Staying up to date
                                                                
Staying up to date
Books are out of date even before they are published, so you need to top up what they say with more recent information. The Web sites of the main business dailies, such as Wall Street Journal (if you subscribe), Financial Times, Handelsbaltt (in German only these days) and Nikkei AsiaBiztech, are excellent sources for this. They provide most of the content of their paper editions and have easily reached sections devoted to computing and electronic commerce topics.
There is also useful commentary from online business publications, such as Silicon.com.
The material from these publications, and the material they direct you to, will provide good starting points to building your personal index of Web sites, for daily or weekly visiting.
For further suggestions and other material, you might want to:
Call on your local library. This could be your company library, if you have one, that for your professional institute or, in large towns and cities, the public library. Most librarians are keen to help and can often put you in touch with people who can help you further. You may need to go to a library to get hold of some of the books we mention.
Go to the Web sites of the main online booksellers and see what is popular and what readers recommend (not always the same thing). Take readers' reviews with a pinch of salt; they are not always what they seem.
Visit Yogesh Malhotra's BRINT Web site. He and his colleagues have created a wide-ranging index of business knowledge that links to a huge amount of source material. Use of it is free. (Shame about the user interface, though.)
Consult Wikipedia. This is an online encyclopaedia compiled and updated by its readers, and is also free. Despite what you might at first think, the quality of articles is often high. The range is broad and the linking between entries is excellent.
For the latest on-line news and comment, use an RSS aggregator. Not as fearsome as it sounds, this is software that collects material as it appears on those Web sites you wish to keep an eye on. Depending on which software you choose, it presents the results in a separate window on your screen, in your Web browser or in your email access software. Many RSS readers are free; some Web browser incroporate one. I use the GreatNews reader, which is currently in free, in beta form at least.
Make your own home page
You can easily turn your list of links into an HTML file. To it you can add the URLs for your favourite search engines, flight booking services, the corporate intranet and whatever else you need. You don't need special expertise for this; most modern word processing packages offer the option of saving in HTML. Make the file your home page – the page you see first when you start your browser – and it can be your own portal to the Web.
Here's mine, below. As you see, a home page does not need to be complicated to be useful. (The reverse is often the case. Too many site designers put trickery above practicality.) The page fits on one screen, too, so I don't need to scroll down to see everything on it. The contents of mine reflect the interests of an industry watcher in Britain; yours will no doubt be quite different. 
Click on the image for an enlarged version and an explanation of some of the entries. 
My home page (small)