Oldlook gets a reprieve: A couple of weeks ago, we were informed by Engineering that the Oldlook of Experts Exchange was going to have to be taken down because of the number of errors that were being produced by code changes to the site. Those plans were put on hold a couple of days later, when Jan and Brian were able to find and fix the errors. Oldlook will remain on line, at least for the foreseeable future, until they finish the code for "skins", which will allow members to tailor the look of EE according to their own tastes.

Links versus content
SitePro News had an interesting article about which is a better way to get to the top of the search engine rankings: links or content. Generally speaking, we like the idea of content-rich sites, but you can make up your own mind: read the article here.

Google enters the email fray
Sometimes even the head man gets involved. WesLennon, our inimitable Director of Community Support, send us a CNet story about Google's new challenge to Yahoo and Microsoft: Gmail. Tired of bouncing emails when you fill up your 5 mb of web email? Read about a gigabyte...

There are tons of sites, and a bunch of people at EE, who can probably give you a better explanation than I can, but basically, an open source program is one in which the author has given users access to the source code for the program; it's also usually free, because the code is freely distributed. The best examples of open source are the Linux operating system and the Mozilla browser.

The advantage to it is that if you've written a nice little program, you can get hundreds or thousands of programmers to help modify and improve it, and usually you can get their help for very little money -- they do it because they can help build a better mousetrap. You also get programs in which the bugs are worked out fairly quickly -- no more waiting around for the next patch or service pack.

Check out the Linux TA at Experts Exchange for some of the Internet's best open source Experts.