Internet offers Weird, Wild, Useless(Originally written in April of 1999, so some sites may no longer exist) From the slightly weird to the wild, and the constructive to the useless, the Internet offers us many things. It allows the spreading of information in a way that was never before possible. This means we can become better informed; however, it also allows the possibility of misinformation to become common knowledge in a matter of days. Chances are, if you want some information about a certain subject, it’s on the Internet. If you want some Bryan Adams’ lyrics, try www.bryanadams.net. Or if you want to learn about the latest products from General Mills, www.generalmills.com will take you there. There are two ways to find an item you are looking for, searching and guessing. Searching is usually the most useful but sometimes can return too much information. For example a search for “cat” returns 265,964 articles. There are many search engines (programs that browse the Internet for information.) Some of the best are Altavista (www.altavista.com), HOTBOT (www.hotbot.com) and WebCrawler (www.webcrawler.com). There are also many web guides that list information in a categorical order such as Lycos (www.lycos.com), Excite (www.excite.com), Infoseek (www.infoseek.com), and Yahoo (www.yahoo.com). Guessing is sometimes faster, however, it sometimes returns unexpected results. For example, www.dog.com returns dog information and merchandise which is probably what you were looking for. www.cat.com returns information about caterpillar tractors and earthmovers, which may or may not be what you are looking for. However, www.chicken.com returns the Supernet homepage (whatever company that is), probably nothing like what you wanted. To become net-savvy, there are some terms that we need to become familiar with. Browser -- this is a program that runs on your computer that allows you to “browse” or look through the content provided on the Internet. These programs allows you to view a combination of pictures and text in a web page. Some common browsers included Netscape Navigator that can be downloaded free of charge at (http://home.netscape.com/download/index.html) and Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 that can be found at (http://www.microsoft.com/ie/download/). There are many new terms and acronyms on the Internet. For example, consider the following: Hypertext: -- is text on a web page (usually underlined) that allows the user to click on the words and be transferred to a new location. FTP-- stands for File Transfer Protocol wich is used to move files from one server to another (in most cases, your own computer). Server: -- is a disk drive or data storage location which holds files to be read from, or transferred to other computers. They usually have quite a large storage capacity and run on faster microchips, such as the Alpha chip. However, almost any computer can be set up as a server with the right software. Web -- just as a spider web is made up of many lines and strings in a pattern, the Internet web is made up of many computers networked together through fiber-optic cables, phone lines, and network connections. There are two basic graphic types that can be put on a web page, “jpg” and “gif”. Jpg is a “Joint Photographic Experts Group” graphic. It usually contains 16 million colors and is therefore used for photographs and other high-resolution images. It is usually compressed, thereby allowing larger graphics with less disk space. Gif is a CompuServe Bitmap and is made up of 256 colors. These can be animated or still and also allows for transparent colors. E-mail -- short for electronic mail. This allows people to send messages via computer to anyone else who has the capability to receiving e-mail. It is sent to addresses just as we send mail to postal addresses with a few differences. For example if we are sending something to johndoe@anybusiness.com, the computer divides it up as follows: “Com” could be considered as the Zip code. It first searches for a list of commercial organizations. Then “anybusiness’ is used as the street address. “Johndoe” is used as the personal address because there are probably many people who work at “anybusiness.” There are also divisions in an internet address. For example, consider the following: http://cc.usu.edu/~slp8n/index.html. The first part (http) is called the protocol and sets the distinction of what kind of server is being connected. The next part (://) is a separator. The next part (cc.usu.edu) is the domain, where .edu is the top-level domain, and the others are subdomains. The next part (/~slp8n) is a directory on the server, and finally index.html is a file on that server. There are some basic distinctions in classification of web sites. The most common are:
The upside to this new naming policy is while www.deere.com is the John Deere website www.deere.nom could be the website of Roger and Nancy Deere, from Casper, Wyoming. The downside is that we may be forced to try various possibilities of domains to actually find the right site. So what nationality is the Internet? According to The Internet Report, a comprehensive look at the online world by the investment specialists Morgan Stanley & Co., “more than half, or 28,470, of the computer networks around the Earth that constitute the Internet are based here in the United States. The runner-up is Canada, with 4,795 networks, and in third place is France, with 2,003 networks. After that comes Australia, with 1,875, barely squeaking past Japan, with 1,847, and Germany, with 1,750. We were surprised to learn that the United Kingdom has just 1,436 networks on the Internet ” There are many sites all over the world full of information concerning everything from aardvarks to zephyrs. Here are some examples:
The world wide web allows us to familiarize ourselves with the world, set up a cyberspace storefront, spread our own ideas, gather information for school reports, and keep in touch with loved-ones many miles or even continents away. What will technology think of next? |