Working Lunch, BBC2’s daily business and personal finance programme, has been given its own website. As well as providing background information on presenters, the website (www.bbc.co.uk/workinglunch) offers viewers guides to various aspects of managing money. One impressive feature is the quality of streaming, as it offers a daily webcast of the day’s programme. Even on a home dial-up connection, the broadcast of both the audio and video is very clear. What would have been useful before viewing the programme is some sort of text preview of what is on the show along with an archive of previous shows for viewing.
One of the major advantages of the internet is the ability to deliver services to a wide range of people. Freelance Matthew Clarke has created a website in Cornish to offer speakers of the language a regularly updated news service. "Until now, people had to wait for a monthly newsletter in Cornish," Clarke said. "Despite the quality of writing in this kind of periodical, it does not fulfil a need to know what is happening that particular week. More importantly, it is providing Cornish students with something to read on a regular basis." The initial site is a taster to what Clarke promises will be a comprehensive resource to all things Cornish.
If you want to avoid other people getting hold of your internet and computer usage history, then the latest tool is Window Washer (www.webroot.com/washer.htm). You could of course try removing the cookies and cleaning the cache of your web browser yourself, but it is a timely exercise and doesn’t always remove everything. Window Washer does the whole process of cleaning up your hard disk automatically and, more importantly, allows you to keep your privacy at a cost of just £20 for downloading. It is also worth checking out Anonymizer (www.anonymizer.com) which allows you to access sites without revealing details of your internet connection and claims to have accessed nearly one billion web pages since 1996. The service works on whatever computer you access as you go to the main Anonymizer site and access the web via that.
Another useful feature is that it stops websites from "profiling" you and keeping track on what you are doing which means you can surf in private without being bombarded by intrusive marketing techniques. The basic Anonymizer service is free and somewhat slow, but for around £50 you can access a premium service which is much faster.
Leslie Bunder
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