As most Slashdotters will already know (Greetings Googlers.)

On the Google News page, in the left hand column, below the category buttons is an envelope icon labeled "News alerts." It lets you set a web crawler to search over 4000 news sources, plus other sources that you can combine in limited ways for news on a particular topic. Ex I have an interest in the "Jack Oil Field" in the Gulf of Mexico, so I search "jack oil." It sends the info to your e-mail inbox at intervals (daily; weekly etc.) I have a gmail web address devoted to nothing but google alerts. You have to read them regularly, but they can make you (seem?) extremely knowledgeable about a topic and keep you up to date. If you fall behind, you can just mark them all as "read," and archive them. It's a conversational "secret," that I thought I would share, and put in a plug for the service. I don't think you can use google alerts without a gmail account. It lasts fully 90 days without checking, but if you don't check it for more than 3 months, your membership is either put on hold or cancelled - same as hotmail and yahoo, but 90 days, instead of 30 days.