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amazon.co.uk
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amazon.com |
Details: |
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ISBN 0910965692
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Published by CyberAge Books
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Written by Randolph Hock
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Title:
Yahoo! to the Max
Review:
Want to get more out of the internet using Yahoo!? 'Yahoo! to the Max'
by Randolph Hock is a very useful guide.
Hock suggests that "When you really want to know a site, click
everywhere! The catch is that few people have the time to really do
that". Hock has made the time, and we get the result: a slim book
with surprising breadth that makes it quick and easy to learn which
parts of Yahoo! are most interesting to you.
The book has nine chapters: (1) Overview/General; (2) Searching and
Browsing; (3) My Yahoo!; (4) Yahoo! Groups; (5) Yahoo! News; (6)
Communications (such as mail, messenger, chat, message boards,
building free websites, etc.); (7) Buying and Selling (shopping,
auctions, classifieds, etc.); (8) Finance; and my favorite for travel
and U.S. city guides: (9) Other, which also has Yahoo! international,
maps, weather, health, people search, photos, Yahooligans! (for kids),
music, and desktop search.
Chapter 3, My Yahoo!, is the longest and most important chapter of the
book. In it, Hock shows how to create a personalized web portal where
you can quickly get to a variety of useful information. Step-by-step,
he explains how to make a customized portal suitable for a personal
homepage. To begin, visit http://my.yahoo.com to see the default My
Yahoo! page. Then, click on 'Add Content' to begin customizing the
page. (You will be prompted to sign in or sign up if you don't have a
Yahoo ID).
To discover what content is available, you can browse the directory
categories, check the Editor's Picks ('Cooking for Engineers' gave me
a smile) or view the Most Popular ('Awful Plastic Surgery' made my jaw
drop both for the content and the number 5 rating). You can search
for RSS feeds in the find box, or add the URLs directly. The
advantage of using My Yahoo! to read RSS feeds over browser or
standalone software RSS readers is that the feeds are available from
any computer.
The same ease of accessibility is obviously true for bookmarks
http://bookmarks.yahoo.com and other Yahoo! services. Some features
like photos, calendar, and briefcase (which have URLs following the
same pattern as bookmarks), also permit sharing with other Yahoo!
users. The photos and calendar are self-explanatory. The briefcase
allows importing and uploading of up to 30 Mb of files, again,
accessible from any networked computer.
To make trip-planning for over 17,000 world cities easier and to make
trips more fun, try http://travel.yahoo.com. The Trip Planner lets
you save your favorite links to create a custom travel guide.
lets you find businesses and services near
any address. Check out the Event Calendar at
http://cityguides.local.yahoo.com/ to find out what's happening in
U.S. cities.
Yahoo! is always changing. So Hock provides
http://www.extremesearch.com to keep you aware of changes since the
book was published.
Hock writes that the most important step in getting the most from
Yahoo! is learning which of the many parts particularly interest you.
This book is well-organized and well-written for helping race up that
learning curve.
FreePint Reviewer:
Jean Roth is the Data Scientist at the National Bureau of Economic
Research (NBER, http://www.nber.org/data) in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. The NBER is the top non-profit economic research
organization the United States. She has an MS in Statistics, and she
helps researchers there find, analyze, and use economic data.
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