Web Site of the Week: Web Informant

Web Informant It's a newsletter. It's a web site. It's both! It's David Strom's Web Informant. David Strom was my supervisor at PC Week during the brief but relatively happy period that I toiled at that Ziff-Davis publication as a Senior Technical Analyst. He went on to found CMP's Network Computing (and, while there, taped a segment for CMP's ill-fated PC Vision television project, which I edited). He's been a freelancer for years. He runs the marvelously well-written and informative weekly e-mail newsletter Web Informant. If you are at all interested in the World Wide Web, I'd suggest you sign up for it. To get an idea of what Dave and his friends write about, visit the web site and see past columns. I'll tell you how much I like the newsletter; on two occasions (so far), I have purchased material from it for Byte.com, my real-world job. Just one note; I hate to spoil your innocence, as mine was spoiled, but you know those "letters" Dave runs in the newsletter where he says, "my friend Joe wrote about…" I always thought those were just emails from his friends and colleagues. And some of them are. But some of them are articles Dave pays for. As he told me when I was talking to him about it, "the newsletter promotes me and my consulting services. If I have to pay someone for an article to get people to read the newsletter, I will." A point to remember for all your fledgling newsletter publishers out there.