What's Up

    The latest hype on The Internet is public information search
utilities or "people finder" services. The Ultimate White Pages
[ http://www.angelfire.com/pages0/ultimates ] is a good place to
start. There you will find a page with interfaces to many such
Web resources. Basically they are servers totally dedicated to
maintaining data bases of publicly available information; most
notably telephone directories and census records. You can type
in people's names and the city / state they live in and you'll get
a list of every match the service finds. Big Deal --an electronic
phone book! But, you can do some things with them that you can't
do with the big paper book. For one, you can reverse the search;
meaning the next time you find a mysterious number on your long
distance bill, you can search the system for who the number
belongs to. There are also address listings for people who have
no phone. Another neat thing is that some services have map
programs working with them. Once you decide which address is
the one you're looking for, you'll get a picture of a road map with
the address properly located on it. It will probably show a fair
chunk of the state that the place is in, but you can zoom into the
map right down to the point where you see all the little side
streets. None of the services are magic, so they're not 100%
goof proof. If you are not listed correctly in the phone book...
Well, that is where they get their information. Nicest thing about
them is they cover the whole US, and in some cases, international
listings.

    Speaking of Internet search utilities... The Akron, Canton,
Youngstown, Northeast Ohio Gay Community now has a whopping
huge presence on the World Wide Web. My favorite search engine
is AltaVista [ http://www.altavista.digital.com/ ]. If you type in just
about anything having to do with Gay in NE Ohio, You'll get
slammed with links to pages on Gay Akron's own Rainbow server.
We hit hard, usually with 7 or 8 links in the top ten! :o) Keep in mind,
this is available to the whole Planet Earth! "If you build it they will
come." Out-of-state travelers have visited Cafe115 having read
about it first on The Internet. This all ties in rather nicely with the
"Gay Money Gay Power" theme of this issue. AIDS Holistic
Services Program just got their new spiffy Web pages posted at
Rainbow, and the whole Rainbow site [ http://www.rainbow-akron.com ]
grows even larger every two weeks with the addition of every new
issue of What's Up --The Internet Version. Since all of the pages at
the Rainbow Site are inter-linked, Rainbow will always be a huge and
growing target for Internet search engines, for anything that may be
posted there. Neat thing about all this is there's really nothing else
like it anywhere else in the world.

    Has anyone else noticed that you can't watch five commercials in a
row on TV now without hearing or seeing some reference to The
Internet? Pretty cool man! There are also many new ways being
marketed to get people on The Internet without the use of a computer.
One of the TV                                                                               ===>