BookWire: Want to know the latest developments in the publishing trade? Then this webzine is the place to visit as it offers regularly updated news on new books and best-sellers, views from and interviews with authors, book reviews and other interesting features. The range of subjects is pretty wide so you'll find everything from a focus on 'Books For Fans Of Fly-Fishing' to 'The Carbohydrate Addict's Lifespan Program'. There's a search box to help you zero in on a particular title, and a direct connection to Amazon.com (Is there a commercial Website Amazon has not penetrated yet?) tries to tempt you to buy the book online. The layout is as surfer-friendly as you could expect a site like this to be so you don't have to worry about heavy data bogging things down.

CNN.com: Although it's probably one of the busiest sites on the Web, CNN's cyber edition is easy to access and navigate. While the video and audio streams may take a while to load, the news items are mainly just a click away. And most are easy to retrieve from the summaries and headlines in the various sections. The home page contains a whole lot of data, but because of the use of space, it all appears neat and uncluttered. The main news loads first at the top, and within a minute or so, you get the entire flow of features. But what really makes this one of the first-stop news domains is the regular updating, especially when there are breaking stories. You can also customize the home page to your needs, and in case you need yet another free e-mail account, you can sign up here.

Gist TV: TV buffs would love the trivia and gossip dished out on this e-zine devoted to developments in the world of the "idiot box". Like most sites regurgitating American popular culture, it has a zippy feel reinforced by such crowd-pandering features as 'Celebrity Photos' and 'Fan Frenzy Polls'. It also offers cash-prize enticements, which should give you an idea how crassly commercial it all is. But cheesy as it may seem to devotees of high culture, even they will find articles with tantalizing titles like 'Was Ally McBeal's Same-Sex Kiss a Gimmick?', 'Who Should Be Charlie's Third Angel?' and 'Mulder and Scully to Kiss on X-Files' hard to resist. Other attractive features include listings of the latest movies and video previews. And the site is updated daily.

Merriam-Webster Online: Offers free access to the contents of Merriam-Webster's Dictionary and Thesaurus. You'd think a site like this would be hard to get into, but amazingly, the home page takes less than a minute to load up on the average PC. There are separate search boxes for the dictionary and thesaurus, and unless you're looking for the meaning of a really arcane word or phrase, most of the searches turn up positive results. The normal entries apart, there also features like 'Cool New Stuff', 'Word of the Day', 'Daily Word Game', 'Word of the Wise' and 'Lighter Side of Language' to entertain and elucidate the word lover. Navigation is faster with the 'text-only version'.

Q Online: Shamelessly boasting that it's 'The World's Greatest Music Magazine Online', the Web version of Britain's Q magazine is loaded with the latest music info. The British bias is unsurprising but all the news that matters is featured in a breezy style. You can also access "over 18,000 reviews at your fingertips", but the loading time can put you off. Among the specials that make this worth a visit is the '100 Greatest Albums Ever' list and random quotes from the magazine's archives.

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