ABC Online continues to broaden in scope and improve in quality and depth. Its Rural site provides a wide range of news and information relevant to the readership area and is linking in more with what's on ABC Radio. That means it's handy to be able to go to ABC Rural to catch up on something you may have missed on radio, say on the Country Hour.

One particular current feature at the Rural site is coverage of the recent Future of Australia's Country Towns conference at Bendigo. Even though you may have heard some of the conference on radio, at ABC Rural Online you can peruse in your own time the online reports and conference papers.

ABC Landline covers the Landline TV show and lets you access the whole show via steaming video or particular stories featured on the TV program. As well there's a message board so you can add your comments or start up a new discussion topic for others to contribute to.

Farmwide is another wide-ranging site, providing links, lists of events, a Net guide and rural news headlines. As well there are market quotes and commodity prices. You're able to join in disccusions using the message board and there's a schedule of online chat times.

Adrian Fisher is the world's leading designer of mazes. At his MazeMaker site you can see some of his designs, including mazes in Australia and other parts of the world. Or you might like to spend some time puzzling your way out of some online maze games.

The Maze-world site includes mazes both on Earth and in the solar system. An interesting offshoot is the MaizeMaze site - yes, maizes that Fisher and others have constructed in maize crops.

The maze puzzles you can play online make a good alternative to the more popular "crash-and-bash" type of game. You might also take time to follow the link to Ed Pegg Jr.'s Math Puzzle site. He follows in the footsteps of Martin Gardner who for many years presented maths puzzles in the Scientific American magazine.

The ArsDigita Foundation in Cambridge US recently invited the finalists in its web service contest to the US for the announcement of this year's winner. Among the finalists was an Australian, Emily Boyd, from Newcastle. Emily, with the help of her two younger sisters, has developed the MatMice site (www.matmice.com) to help the younger generation learn HTML, write their own web pages and share their sites with others.

The winner, Ara Anjargolian, has developed a site called SecondSaver (www.secondsaver.com). Ara's SecondSaver is a clever idea for a personal web calendar where you plan and edit one day at a time and is fully customisable. Ara also maintains another site for those interested in writing programs in Visual Basic (www.dev-center.com)

There are links to all the finalists' sites at the ArsDigita Foundations's site at www.arsdigita.org.

There is plenty of activity by Seniors on the Web with many sites bringing together their interests and providing helpful resources.

To start, visit the National Seniors Association's site and from there you'll find links to branches around Australia, including the Victorian branch's site.

The Endeavour Web for Senior Citizens and Gold Coast Seniors on the Net are two sites with a wide variety of resources and activities. The Golden Age site now appears inactive but it's still there with a very comprehensive list of links for Seniors, including links to various government departments.

To make new friends overseas, why not visit the US Seniors site. Apart from helpful information, it offers discussion forums, chats and newsletters.

By the time you read this in the next Waranga News, Essendon will have continued its unbroken winning streak, the Euro 2000 final will have been played between France and Italy, and the cyclists in the Tour de France will be half way through the gruelling three week tour. And the Olympics are getting closer!

With most of our athletes currently competing in Europe, it's worthwhile to see how they are performing against athletes from other countries. The International Amateur Athletics Federation site (www.iaaf.org) lists current world rankings and performance lists, as well as results from the latest meetings. For example, if you're keen to see how Patrick Johnson and Matt Shirvington are running, choose the mens 100 metre event performance list and you can find their times in relation to their competitors. All athletic events are similarly recorded.

If you're wondering how the rest of the world sees Australia hosting the Olympics, here's a couple of sites worth visiting: MSNBCSports.com and NBCOlympics.com. You'll find some interesting headlines.

Keeping up to date with all that goes on in the sporting world can be time-consuming so it's worth visiting SportsToday (www.sportstoday.com.au) to catch all the news in one place: cricket, real footy, the Olympics and tennis for example.

So you can watch how Stuart O'Grady performs this year in the Tour de France - he's aiming to take the sprint title - you'll have to visit the official LeTour site at www.letour.com/2000/us/. It's a very well organised site and if you're one of those who log onto the Web early in the morning, you can be up to date with each stage's results within a few hours of the day's racing.

Firstly this week, webDotWiz recommends the NSW Library's Internet Resources site when you're looking for information or want to follow up a particular subject in some depth. There is a broad range of topics with each area having links to quality sites.

Visitors to this year's PC Expo were greeted with the emphasis on palm, pocket and portable computers rather than desktops. It's worth looking at where computing is heading and the PC Expo is a showcase for what we can expect.

There have been a number of sites mentioned in past columns where you can find free games. There are also many sites which enable you to play online so look at this week's sites to get started with your favourite game.

PricePoint is an Australian site where you can compare prices. Presently coverage is restricted to computers, office equipment and audio-visual items. Hopefully the range of goods will be expanded in the near future. If you want to see what's available to overseas shoppers, visit Compare.net.

The JazzAtWhroo site has some links for jazz MP3 downloads, particularly swing jazz. Or use the music links page at webDotWiz Online for a wider range of jazz MP3s.