Computering with Artist KDD

I have been on a tear lately with this being an election year. There is a lot of dis-information going on out there about what's going on in the political arena. The television networks aren't telling you what's really going on. Some of the magazines that you read aren't telling you what's really going on.

How many of you have ever heard of FISA (Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act) before since I have been talking about? Show of hands, please. Congress has passed legislation against developing oil in this country. Partly because of the Environmentalists telling them that oil development will harm the environment.

Duh! Our environment is already shot and is in deep trouble. I ready that Iraq is opening contracts to major oil companies in the U.S. (Exxon/Mobile, Shell and Total just to name a few) shortly. Will this development bring down thew price of oil in America? I highly doubt it.

So what does all of this have to do with netvibes.com? There are some magazines that publish on the web as well as in print. You can subscribe to their RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds and have the stories delivered to your desktop.

The Christian Science Monitor (a Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper), the New York Times, the L.A. Times and several other major newspapers also have RSS feeds you can subscribe to. Being an artist, I subscribe to the Art feeds from these latter newspapers. I get my major news from the Christian Science Monitor for their fairness of reporting.

Do you like comic strips? There are comic strip sites out there that will provide you with a large choice of comics to have delivered to your desktop. I read Garfield and it's in color every day, unlike the black and white version you see in the daily paper (except on Sunday, of course).

Do you have a MySpace account, a Windows Spaces account or a blog? You can link to these places and have them sitting on your desktop waiting for your next inspired moment to comment to the world. If you have none of these, but you have a favorite blog that you like to read and makes comments to, no problem; just link to it and there it is on your desk top.

I have found that I use my browser bookmarks differently since having a netvibes.com account. Did I say account? Yes, you do have to register, but it's free. They have pretty descent technical support, but for the most part, the application (that's what it is, welcome to web 2.0) is fairly intuitive and clearly marked. If you use Firefox as your browser, they even offer an add-on that will allow you to click a button on your tool bar and automatically add the web site you are viewing to your netvibes.com page.

Now with all of the information you will have on your page it would call for a lot of scrolling, but have no fear. You can add tabs to your page, name it what you want and place your comics (like I do) in one tab, your news in one tab, sports in another and, well, you get the picture.

Got a thing for music and videos? Netvibes.com has over nine thousand links you can add to your music and video tab. You may even want to have a separate tab for music and videos. Don't worry either, YouTube is on the list.

So isn't it about time you design your home page with what you want on it? Click on over to http://www.netvibes.com and sign up for an account and start getting the information that's important to you, rather than accepting what someone else thinks what is important for you. If you have to have MSN.com or Yahoo.com, put a link on your tool bar or bookmark it.

My time is up; I thank you for yours.