Bill Hopkins is the Webmaster of PhotoSourceFolio* (www.photosourcefolio.com) and a regular contributor to PhotoStockNotes. Send comments via Email to wh@photosourcefolio.com. Fax: 1 818 831-0916. Or US Mail: PhotoStockNotes. (*Display 6 of your images on our Web site!) For on-line marketing questions, contact him on the Cracker Barrel at www.photosource.com/board

Used to be, you could lick the stamps (OK, most are self-stick now), or take the mail to the post office and they'd meter it for you, or rent a Postage Meter for your small business. Now, you can get stamps via the Internet. We're not talking about purchasing physical stamps, but using E-stamps. This has been in the testing phase for a while, and is now ready for prime-time. Two companies are approved by the USPS for E-stamps, E-stamp.com and stamps.com (There may be more by the time you read this). You do pay a service charge for this convenience, around 10%. One company wants you to go on-line each time you want to print out a stamp (they are BIG), the other offers a Avault@ that connects to your parallel port so you don’t have to be on-line to print postage. For detailed info, check out each vendor’s website.

Send your print job to an Internet-connected printer! New software available now for Windows98, Windows98 Second Edition, and WindowsNT from Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard lets you print over the Internet almost as easily as printing to a local printer. The catch? You need the URL of the destination printer. For photographers whose clients have such connected printers (and who are willing to share...), it means that your previously faxed (print it instead) material will now be much clearer and sharper, and if the printer is a color printer, IN COLOR! And gone will be busy signals on the fax line, etc. So, if you’re in the position, ask your major customers if they have such capability, and let us know how it works for you. (For some gritty details: http://www.hp.com/net_printing/ppss/ipt_specs.html)

The nation’s first public computer network, Cleveland Free-Net, succombs to the Y2K bug. A precursor of the World Wide Web, this electronic bulletin board, started in 1984 at Case Western Reserve University, will shut down permanently October 1. According to Raymond Neff, Vice President of MIS at the University, the computer program would take too much time and personnel to make Y2K-compliant.