidman's Online Insider so superb is that Seidman really does
give you *inside* information.  It is not unusual for Seidman to call up
the Chief Executive Officer of AOL, C|NET, Netscape, etc. to find out what
is *really* going on.  It is because of Seidman's incredible reporting
style that pretty much everyone who is anyone on the Internet reads his
Online Insider articles each week [Seidman also mentioned our little bus of
Internet happiness in his April 26, 1996, post, so he must be a pretty
smart dude as well].

To join the ranks of the folks who read Seidman every week (including Dr.
Bob and me) just send an e-mail letter to LISTSERV@PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM

with the command SUBSCRIBE ONLINE-L YOURFIRSTNAME YOURLASTNAME

in the body of your e-mail letter, replacing YOURFIRSTNAME and YOURLASTNAME
with your first and last names.

If you have Web access, you can also find Seidman's Online Insider on the
Web at [deep inhale] http://techweb.cmp.com/net/online/current/columns/seidman/online_insider  (put that all on one line)

[exhale].  The neat think about this Web page is that it has links to both
Siedman's current and previous articles, although the previous articles
only go back to July 19, 1996.  If you want to see some of Seidman's
*really* old articles, point your Web browser to http://www.clark.net/pub/robert/back.html

Mr. Seidman has also written some articles for our friends at C|Net, and
those articles can be found at http://www.cnet.com/Content/Voices/Seidman/index.html

Even if you do not subscribe to Seidman's Online Insider, I really
recommend that you check out some of Seidman's articles at C|Net
(especially his article "kicking and screaming into the information age").

That's about it for this week.  Your fearless bus driver is heading to the
Great White North next week -- I have to speak at a conference in Toronto
-- but I promise to send you another TOURBUS post before I trek into the
frozen tundra of Canada.  After all, what is a week without your weekly
Southern Word?
--------------------------------
TODAY'S SOUTHERN WORD OF THE DAY
--------------------------------

BAGEL - adjective. Quite Large.

USAGE: "That's a bagel bowl of grits you got there."

(Special thanks goes to Lisa Ward for today's wurd)

YOU CAN FIND ALL OF THE OLD SOUTHERN WORDS OF THE DAY ON THE SOUTHERN WORD
HOMEPAGE AT http://ua1vm.ua.edu/~crispen/word.html