Networking with Others

Contents of this page

• Locating People, Organizations and Businesses
• Subscribing to E-mail discussion lists
• Subscribing to Usenet Newsgroups

Locating People, Organizations and Businesses

Although the following sites give you the means to help you find someone or some organization, many also allow you to register so that other folks can find YOU. When you do so, you can give the bare minimum of information (i.e. your e-mail address and/or your phone number) or you can go wild, letting them know the school(s) you attended (never know when there'll be a reunion!), your occupation, your maiden name, your full address, your interests, and where you're employed. I've found this two-way usage of the service to be a terrific resource that frees me up from having to remember or maintain my own address book.

Note too that sometimes you may find you're already registered with these sites. Apparently, many ISPs, telephone companies, etc. share their directories with these services.

Also, The Special Ed Exchange (SpedEx) web site offers searchable dictionaries for net of various professional affiliations, such as Orientation & Mobility associations, teachers of the visually impaired, rehabilitation teachers, deaf-blind specialists and intervenors, Braille transcribers, and more. If you're a vision professional, you can have your name added to these directories. If you're trying to locate a vision professional, here's a good place to start!

AT&T's Directory of Toll-Free Business Numbers

This lists the toll-free (800 and 888) phone numbers for businesses across the country.

Bigfoot

This site has over 100 million white page phone book listings and 8 million e-mail addresses to help you locate someone, all offered in multiple languages (a big plus!). In addition, you can register for a free lifetime e-mail address (i.e. yourname@bigfoot.com). This allows you to have folks send you mail at your "@bigfoot" address and have Bigfoot redirect it to one or more other e-mail addresses. If those other addresses ever change, tell Bigfoot the new e-mail address to which to forward your mail and your friends don't have to be notified that your e-mail addresses have changed: they remain yourname@bigfoot.com forever.

Big Yellow

This lists complete and timely neighborhood, transportation, business and attraction information for metropolitan areas within the Bell Atlantic region, plus libraries, post offices, hospitals and more. It also includes yellow pages for Africa, Asia, Europe and more.

BigBook

This offers information on over 16 million businesses. You can search by category or name, and even produce a map showing how to get to a particular business.

Four 11

Four 11 provides several directories for locating people and businesses: e-mail, telephone (white pages), NetPhone (for those surfers who use Internet phone software to hold voice conversations via your modem), government and celebrity. The government directory, useful for lobbying your congressman, lists the e-mail addresses and home pages for U.S. Government officials and congressional committees.

InfoSpace

This site offers e-mail directories; national and international phone directories; federal, state and local government directories; weather and ski information; road maps; traffic information (for a few major cities); and business 800 number and fax number directories.

Internet Address Finder (IAF)

This service offers over 5 million listings of e-mail addresses.

Internet Phonebook

This phonebook is produced by Phil Scovel and contains the names and e-mail addresses of many blind Internet users, as well as other lists such as blind ham radio operators,etc. It is updated once a month, free of charge. To receive monthly updates, contact Phil via e-mail and request to be added to his e-mail distribution list.

Switchboard

This service provides 106 million residential listings and 11 million business listings.

WhoWhere?

WhoWhere? provides e-mail, white pages, yellow pages and toll-free directories. Through their community directory, you can register yourself or do searches based on educational information (school name, location, year graduated) and group affiliations, to name a few.

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Subscribing to e-mail discussions lists

Unlike Usenet newsgroups (see below), the messages posted to e-mail discussion lists are sent to your e-mail address.

You "subscribe" to the e-mail discussion list by sending an e-mail. Who you send that e-mail to and what it must say depends entirely on that particular e-mail discussion list.

Once subscribed, your name and e-mail address is automatically added to the list. You will immediately receive an automated "welcome" letter explaining how to post messages to and unsubscribe from the list. Keep this message around!!! From that point on, you will receive all mail (i.e. postings) sent to the list by its members. You may just read the messages (known as "eavesdropping" or "lurking") or you may participate by replying to messages or posting your own. If you respond to a message, you can send your response to the list (in which case all members of the list will receive it) or to an individual on the list.

For very active discussion lists, you may receive dozens or hundreds of messages in your e-mail in-box each day. For others, you may only get an occasional message. Either way, read the messages whose header looks interesting or delete it immediately.

You unsubscribe from an e-mail discussion list by sending another e-mail and, like before, who it's sent to and what it must say varies from discussion list to discussion list.

Note that many e-mail mailing lists have archives containing the last month or two's worth of postings to their list. Several of the blindness-related mailing lists are on the MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU listserv, so you may want to visit its archives to get a better understanding of the type of dialog that occurs on these mailing lists. Another archive can be found at TR.WOU.EDU.

Blindness-related E-mailing Lists

This site contains the instructions on how to join over 65 mailing lists relating to blindness. It also contains lists which deal with accessibility or are frequented by blind members.

Blindhomeschoolers

This list is for families that are homeschooling and/or parenting a blind child.

Braille Music List

This page describes how to subscribe to the BrailleM e-mail mailing list (a mailing list about braille music), and also contains a list of frequently asked questions (FAQ) and their answers.

CataList

This site is a catalog of LISTSERV lists. From this page, you can browse any of the public LISTSERV lists on the internet, search for for mailing lists of interest and get information about LISTSERV host sites.

Children's Disability List of Lists

This page, part of Allison and Rick Martin's site, contains information about various mailing lists for individuals with disabilities (or their families).

Disabled-Ministry

This list is for the discussion of how churches can reach out to people with disabilities and their families.

Liszt

This is a directory of e-mail discussion lists. By searching for various words or categories, you can find the mailing lists (out of over 70,000!) in which you may be interested.

Special Needs Mailing Lists

This lists several mailing lists for parents of children with special needs, including two relating to premature babies.

Special Education Exchange list of E-mail discussion lists

This site offers an extensive list of mailing lists along with instructions on how to subscribe.

Special Needs Education Network (SNE) mailing lists

SNE hosts several excellent discussion lists. One is targeted at parents and care providers of students with special needs, one is targeted at teacher's assistants (i.e. aides) of students with special needs, and another is targeted at teachers of students with special needs. There are other lists as well.

Other mailing lists which may not appear in the lists mentioned above:

• BVI-PARENTS, a list for parents of children who are blind or visually impaired, so that those parents can network and share ideas and experiences. Blind adults are also welcome, but the primary focus of the list is the needs of the parents. BVI-TEENS is a list for kids and teens who are blind or visually impaired, and are in elementary, junior high or secondary school. Visit the BVI-Parents home page for information on how to subscribe to either list.
• PREEMIE-CHILD, a list for parents of children who were born prematurely and are now school age.
• PREEMIE-L, a list for parents of children who were born prematurely and are not yet in school.
• Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP) support group
• Specpar, a mailing list for parents of multiples (twins, triplets or more) where one or more of the children has special needs.
• TRAINING-L, a list for people involved in training others on assistive technology. To subscribe, send an e-mail message to majordomo@bbs.nipha.com. In the body of the message, put these words: subscribe training-l

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Subscribing to Usenet Newsgroups

Usenet Newsgroups are sort of like a community bulletin board you might see in your grocery store -- a place where anyone can post something and anyone can read what others have posted. You have to have newsreader software to access newsgroups and your ISP has to offer this service (most do) via a NNTP (network news protocol) server. Newsreader software comes bundled with the Netscape Navigator browser. Microsoft provides a free newsreader as part of the Internet Mail and News product that can be downloaded from their web site; it works with any browser.

There are over 15,000 newsgroups and they are generally geared around a particular subject. One popular use for them is as a forum for experts and novices to help each other with computer-related questions or problems. Articles (i.e. messages) posted to a newsgroup are not around forever; they expire and are deleted from the newsgroup after a few days or weeks. Through a search engine called Dej ews you can search through even these expired articles to find what you're looking for. More information about Usenet newsgroups is available at Deja News too.

Many newsgroups publish a FAQ (frequently asked questions list) to save individuals from asking the same questions over and over. By reading a newsgroup's FAQ, you often can find out if the newsgroup is one you're interested in subscribing to (sometimes the name is misleading) and the FAQ usually presents very helpful information.

Dej ews

This site can help you find what newsgroups exist on the subject(s) in which you're interested. In addition, as described above, it allows you to search through newsgroup archives of previously deleted newsgroup postings. What this translates to is the ability to search through all postings of all newsgroups for a year or more to see if there were any discussions on a given topic. This is ideally suited for getting help on a technical problem, but also to save yourself from having to subscribe and keep up-to-date on each newsgroup you may be interested in.

FAQs by Category.

FAQ Finder.

Usenet Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs).

List of newsgroups dealing with medical and handicapped-related issues

This is a page from a site called disABILITY Information and Resources.

 

alt.comp.blind-users.

bit.listserv.ada-law

ADA Law discussions

bit.listserv.blindnws

Blindness issues and discussions

bit.listserv.easi

Computer access for people with disabilities

fj.misc.handicap

Discussion about handicaps and the handicapped

k12.ed.special

K-12 education for students with handicaps or special needs

sci.med.vision

Discussion regarding human vision, visual correction and visual science .

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