Going Online

While you are sitting at home, how can you ride a roller coaster, enjoy a workout with your cat, learn how to handle stress and watch the Earth’s changing climate system? The answer is simple – through the Internet. In this chapter, we will introduce you to the basic concepts of the Internet, show you the different ways in which you can connect to it and also provide you a brief glimpse into the wide variety of things that you can do using the Internet.

Getting Connected

While you may have the option of choosing a dial-up connection to the Internet, you should be aware that dial-up modems are fast becoming a thing of the past. More than two-thirds of the world’s Internet users are now using high-speed connections. And there is no mystery why when you consider the kind of tremendous advantages they offer over dial-up connections.

• Faster Connections – Broadband speeds are at least ten to twenty times faster than dial-up connections. This enables huge amounts of data to be quickly transferred. For example, while one would have to wait for at least ten minutes before a typical song could be downloaded on a dial-up connection, through broadband, you can download it in seconds! Similarly, even big email attachments can be sent off in seconds.

• Cheaper Connections – Though the initial costs of broadband may seem on the higher side, you will find that you need to pay only a flat monthly fee irrespective of how long you use the connection. Thus, in the long run, the broadband connection will cost you far less than a dial-up one.

• Greater Convenience – With dial-up connections, you need to connect to the Internet every time you want to go online. With broadband, you are always connected – 24/7. This makes it extremely convenient for you to regularly check your mail, access some information quickly and even make phone calls over the Internet when you want to.

• More Services – Broadband connections have opened up a wide variety of services to all users. Because of the high-speed Internet access, users can consider Internet telephony like Skype, video conferencing and even telecommuting. You can listen to online radios or watch streaming videos with ease.

Depending on the kind of service available – DSL, cable, satellite or wireless – the broadband speeds may vary a little but they offer far better speeds than dial-ups on any given day. It is therefore advisable that you consider getting yourself a broadband connection to go online.

Staying in Touch

The Internet is now not just a place for sharing or finding information – the latest and most exciting multimedia feature is now to be found on the Web. Be it a preview of an upcoming movie, a popular song or a news event. Regardless of this, the most frequently used application of the Internet that remains so even to this day is the Electronic Mail or email. Millions around the world who have some kind of access to the Internet, be it at home, school or work, use it simply to exchange emails and for no other purpose.

Sending an email is very easy. Your Internet Service Provider would have given you an email address such as yourself@yourisp.com and even set up an email software like Outlook Express to send emails.

Using the email software, you can create a message and then just send it. This email first gets sent to your ISP’s mail server, which in turn forwards it to the mail server of the recipient. This message now stays on the recipient’s mail server till that person requests to see the mail by ‘checking his or her mail’. The mail gets downloaded onto the recipient’s computer where it is displayed by the email software.

There are some obvious benefits to email. For one, it is quick – emails are received within minutes of sending them. Secondly, they are far less intrusive than telephone calls. People can respond to emails at their convenience. Finally, emails have traditionally been far less formal than regular mail. As a result, it is easier to quickly compose and send an email than a regular mail.

In fact, nowadays emails are not just restricted to exchanging messages between friends and family. If you are reading an article on the Web and find it interesting, you can just write to that person and let him or her know. If you are facing some problem and are looking for a solution, you can write to some experts and request their opinions. Many respond to such emails and you should not be surprised to find your query quickly answered.

Your ISP is not the only way for you to acquire an email address. There are many free ‘Web’ based email services that will give you not only free email addresses but several other powerful features like sharing files and chat facilities. The advantages of these email addresses are two-fold: you can check your email from any computer that has a browser and an Internet connection. Secondly, your email address will be the same for life, even if you regularly change your ISPs or your job.

Some of the most popular Webmail sites are –

• Gmail – One of the most popular web-based email services from Google that even offers chat facilities.
• Hotmail – This MSN service started the trend of Webmail services.
• Yahoo! Mail – Another popular web-based email service from Yahoo!

 
Searching and Shopping

When you first start surfing the web, you may have a few favorite sites that you keep visiting. However, very soon, you realize the tremendous potential of the Web with information on every possible topic available down to the last detail. However, with over a billion web pages now online, how are you going to find the piece of specific information that you are looking for?

Earlier, searching the Internet used to require some amount of skill and a fair bit of luck to find the information you were looking for. Not any more. Search engines like Yahoo!, Google and Ask.com have completely revolutionized the Web making it possible to search and find the information you are looking for in a matter of seconds, no matter how detailed or obscure the information you were looking for.

Search engines are of two types – directories and indexes. For example, Yahoo! is a directory that classifies all information into various categories and as such makes it easier for you to find general information on any topic such as dinosaurs or English universities, for instance.

However, if you are looking for some specific information like say, about Tyrannosaurus Rex, you might want to go to a web index like Google. These use software programs called robots and spiders to keep looking through the Internet, analyzing billions of links and web pages, blog postings and newsgroups, to index all the words used. As a result, if you are looking for specific information, you could be taken to a page that contains some text relevant to your search criteria while the website itself may have nothing to do with what you are searching for.

This does make it possible for you to get your information from the most unexpected of quarters. Of course, to make life easier, the search results are ranked in order of relevancy, measured in terms of the number of times your search terms appears in that document. This is by far the most thorough way of finding the information you are looking for.

Another activity that has exploded with the growth of the Internet is online shopping. The number of stores offering products and services online as well as the number of users shopping online has seen a huge increase in the last decade or so. Accordingly, attempts are being made to ensure that the lines through which these transactions take place are being made as secure as possible.

Even then, there are many who are still a little wary of shopping online. They are a little concerned about revealing their credit card number online and secondly, they still do not see any big advantage in shopping online. Let us consider these factors one by one.

First of all, if you have ever used your credit card in a restaurant or over the phone, you should feel comfortable making purchases online. After all, all your financial information is usually encrypted and then sent across and unlike in the restaurant or store, no third person can actually see it. Very few online shopping sites store the credit card numbers and in fact, are very careful to make sure that the privacy of their customers is fully protected.

Secondly, it is incredibly convenient to shop on the Internet. It is open on all days, twenty-four hours a day. Most purchases made over the Internet come cheaper because compared to brick and mortar stores, online stores have lesser overheads.

You can purchase almost anything on the Internet these days – from electronic equipment to garments, gift items to flowers, movies, books and software. Delivery is quick and most online stores offer the same kind of hassle-free return policies as regular stores. Finally, you can carry out a comparison of various products, both feature wise and price wise, from the comfort of your home before you come to a purchasing decision.

Of course, to ensure that you have a pleasant shopping experience every time, take the following precautions every time you shop online:
• Always shop with companies that you are familiar with or have an established reputation.
• Ensure that the companies list a real street address and phone numbers where they can be contacted.
• Do not complete the purchase if the store is not using secure servers (‘https’ in the browser instead of ‘http’) for financial transactions.

Online Networking

Strangely enough, quite contrary to the fears that the Internet had raised a few years back – of people getting more and more isolated and losing the human touch – today the Internet has become the ultimate meeting spot for people of all ages and all across the world. In recent years, social networking sites have simply exploded with millions of people joining in, looking for a place they can just hang out together with people who share their interest. In fact, among the younger generation, not having an online presence in one of the popular social networking sites is like not having a name!

Setting up an account is fairly simple. You just need to fill in a few personal details and you are off. However, before you open an account and post a profile, consider which site may be suitable for you. If you are trying to establish a professional network, LinkedIn would be a good option while if you want a personal network, MySpace or Facebook would be great choices.

Once you have opened an account, you can post your profile – all this means is creating a page that will contain details about yourself, your special interest, pet peeves and whatever other information you want to share about yourself. You could even upload photos of friends, family members and pets, share music files that you like and put up videos.

Having an online profile is a great way of telling the world more about yourself and of finding people who share interests similar to yours. The more creatively you express yourself, the more the number of people who would want to hang out with you. As more and more people read about your profile, you will start getting contacted by kindred souls who will either send you emails or will communicate to you through instant messaging. You could all chat together in chat rooms or share a private one-on-one. While some of your friends may want to meet you in person, most of the time relationships on social networking sites stay virtual. And yet no one can deny the feeling of companionship and belonging that they provide to all the members of the site.

Downloading Useful Files

Downloading is merely accessing digital information that is on some remote computer and making it available on your computer. For example, if you have purchased a particular software online and need to install it on your computer or would just like to listen to a particular song on your computer, you will have to access those files, store them on your computer and then use them. The process by which you get those files from the remote computer to your own computer is called downloading.

To download a file, click on the link provided with your right mouse-button. Amongst the various menu options, choose ‘Save to Disk’ or ‘Save Target As.’. You can save the file in a location you have specified on your hard drive. Once the file is available on your hard drive, you can either listen to it using your media player or if it is a software file, you can follow the manufacturer’s instructions to install it on your computer.

The Internet is not the only powerful tool that the PC provides you access with. In the next chapter, we will see how modern PCs are computational and home entertainment units all rolled in to one.