Caught in the Web (part 1)

Virtually every other cub of the Celtic Tiger got a new computer and modem for Christmas, and an Internet account thrown in.

It's sitting there, glowering at them from the corner of their rooms, and they haven't the slightest idea what to do with it.

The computers of the 1990s are so easy that your granny could teach you, and most of the kids gloating over their Christmas presents have already studied them in school.

Non-grannies who are not schoolchildren can buy one of the For Dummies series of books such as Windows 95 (or Macs) for Dummies and work their way through it. Within a week they should be experts too.

The Internet is equally simple to use, despite its massive heft. The best introductory book is Rough Guide to the Internet, which costs something like a fiver, fits in your jacket pocket and teaches you everything from how to use email to how to make your own website.

The people who learn fastest are those who stick the tech-support telephone number of their internet service provider (ISP, be it Ireland On Line, Tinet or whoever) up on the computer and spend a certain amount of time chatting to techies for the first couple of months.

The Internet gives access to a bunch of different services. The most commonly used is electronic mail (email), closely followed by the World Wide Web. The first five emails I ever sent went to Utah, California, Melbourne, Perth and Galway, and each of the five had an 1,800-word article attached to it. Sending all five together cost 11.7p - the price of a single local call.

The World Wide Web is a series of interconnected "pages" - in effect, articles and advertisements - which are held on computers all over the world. For example, my own website, at www.geocities.com/Paris/Metro/2332, is held on the gigantic Geocities computer, which offers free pages to people all over the world. Some of the sites are just ads for companies, others are homepages for individuals and organisations, who link to pages that interest them. I put links to Aertel on my page, so you can check what's on TV tonight, and to a guide to what's on in the cinema in Ireland.

Other programs are used less. Telnet allows you to turn your computer into part of another network, for instance if you want to access a library. ICQ, CUSeeMe and IRC programs are for chatting in one form or another. NetPhone programs - probably the next big thing - mean you can make international calls for the price of a local phone call, using the Internet. Fetch and other ftp (file transfer protocol) programs are for downloading software quickly from far away.

But the main things most people use, at the moment, are email and the Web. Email is wonderful, because it's fast, cheap and disposable. Email uses such programs as Microsoft Mail, Pegasus and Eudora. The Web uses a browser - the commonest are Internet Explorer and Netscape.

The Web is an extraordinary research tool. Only the other night I was "talking" on IRC to a woman who had been adopted, and has now found her birth-mother by using an Internet association. Her mother was deep in the mists of Alzheimer's, but she is now tracking down the rest of the five children her mother gave up for adoption. Almost any kind of research is possible using the World Wide Web, though it takes a little while to learn to use it effectively.

Finding the page you want is easy using the many search engines, some specialised, some wide-ranging. My favourite at the moment is Metacrawler - www.metacrawler.com - which collates results from several of the other engines. If you find a site you think you will come back to again, bookmark it or add it to your "Favourites" list.

Michael Cunningham (who edits the Computimes page every Monday in The Irish Times) has an online course in digital journalism (http:// members.tripod.com. (tilde)mick(underline)cunningham/ sitemap.htm) with cog notes on how to use everything from email to browsers. Very handy.

at work, rest or play

Fun is readily accessible. You can listen to Gerry Ryan online (via www.2fm.ie), as well as hundreds of other radio stations. If you watched Sesame Street as a child, you will be shocked and grieved by the cruel lies at http://fractalcow.com/bert - the Bert is Evil site, with its ridiculous allegations about Bert, the uptight but much-loved half of Bert and Ernie.

The Onion (www.theonion.com) gives hours of silly fun. This is a satirical magazine with headlines like "More states shifting welfare control to McDonalds" and "New York to install special `infants only' dumpsters". A page of jokes to entertain your little sister is at www.needham.org.uk/kids/jokes.htm.

If you're a film buff, the first place to go is Ain't it Cool News (www.aint-it-cool-news.com), where portly bearded redhead Harry Knowles enters all the gossip fed to him by film-biz insiders. Rage though the studios may, this is the place to get the inside skinny on films - before they come - straight from the horse's mouth.

Another cool site is Drew's Script-o-Rama (www.script-o-rama.com), where you can download the scripts of many major films - very valuable for screenwriters (and perhaps for Transition Year students who are entering the current media scope competition). Some of the scripts here (e.g. the one for Raiders of the Lost Ark) are earlier versions, which can be all the more interesting.

In homework terms, the Web is a godsend. Every subject has at least one site, and usually dozens, maintained by people impassioned about it. It's not worth spending hours online every night, looking up the wisdom of the Net about whatever your homework concerns. But for the special project, or for the subject that is proving a puzzle, there's nothing like the Web.