Huge amounts of information are locked behind firewalls. You can't read the entire Wall Street Journal online unless you have a subscription, and the Encyclopedia Britannica site lets you see only partial article entries until you pay a monthly fee.

Now a startup called Congoo (www.congoo.com) has cut a deal with such publishers to offer some of this premium content via a downloadable toolbar.

The trade-off? Publishers are trying to figure how to boost readership, so the businesses above, as well as ventures such as The Hollywood Reporter, TheStreet.com and a variety of newspapers, are willing to let users through in hopes of whetting their appetite for more (and thus getting them to sign up for their services).

The publishers also get Congoo's user registration information, a boost for them. But be aware that this may create privacy issues if you decide to try this service.

A different take comes from browse4-research.com, which uses a natural language engine to help you refine your search queries. Instead of submitting two or three search terms, you can feed the engine up to 100 words and let it parse the text. You then pick a result that is close to what you want, and it is submitted to Google for a complete search. What the engine offers, then, is a way to shorten the sometimes time-consuming keyword process up front.

More thorough still is the service's "research assistant" feature. Here, you submit an entire article (up to 10,000 words) and receive an e-mail link to a custom Web page built around the query. (Yes, it's cumbersome, but still in development). Your text is split into chunks, each of which is set up as a hyperlink so you can retrieve search results from just that chunk.

A good searcher can match these results, but there are time-saving advantages to being able to drop entire articles into the engine and do something else while it works.

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Multimedia files -- everything from snapshots from camera phones to homemade videos -- are taking up more and more of our storage space. When people try to attach photo albums or movies to e-mail, they usually run into size restrictions. No service provider wants to store the 1-gigabyte file attachment that carries your home movie of the family at the Grand Canyon. Even much smaller files can quickly put you over the file-size limit.

Pando.com is an ingenious way around the problem. The technology, currently in beta testing but available for use, breaks a large file down into smaller pieces and uploads them to the Pando servers.

Send an e-mail attachment using the software, and the recipient (who also must be running the Pando program) will be able to download it by peer-to-peer methods, so the file arrives from multiple machines and never surpasses service provider limits.

With these methods, even a huge file requires only a 30 KB file attachment; the rest happens between your PC and the Pando servers using a free download that takes up less than 2 MB on your disk.

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Jargon watch: Buzzwords fly fast and furious on the Net, and the latest is "attention."

A company called Root Markets tracks attention patterns -- who's clicking on what -- to improve the collection and sale of individual user data. Founder Seth Goldstein is also behind the nonprofit Attention Trust (www.attentiontrust.org), which works with end users and marketers to establish principles for the use of such information in ways that benefit both.

One thing is for sure: Our usage patterns are valuable, and we give them up all too easily.

Most people are appalled to realize how their Web travels can be tracked through spyware, and even legitimate cookies that speed your return visits to a site can become suspect.

"Attention" is just another way of looking at an older problem: We all need to pay attention to Net privacy, even if the come-ons to divulge personal information sometimes seem worth the cost.

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