Tech News: After many hints for less experienced Internet users, why not some info for tech savvy folks? The Internet is crawling with sites that purport to offer technical news, but it is best to stay away from those that are trying to sell you something. That way you can avoid the "Our stuff is newest, best, fastest, coolest, sexiest -- and you should buy it, buy it, buy it from us" type of "news" items. The best sites on which to seek technical news are those whose main product is news, and among the best of those is the tech news site of the Ziff-Davis Company that publishes PCWorld, MacWorld, PCWeek, MacWeek and other magazines, at http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/. ZDNet has a huge staff of specialists and has to tell the truth to stay competitive. There is a shopping section, but it is separate from the "news" section. You can also register (free) and sign up for e-mail notices of news about areas of interest, which you specify, at http://zdnet.netmind.com/register.shtml.

C|Net is another news purveyor which is usually accessed through news slots on other net pages. A good access point, without too much advertising, is at http://www.news.com/computing/technews/.

Search pages are also good starting points for technical information. You can always search for specific words, but most of the search pages also have lists of categories you can access. One such (no better than competitors) is at the AltaVista search page at http://www.altavista.com/, which offers more than 50,000 technical sites in listed categories and subcategories. Yahoo has a technical news and media page at http://dir.yahoo.com/News_and_Media/Technology/, which is organized the same way. Finally, About.com, which uses expert human guides (who slog through the menagerie of tech sites for you), has a whole list of computer and Internet pages at http://home.about.com/compute/index.htm.