ScotConnect: Free Tutorials - the Internet - What's it all about?
For many people1 the Internet can be summed up in one word, 'Information' —information which is held on computers located all over the world; in individual’s home’s, at University’s, within commercial companies, in Government buildings or public libraries. The Internet is the key to making this world of information accessible to you and everyone else who is ‘connected’.
Glasgow Caledonian University for example - where I have my day job - has details about their courses, lecturers, and their library catalogue on networked computers2 situated throughout the campus. You could access this information by visiting the University - easy if you stay locally, or, you could stay at home and use your computer to tap into those resources via the Internet. You can do this even if your home is in Japan or somewhere else far away from Glasgow.
This is possible because the local computer network which the University maintains is just one of many which are spread throughout the world and which connected together make up that ‘thing’ which has been christened the Internet. The Internet you could say is just a network of networks - yes, it’s an inter-network!
Now that sounds like a reasonable description; its about information and its about computers connected together. And in one sense that’s true, but the internet is also about people and communication, the sharing of information and ideas, and the breaking down of barriers, both physical and geographical. The networked computers are important (and is for many the only definition), but they merely provide the means by which a ‘human’ network is made possible.
This human network is derived from the millions of people who are using the technology of the internet to make communication and information provision easier; companies are using it to keep in touch with their customers, families are using it to communicate with their overseas relatives, local clubs are building Web sites and starting 'mailing lists' to keep club members informed.
When you can use e-mail to get in touch with a thousand people as easily and cheaply as getting in touch with one person this opens up new possibilities for promoting yourself or your business.
On-line Communities
One of the Internets greatest assets is the opportunities it offers to develop and sustain strong on-line communities. To give you a sense of how this works here are a couple of examples of on-line communities that I am a member of.
As a computer programmer and Web site manager I subscribe to many mailing lists and daily visit Web sites related to these activities. I have got to know many of the people who also have an interest in this area - not by meeting them physically - but because I have 'spoken' to them using e-mail. Over the years this community of people have helped me out when I have been stuck, given me useful programs to use on my sites, and shared many tips and tricks. I have also contributed to the community by answering questions, entering into discussions and providing a few programs that I have written so that other people can - if they wish - use them on their own Web sites.
Another community I am a member of is based around the provision of disability information and issues surrounding accesible information. I worked as Disability Information Officer for three years and I have spent the last five years promoting and using the Internet as a tool for making information and services more accessible to disabled people. I am a member of the Scottish Disability Information Mailing List which has about 150 subscribers. People write to the list with their disability related enquiries, give answers to questions that people have asked on the list, tell people about up-and-coming events, inform people about jobs in the Disability field, and much more.
I also run a Web site called Connections Disability where you can find a directory of disability related information, chat rooms, discussion forums, articles I have written and links to other disability related resources. (Information about Scottish Disability Information Mailing List and the Connections Disability Web site can be found at http://www.connections.gcal.ac.uk/)
I have got to know many people as a result of being connected to this 'digital' network - not only in Scotland but all over the world. I have learned a lot from my sometimes unseen friends, tried to pass on my own humble opinions , and I definately feel a sense of belonging to distinct on-line communities.
Getting on the internet then is not - as some like to characterise it - about staying in and interacting with your computer - It’s about using your computer and the internet to talk to and communicate with other people. The myth that Internet users are anti-social computer 'geeks' is just that, a myth. It may (or may not) suprise you to know that there has been research done which shows that people who use the internet actually have more social contact than those who don't.
Who owns the Internet?
This is a question of who owns the Internet is one that is asked and answered in all introductions to the internet. So I won’t bother with it in this one. Try finding out for yourself3 . Here’s a tip, once you get onto the Internet go to the Infoseek ( http://www.infoseek.com ) search page and type in the following phrase including the quotes “who owns the Internet”. You might find some interesting stuff.
If the above suggestion doesn’t make much sense yet remember to come back to it once you have ‘done the internet’.
Acronym and Jargon Watch |
What is FTP?If you want to transfer a file from someone else’s computer to your own, (say some fancy utility they have been going on about or their latest holiday photographs) one way you can do it is by using FTP. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol and is a method (i.e a protocol in ‘tech speak’) used widely on the internet for this very job. You friend would have to be connected to the Internet and running a FTP 'server' program. Providing you had the corresponding FTP 'client' programme this would allow you to remotely logon and gain access to their machines files just as if those file where on your own hard disk. Once you had located the appropriate file you could download (transfer) that file to your machine. FTP also allows you to 'upload' files from your machine to the the machine running the FTP server. This is how many people keep their Web sites up to date - they download Web pages to their own machines, edit them and then upload them again to the Web server. There are dedicated FTP client programs, but your web browser can also do the job. |
What Sort of Information can I find on the Internet?
As well as mainstream interests, academic journals or personal information, on the Internet you will find details on the most obscure subject imaginable - and a few more besides. The Internet, and in particular the World Wide Web, (which now has more than 2 billion Web pages)has developed in such a way that it allow individuals to publish information quite easily. You will find that plenty of people have discovered this and are taking the opportunity to tell you all about themselves or their pet subject.
Here is just a few topics you will find on the Internet to give you some idea of the breadth of interests available.
News and Current Affairs - The last few years have seen an explosion of new sources of news on the Internet - and ways to aggregate and deliver that news (in a targetted way) to new ‘net’ consumers. Local and national news is viewed as a valuable commodity by many Web site managers; up-to-date news attracts people - and people mean possible sources of revenue.
Now it is possible for specialist news sites to sell their constantly up-to-date content to other Web sites. Automated syndication and payment systems have been developed and are being refined in anticipation of a future ‘explosion’ in this type of activity.
A good example of how this works is the BBC’s Web site which is one of the biggest and busiest Web sites in Britain - if not in the entire World. Every day it pumps out the latest local and international stories, giving away some of it free and also providing it as a revenue generating service to many other Web sites.
I would be surprised if your local papers and TV stations are not currently on or worrying about how they can get onto the Internet.
Links:
BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/
Weather Updates - Some people are just obsessed by the weather and there is plenty here to keep them happy. Is it currently raining in London? Give me a few minutes and I will log-on and tell you.
Links:
Weather from The Met Office: http://www.meto.govt.uk/sec3/sec3.html
Business and Financial Information : It would not be an exageration to say that revolution is in the air as far as business and financial information is concerned. Not only can you get basic information like company reports, Stock Market Quotes, exchange rates, and more advice and opinion than you can shake a stick at, but you can do much more of the ‘dirty work’ yourself. You can manage your own portfolio, buy and sell shares, bank on-line, and if the fancy takes you, buy insurance. In effect you can cut out the middle man - disintermediation as it is called; by-pass the whole expensive ‘independent’ financial advice business and use the information you can find on the internet to make your own decisions and buy your own shares and services directly.
One of the Web sites with highest profile in the 'money' area is the ‘Motley Fool’ web site which takes the line that it pays for people to become their own financial advisors. They provide guides, comments, discussion areas, company reports and a host of up-to-date information about companies prospects the state of market and much more.
Business to business communication and information exchange is another area which is currently in a state of flux. Soon you won’t be able to order new stock, send out invoices or pay your bills if you are not ‘connected’.
E-business is becoming the new buzz word. Business to business systems and applications is set to be a huge growth area over the next couple of years. If you are in business - as they say, ‘panic now, avoid the rush’.
Links:
The Motley Fool: http://www.fool.com, or http://www.fool.co.uk
Shopping : I don’t need to tell you that internet shopping is taking off in a big way - you are probably already finding it hard to avoid the hype. You can buy anything from a suit to a Black and Decker power drill - and off course the ubiquitous book from Amazon.com.
Links:
Amazon.com http://www.amazon.co.uk
Words : Entire texts of books, 'e-books' which can download and read on your personal organiser, articles, comment, news and lots more.
Links:
ZDNet Quick Guide to E-Books http://www.zdnet.com/products/stories/reviews/0,4161,387694,00.html
Government Information The government has recently published it's e-government strategy document which states that they are expecting to deliver 100% of their services electronically by 2005. Are they going to achieve this? If they do this has serious implications for everyone; the possibility of electronic voting, government legislation and promises for us to comment on just a click away, registration of births, marriages, deaths on-line, every MP with their own Web site and e-mail address. Is this a good thing? Can government cope with a population that can express it's opinions so easily.
Links:
Open.gov.uk: http://www.open.gov.uk/
Shareware and Freeware - lots of free software to clog up your (or someone else’s) computers hard disc.
Links:
Shareware.com: http://shareware.cnet.com/
Games: plenty to keep you occupied.
Links:
Yahoo! Games: http://games.yahoo.com/
Entertainment: Info about Films, Sports,Music - you can download tracks and listen to live concerts. MP3 - a way of making music files small enough to download over the internet to be played on your computer or 'digital walkman' is the latest killer app on the Internet.
The latest buzz centres around Napster - which allows you to search for download and play the music of all your favourite artists.
Links:
Napster: http://www.napster.com
MP3.com: http://www.mp3.com/
STRONG>Education: Details of University and College courses, or distance learning
Links
http://main.emap.com/id/uk/category/Education.htm
Disability related information. As we will see in one of the later chapters the Internet offers particular opportunities for disabled people. There is a very large community of disabled people who regularly use it to find information and share their experience and skills, opinions, software. And of course disabled people are interested in the same things that non-disabled people are interested in - and there is 'lots of everything' on the Internet!
Links:
Connections Disability: http://www.connections.gcal.ac.uk
The Internet is a way to connect information sources and information searchers.
It is predicted that by 2002 there will be 490 million people connected to the Internet (Computer Industry Almanac http://c-i-a.com). There are currently over 2 billion publicly available pages on the Web and that number is growing by 7 million pages per day (CyberAtlas: http://cyberatlas.internet.com/big_picture/) This represents a lot of opportunities if you are in the information business; either to find what you need or to inform your target audience. It is relatively easy to add to the existing information and it is possible to create ways for your intended audience to contribute to as well as receive information.
The information served on the Internet is not just in the form of text but can be pictures, audio, video, animation or a combination of all these media. There are discussion groups you can join, ‘real-time’ chat rooms to participate in, newsgroups relating to a wide range of subjects and lots of free software to download. The value of the Internet is not only the information or resources you can get from it but also the expertise, skills and experience of the people who use it.
One important advantage of the Internet is it’s ability to deliver information in a format which can then be customised to suite the needs of the person receiving it. As I mentioned earlier this has the tremendous advantage for example, of making information more accessible to disabled people — an idea I will be explore further in a later chapter.
| It can be useful to remember that each page on the World Wide Web is a real file sitting on a real computer which is probably sitting in someone’s office somewhere in the world. |
How do I get at all the information?
The Information on the Internet is not all stored in the same way. Numerous methods of storing and retrieving information have developed as the Internet has grown. This is both good and bad; good because different types of information suit different storage/retrieval methods and bad because we may need to learn more than one retrieval tool to make the most of this variety. The names of (just some) of these systems include: File Transfer Protocol (FTP) used for retrieving things like, programs, pictures or sound files; World Wide Web(WWW), for pages of information as text, graphics, sound, video and more; Gopher, a menu based system which predates the Web and News for retrieving information from the USENET system.
Lately however..
Rather than try to cover all of these different methods in any great depth, in this Introduction I will mainly look at the World Wide Web which has become the most popular and is one of the most powerful ways of accessing information from the Internet. The application package, used to navigate around the web is called a Web Browsers . Although these are chiefly designed to access information on the World Wide Web they are becoming flexible enough to allow access to many of the other systems mentioned above, in an easy, and, once you have mastered the Browser, familiar manner.
Internet Addresses: IP Numbers and Domain NamesEach computer on the Internet has a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address which is made up of four numbers separted by full stops. An example would be 193.62.231.104 which is the IP address of the Centre for Independent Living in Glasgow (CILiG) Web server. Humans however tend to have difficulty remembering strings of numbers, so a system has been developed which allows us to substitute names rather than numbers for addresses. These are called Domain Names, the corresponding domain name for the CILiG server is cil.gcal.ac.uk. |
What is the World Wide Web?
The World Wide Web (WWW) is a way of accessing and presenting information in a multimedia rich form. Graphics, sound, video, animation and formatted text can all be made available via the ‘Web’. The information is presented a page at a time and each page contains highlighted links—called hyperlinks in ‘techy’ jargon—these links could be words, pictures, or graphics.
And why is it called the web? Perhaps its because if you joined up all the links on all the pages on all the computer on all the networks on the Internet, it would just look like one big tangled web. Then again perhaps not. That however seems to me to be as good an explanation as any other, so I’m sticking with it.
Navigating through this web is done by clicking on highlighted links, called hyperlinks on web pages. Each link clicked brings up a new page of related information—this new page also contains clickable links to other pages and so on, ad infinitum. A page of text which contains hyperlinks is called hypertext.
This method of navigating through pages of information is called browsing, or surfing. One of the unique aspects of the WWW is that clicking on a highlighted link may take you to a page of information which resides on the same computer or to a page which is stored on a computer on the other side of the world. The WWW provides an easy way to access the the archives of information located on computers across the globe or across the road.
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You’ll soon realise that this internet business is thick with jargon—and computer related jargon is thicker than most. |
How does it work?
Using links to jump from one piece of information to another is based on a concept called hypertext, (yes I did mention it before). This is a very simple idea in practice and I did make an attempt to explain it, but just in case it wasn’t clear here’s a good explanation which was given by John Shelly in his book ‘The Internet and World Wide Web Explained’:
‘Imagine you are in a library, searching a card index system for a particular book. When you find the card it will contain details such as a book title, shelf position, author, publisher, date of publication etc. Now suppose that you would like to know more about the author. Let us say that you could simply press the author’s name on the card and up pops another card with details about the author, including a photograph and details about other books he or she has written. One of these titles interests you and your press on the title. Lo and behold: another card pops up from ‘nowhere’ with a brief summary of the book, cost, shelf position, and so on. You may now wish to go back to the original card, press on the shelf position, and a map of the library pops up showing you where the physical shelf is situated. That is what hypertext is all about.’
Thanks John, couldn’t have put it better myself.
Why is this hypertext a good thing?
The use of hypertext links is useful because it changes the way we ‘consume’ information. Reading a book in the traditional manner is, for want of a better description, a sequential task. Hypertext changes this—now it becomes as Paul Gilster puts it (rather grandly), ‘the pursuit of ideas through a forest of data’.16 We can now choose one of many paths through a document or a collection of data; the path that suits our particular needs.
For example, when I read a manual giving instructions about how to use my word processor I might only be interested in finding out about how to use the ruler. If the manual is a hypertext document I would click the hyperlinks taking me directly to the sections I’m interested in. You, reading the same document, on the other hand may be interested in finding out how to create a mail merge. Again in a hypertext document you would jump straight to the sections which deal with this topic.
We can both read the same document but by taking different paths through we maximise our individual learning experience.
The World Wide Web is, if you’ll excuse the expression, the ‘Grand Daddy’ of all hypertext based systems. This has some tremendous advantages; instead of being restricted to a single book or manual you have a whole world of information which is just a click away. A click of the mouse and your looking at the local weather on a web site in Africa (http://space.rice.edu/~rss/weather/africa.html), click again and your checking out the evening courses at Cambridge University (http://www.cam.ac.uk/CambUniv/UGProspectus/Applying/ContEd.html). It’s an opportunity to satisfy the most curious of minds.
Some of the disadvantages spring from this very richness- I remember reading somewhere (can’t remember where) of someone feeling that they had ‘toxic data syndrome’ after being on the internet for a long time—there is so much to explore that you could certainly feel overwhelmed by it all. The open-ended nature of the Web can at times mean documents seem unstructured, and the pursuit of information about a topic is on many occasions open-ended; there are so many pages of information relevant to your topic and each of them have their own set of link. Sometimes there seems to be no end to your quest.
The web is such a huge store of information that it can be difficult to find the exact bits of information that you need. This problems has been addressed by the introduction of search engines, which index and catalogue the information and can be searched using key words or by a hierarchical system of menus. Searching for information will be explored at greater length in a later chapter. If this was a hypertext document you could now just jump to the section on searching the internet if that was what you where particularly interested in. (Oops! I forgot this now is a hypertext document - so as soon as I put up the search engine chapter I will be putting a link to it from here.)
Web Addresses
Each page on the WWW has a name and an address called a URL (Universal Resource Locators or Uniform Resource Locators depending on who you ask) which gives its location on the Internet. The address consists of the name of the Web site (a computer somewhere in the world, called a host) followed by the directory path to the file and finally the name of the file. Everything after the name of the Web site is separated by two forward slashes.
Here is an example. My wife Pat created this Web site to be tell visitors all about the West End of Glasgow. One of the pages on the site gives some background information about Pat and has the following URL:
HTTP://www.glasgowwestend.co.uk/about/aboutpat.html
The HTTP part means this is a web page (as opposed to information from a FTP or gopher site), www.glasgowwestend.co.uk is the name of the computer the page is located on, (yes that’s the host computer), /about/ is the directory on the computers hard disk that the file is located and the last part, aboutpat.html is the name of the file. The above URL would retrieve an HTML file called aboutpat.html and display it on a Web browser.
To the uninitiated URLs can look a bit complicated. Most of the time however you can surf the web without ever having to worry about the addresses of the pages you are accessing. Each time you click a link the browser reads the address and displays the desired page—all the bits in between, i.e. the ‘magic’ are invisible as far as you, the user is concerned.
If you come across a URL in a magazine or newspaper, which you would like to check out it is of course possible to find the required page on the Internet using just this information. What you have to do is make sure you type it into your Web browser exactly as it appears —and the page you are after should be found. Sometimes unfortunately that is not true—the internet is such a dynamic and fast changing medium that web site can come and go pretty quickly—or ‘move house’, i.e move to another machine(sometimes giving the page a new address) We will look at the mechanics of web browsers in a later chapter, and how exactly you go about typing this URL in.
Conclusion
In this chapter we have covered a lot of ground - so much that you will probably have to have another read through it before you can take it all in. But don't worry too much about trying to remember it all. The best way to learn about the Internet is to use it. That is what the next few chapters of this book will be all about; getting the best from your Web browser; the magic of e-mail and successfull Internet searching.
Hope you've found this useful - get in touch if you have any suggestions or comments.
Footnotes
1. particularly if they are doing a job like yours.
2. Networked computers are computers that are all connected to each other. Messages and files can be passed from one to the other.
3. Mean or what?