Free Stuff
There are a number of sites on the internet that offer you something
for free. Sometimes it's someone altruistic who's being kind to his
fellow internauts, but more often, it's supported via banner ads.
A lot of the free stuff has been drying up lately, because they are
not paid for putting banner ads on their pages, they are paid when
someone actually clicks on those banner ads. A lot of advertisers
have found that internet advertising doesn't work very well as most
people tune out the banner ads. Does internet advertising not work,
or does advertising in general not work as well as it is assumed to?
I think that all the internet has done is given advertisers a method
to see that their own advertising doesn't work nearly as well as they
think it does. I would question the effectiveness of Magazine ads,
TV ads, Radio ads, etc. The American consumer is much more informed
in the 'information age' than they were in the past - you can't afford
to make a poor quality product in today's market. People do their
homework these days and don't depend nearly as much (as they did in
the past) on "information" gathered via advertising as they used to.
TV advertisers have learned that you have to "catch" the potential
consumer before they surf channels. Your ad must have humor - it
must be entertaining in and of itself.
Unfortunately, all too often, it's the person who has a "free"
web site supported by advertising that suffers from an advertiser's
poorly designed ad. When the advertiser doesn't get any hits, do
they say to themselves "I designed a poor ad", or do they say to
themselves "the internet doesn't work"?
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Free Services you can get via e-mail
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E-mail Postcards:
Basically, you compose a Postcard with a picture and a message
on a web server, then a mail message is generated to the
recipient telling them the URL to go to in order to see your
postcard to them. (Caution: some postcard servers are used
by advertisers to get e-mail addresses to send spam to).
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FTP via e-mail
is a service that you can use if you have e-mail access,
but not FTP access to the internet (e.g. you could use with
juno).
Send a mail message
with "help" (remove the quotes) [and nothing else] in
the body of the message. Leave the subject line blank.
You will get a reply that tells you how to use the
FTP via e-mail server. Here are some servers:
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Fax to E-mail
is a service that some companies provide.
They provide you with a fax number. Any faxes sent to
that number are then converted into graphics files and
e-mailed to you. The basic services are usually free.
To pay for the service, they periodically e-mail you
advertisements.
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JFAX
provides receiving e-mail for free (paid for
by periodically sending you advertisements).
For a fee, you can send faxes via e-mail too
(you send e-mail and it gets faxed to the
recipient). Also, for a fee you can get a
toll free fax number (for receiving).
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eFax
provides receiving faxes for free (paid for
by periodically sending you advertisements).
For a fee, you can get a toll free fax number.
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Voice mail to e-mail
provides you with a voicemail mailbox. Messages that
come into your voicemail mailbox are converted into
a sound file and e-mailed to you. You can then play
the message over your computer's speakers.
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JFAX
provides this for free (they periodically
e-mail you advertisements to pay for the service).
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Free E-mail
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Juno
provides dial-in (via a modem) access to free e-mail.
In a corner of your Juno screen, you are show ads, and
the ads pay for your e-mail.
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Hotmail
allows you to use any web browser to read your e-mail.
You may not be on the internet, but if you have access to
a machine that is (at your local public or univeristy library,
at a friend's house, at work) then you can still have a private
mailbox. If you already have e-mail, and you can use POP3 protocol
to read it, Hotmail can go grab e-mail (via POP3) out of your other
mailbox and shove it in your hotmail mailbox.
Ads in the corner of the web pages that you use to read your
mailbox pays for your free account.
Hotmail has a policy against sending unsolicited advertisement
e-mail (see below), so if you recieve some from a hotmail
user, send e-mail to
[email protected]
.
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NetAddress
used to be better than the others, because it offered all
the services that Hotmail offered plus other services like
using any POP3 client to read your e-mail or forwarding your
e-mail to some other address. They still offer these, but
they are no longer free.
NetAddress has an policy against sending unsolicited advertisement
e-mail (see below). If you recieve such e-mail from a usa.net
address, forward it to
[email protected]
.
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Yahoo Mail
is brought to you by the same folks who run the
search engine.
It's not really any different than Hotmail
(though they don't appear to have options
for expiring your views they way that HotMail
and NetAdress do).
Complaints (of SPAM and such) can be sent to
[email protected]
.
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Alta Vista
also has
free e-mail.
Their offering is free if you want to use a web
browser. You can pay if you want to use any
POP3 client. You can also pay extra to have one of
their special domain names.
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web.com
free web based (only) e-mail; they also allow you to change the
return address on outgoing e-mails so that you can send from
them but get your replies elsewhere.
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Free Internet Access
(these have been drying up lately)
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FreeInet
- free download, or free CDRom.
[
Win95
or
WinNT.
]
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1stup
- free download, or pay for a CDRom.
[
Win95
or
WinNT
]
Also run's AltaVista's free internet offering.
Looks like they sell your e-mail address to spammers.
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Free Web pages
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GeoCities
is now owned by
Yahoo!
(15MB, FTP access)
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Freeservers
(20MB, FTP access)
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AngelFire
(5-30MB)
and
Tripod
are both now owned by
Lycos
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Fortune City
(100MB of space, FTP access)
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HomeStead
(16MB of space)
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There's a guy who goes by the name
Phrantic
who ran what he called
The Trailerpark
which is a place for people to get free homepages.
I used to have lot
B1.
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web.com
provides redirection services, so you can have a URL,
xyz.web.com point to an existing web page
(who's URL is not quite so easy to remember).
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Free disk space
(These have a tendancy to "turn $" quickly)
Garry Garrett's Homepage 