DATE: Monday, September 29, 1997            TAG: 9709270396

SECTION: BUSINESS                PAGE: D9   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY CAROL HORTON, PILOT ONLINE STAFF 

                                            LENGTH:   66 lines

READ THE NEWSPAPER ONLINE, INCLUDING STORIES FROM UP TO 7 YEARS AGO

Hampton Roads' corner of the Internet grew a bit this month, as Pilot Online added a number of features that local residents may find useful in their daily lives. Here's an update on major additions and improvements you'll find when you visit www.pilotonline.com.

Hampton Roads Click TV is the electrified cousin of the Pilot's popular Greensheet television guide. You can find two weeks of TV listings and program descriptions for all cable systems in Hampton Roads, with schedules updated daily with the latest sports events and other changes.

To save time, you can personalize the listings according to the channels you watch most or add a reminder service. Registration for the personalized service is free. You can search for shows by topic, by kid-appropriate ratings and other criteria. And there are plenty of extras on the Click TV site, including links to horoscopes, puzzles, reviews, soap summaries and news about shows and personalities.

For those who revel in sharing thoughts, ideas and opinions with the rest of the world, Hampton Roads TalkNet provides a lively new interactive forum. While Pilot Online hosts a number of conversations related to stories in the newspaper and on the Web site, TalkNet is a communitywide forum where individuals and community groups can start their own conversations and interact with each other.

We encourage you to speak your mind, but please take note of the rules of TalkNet when you complete your free registry. Keep it clean, and remember the golden rule of chatting: Chat unto others as you would have them chat unto you. Even if you don't feel like contributing, you'll find the wide range of topics and views worth clicking to.

Personal services have been added to the BizSearch Yellow Pages as well. Hampton Roads' interactive yellow pages now include door-to-door driving instructions as well as maps to help you get to any business in Hampton Roads and many other cities in the United States. The site also includes Four-1-1, a veritable online white pages, allowing you to search for people and their e-mail addresses worldwide. You can register with Four-1-1 for free, and then others will be able to find you, too.

Everybody loves a free sample, and time is running out for this one. The full-text Archives of The Virginian-Pilot have been expanded to include seven years of locally written stories and a much-improved search engine. Stories are added within a week of publication. While searching the Archives and reading story summaries will always be free, retrieving the full text will cost $1 per article. You can test the service free until mid-October.

Classified ads are tremendously popular on Pilot Online, and several new features will make them even more effective in helping you find an item, pet, job, etc. Sunday ads now stay online all week long, so you can search the current ads, Sunday's ads, or everything in between. Also, a new Personal Clipping Service has been added, which lets you collect only the ads you're interested in for printing.

Pilot Online has also consolidated details about how to win free tickets to concerts, movies and shows on the new Contest Page. Look for details soon about some extra tickets we have to the Elton John concert at the GTE Virginia Beach Amphitheater.

Finally, Pilot Online is proud to sponsor a number of timely public-service sites on the Internet as well:

Kids Voting is part of a national project to get children involved with the election process. It opens for business Tuesday.

The United Way and Combined Federal Campaign sites offer useful information about the two charitable fund-raising efforts that are now under way.

Operation Bravo, a salute to the military in Hampton Roads, includes schedules of upcoming military events and a video clip of the Blue Angels flight team.

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu