So the idea is, keep an eye on the sites that interest you, without visiting each one separately. Let’s take a look at the type of things you might want to monitor. The image at right was taken from my Google Reader screen. To save space, only my subscription categories are shown, not the individual feeds that I’m following. You can probably figure out the kinds of sites that are being followed in each category but a couple of them are worth special mention.

Community is for information that affects me locally. Blogs from my home town and organizations that I belong to.

Updates contains feeds from software and services that I use. For instance, by subscribing to the WordPress Development feed, I make sure that I don’t miss important updates to the software that powers this blog.

webdancers tracks all of the blogs that my company has developed for other people. All businesses can benefit from keeping track of work that they have done for others or by monitoring important voices in their field. Putting all of this information in one place means that you are much more likely to actually see it.

At the moment, I’m subscribed to 54 feeds. This number changes frequently, as I’m particular about what I subscribe to. After all, if it’s there I’m going to look at it and it’s easy to add and drop feeds as necessary. In Google Reader, you can also share items from your feeds, which automagically appear on a custom web page which, of course, has its own feed for your friends to subscribe to.

Once you start using feeds, you’ll start thinking about using the Internet in a different way. Instead of having to take a specific action (visiting a web site), you are making an always-on connection to information that interests you. The feed reader is your side of the connection. On the other side are a myriad of data sources (just look for the little orange RSS icon or the word “feed”). All blogs have feeds and so do many other web sites and online services. I suggest you start with a few blogs and get in the habit of checking your reader regularly. Oh look, I have 12 new items in Google Reader!

Many of our viewers are just starting out on the Internet and wanted to know some basics that will help them conquer the Internet. This series will get you started on understanding the Internet and making it work for you.

For more from Lee and Kim, you can watch part 2 and part 3 of this video series on YouTube. You can also help me out by letting me know in comments if you prefer videos embedded in the post (like part 1, above) or linked to their original source (like parts 2 and 3 on YouTube). If you can’t watch videos at all, please let me know that too.

If you don’t see the embedded video player here, you can watch it on YouTube.

If you’d like to take a more structured approach to learning about the Internet, the BBC website has a free online course, called The Webwise Online Course. It is presented in 10 sections and is available in both an animated (Flash) and text-only versions. Each section is followed by an optional quiz. Here’s their description of the course, from the Welcome section:

There are ten units and each one should last a maximum of one hour.

Each unit contains a list of guides, which you should follow in order. Start with the one nearest to the left of the screen. Don’t forget to test what you have learnt by doing the quiz after watching each guide.

All the guides look similar. However, in the guides you will be asked to perform certain tasks by clicking somewhere on the screen. When you are asked to do this you will notice the ‘next’ button is greyed out.

If you click in the wrong place don’t worry! You will see an arrow pointing to the right place to click.

After you finish a guide you should click on the ‘Back to the beginning’ link to return to the unit menu. It is here where you will see the link to the quiz.

Once each unit is finished, click on the ‘Back to the beginning’ link to return to the main course menu. Here you will be able to select the next unit on the course.

Keep going until you have completed the course!

This course is definitely intended for the beginner but it looks very complete. It is also full of Britishisms (“Let’s try and have a go at using a browser”) and quite up to the production quality you’d expect from the BBC.

If you decide to try this course out, please come back and leave a comment with your impressions.

RSS is an incredibly useful technology that’s often not very well understood. Commoncraft has produced this video that does a great low-tech job of covering the basics in 3 1/2 minutes.

When you’re done watching, subscribe to our feed!

Senator Ted Stevens, (R-Alaska), U.S. Senate Commerce Committee hearing, June 28, 2006:

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Well…that’s one way of putting it, just not a very good way. Let’s see if we can’t come up with a definition that’s a bit more clear. The Internet is commonly referred to as a “network of networks”, which includes millions (yes, millions) of interconnected computer networks that are operated by commercial, academic, military and government institutions. Because these networks all use the same communication protocols (rules), they can share common online services, such as email, chat, file transfer and the World Wide Web, the service you are making use of at this very moment.

Defining Our Terms

Many people think that the terms Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) can be used interchangeably, which is not the case. The Internet is just the transport mechanism that moves data from one computer to another. Information Superhighway is actually not a bad metaphor, in that once you have a network of roads, many different types of vehicles can drive on them.

The WWW (isn’t it odd that it takes longer to say the initials that to say the whole words?) consists of billions (yes, billions) of interconnected pages, documents, multimedia clips and other resources. The defining characteristic of the web is the hyperlink, those colored, clickable bits of text (or images) which allow you to jump directly from one place to another. In order to make those jumps, every one of those billions of resources on the web must have a unique address, called a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). URLs typically look like this: http://www.internetnewcomer.com. They are not case sensitive, which means that you could also use http://WWW.InternetNewcomer.com and the Internet wouldn’t care.

The other big player on the Internet is, of course, email. When the hapless Senator Stevens said (in the same speech) that, “…an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday…”, he was again badly confused. Like the web, email uses the Internet as a transport system to move messages from one computer to another. Email addresses however, don’t look like URLs. This is because email uses a different protocol (the details of which would bore you to tears) from the WWW. It’s enough to know that all email addresses contain an @ symbol, while web addresses never do.

Photo: Matt Britt

Where Are You In This Picture?

In order to display this page, your computer is connected to a network of computers operated by your Internet Service Provider (ISP). Your phone company or cable provider may be providing your ISP services or you may be buying them from a local company. Your connection might be made over a standard telephone line, DSL provisioned telephone line, your TV cable or via satellite. In any case, your computer is a node on their network. The computer on their network to which you are connected is called a host. It is the millions of interconnected host computers that make up the Internet.

Your ISP takes care of all the messy details, insuring that all of its computers (including yours) are communicating properly with each other and with the rest of the Internet. They also operate specialized hosts known as servers, which run their email systems, web sites, chat rooms and other online services.

Summing Up

The Internet is a worldwide collection of interconnected computers that can exchange information of many types. Email and the World Wide Web are the most widely used services but there are many others and new ones come along all the time. Software installed on your computer, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Outlook Express and AOL Instant Messenger provide you with the means to interact with these services.

If there are areas of this topic that you would like to know more about, please leave a note in the comments and we will add them to our list of upcoming articles.