The year was 1998. Mark McGwire breaks Roger Maris' single season home-run world record and makes the world smile (with the possible exception of Maris' family). El Nino affected the world's climate and puts weather forcasters in a snit, and President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky made the world rethink their positions on black berets and cigars. And a newspaper column about the Internet makes its debut in a Southern Indiana newspaper. Okay, 1998 might not seem all that long ago, but in the world of computers and the Internet, "Internet Siteseeing" is practically a third-generation business right now. It was pre-iMac, for Pete's sake. As a former reporter, I became aware of the fact that almost all the column and articles dealing with the Internet were A): written for people who had never turned a computer on before, or B): knew their TCP/IP address by heart. So, I saw a opening, and I went for it. "Internet Siteseeing" first appeared in the New Albany Tribune in 1998, and in the Louisville Eccentric Observer (LEO) the following year. By these paper's circulation figures, approximately 100,000 people per week in the Metro Louisville area receive these publications. "Internet Siteseeing" isn't so much about the Internet as it is things you can find on the Internet. I write the column for people who use the World Wide Web to learn about various subjects that might not have anything to do with computer, not for people who are online for the joy of being in front of a computer. From the beginning, I've had two rules about the column: 1) I will never, ever use the word "Cyber" just to sound all techie. I hate that. 2) The column topics will be varied so that, if this week's column didn't strike your fancy, maybe next week's will wack it good. So, thank you for your interest, and if you have any ideas for topics you'd like to see here, please let me know. Thanks, Dave Davis Who the heck does this guy think he is, anyway? I am a former reporter for the New Albany Tribune (and I'll post that site when they get their act together and get their website up and running), who, through a strange turn of events, eventually wound up in a job where it was my duty to look at sometimes hundreds of web sites a day. We were making a database, you see, summarizing the sites. This was back in 1996, when the Internet was just becoming a part of the world's consciousness. I got in on the ground floor, so to speak. On the personal side, I'm a free-lance writer and website designer, and am trying to make a run for self-employment. I'm currently separated from my wife, Missy. We're still best friends and business partners, but somethings don't work out the way we'd like them to. It's nobody's fault. I've lived in New Albany all my life, I'm an only child, and my Myers-Briggs personality type is INFP (INFJ if I'm in a mood).