This is the year to try to get control of the vast amounts of e-mail you receive. A good place to start is Jakob Nielsen's ten steps to cleaning up “information pollution”.

Nielsen, one of the self-styled “web gurus” commenting on the Internet, says it is time to “rule the computer and put it back in its place”.

His fix is a better prioritisation of e-mails, fewer interruptions, and concentrated information that's easy to find and manage helps people become more productive and stop wasting their colleagues' time.

The symptoms of this information overload include the squandering of up to an hour a day by employees “doing e-mail”. Finding information is also a time waster.

Employees waste 48 hours each year trying to unearth job-related information on bad intranets compared to the time they would need on an intranet geared towards helping them find the correct path to that information.

Many websites also alienate users by burying answers to basic questions in useless “corporatese”.

“E-mail messages that customers actually want, such as useful newsletters or customer-service confirmations, don't survive overflowing inboxes - often because senders ignore the principles of good email design,” he says.

The answer is basic time management: set priorities and allocate the bulk of your time to tasks that are crucial to meeting your goals. For individuals there are six steps to regaining control of your day:

1) Don't check your e-mail all the time. Set aside special breaks between bigger projects to handle e-mail.

2) Don't use “reply to all” when responding to e-mail just to those who need to know.

3) Write informative subject lines for your e-mail messages.

4) Create a special e-mail address for personal messages and newsletters. Only check this account once per day.

5) Write short.

6) Avoid IM (instant messaging).

I'm a consistent breaker of step number one and am very annoyed with instant messaging. I have been very tempted to grab my girlfriend's cell phone and toss it away because she's so addicted to texting.

The phone sounds and the text beckons, demanding to be answered.

The other four rules for regaining control of your time apply to companies. They are:

1) Answer common customer questions on your website using clear and concise language. This will keep them from pestering you with time-consuming phone calls and e-mails.

2) User test your Intranet so employees can find information faster. Make the intranet homepage their entry point for keeping up on company news and events.

3) Don't circulate internal e-mail to all employees but put the information on the intranet where people can find it when they need it. Establish a company culture in which it's OK not to respond to e-mail immediately.

4) Establish a company culture in which it's okay not to respond to e-mail immediately. You can find a complete list of Neilsen's tips on a variety of Internet-related subjects at http://www.useit.com.

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You can get the updated raw photographs of Mars sent back by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit from the surface of the planet at http://marsrover.jpl.nasa.gov.

The initial black and white images were difficult to see, but the incoming colour images being posted on the site and the panoramic images are magnificent.

Meanwhile British scientists are hoping their orbiter around Mars will be able to establish communications with Beagle 2, their spacecraft, which has been silent since it was due to land on the planet on Christmas Day.

The Beagle 2 site, (www.beagle2.com), notes that the orbiter will make its first attempt to establish contact with Beagle 2 today (7 January) at 12.13 GMT. At the website you can at least hear the music especially written for the project by Blur.

Both sites have educational materials and videos available online for teachers.

While you're out in space take a visit to NASA's online Earth Observatory, which has posted a new tutorial outlining some of the difficulties orbiting astronauts have in taking photographs of the earth.

The site takes you step by step through an attempt to photograph Everest, the highest point on Earth. Everest is a “long-standing challenge” for astronauts orbiting the Earth, NASA says. “Despite Everest's planetary stature, it is not an easy peak to locate while zipping over the mountains at seven kilometres per second.” See if you can find the peak at the Find Mt. Everest interactive tutorial at: http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/education/Everest/.

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Apple Computer has issued a security update that, among other fixes, closes a hole in Mac OS X that could allow hackers to take control of your computer.

The patch is available for Mac OS X 10.2.8. (Jaguar) and Mac OS X 10.3.2 (Panther) and the server versions of the operating systems.

As a matter of record Microsoft listed 119 vulnerabilities this year for various versions of Windows.

Microsoft issued 76 security updates during the year.

As far as I can determine Apple issued 20 security patches during 2003. You can access all of Apple's security updates at http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?arnum=61798.

The majority of these patches and updates are available through Mac OS X's “Software Update feature that can be accessed on your machine under “System Preferences”. By default, an automatic check for new updates is performed weekly.

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The annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas runs from January 8 to 11. Check out the latest gadgets as they are released at http://www.cesweb.org.

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You can contact Ahmed at editor@offshoreon.com