Information at your fingertips

With the Internet growing in notoriety for such nefarious sites as those dealing in hatred and pornography, it is heartening to see an ever-increasing use of the medium for educational purposes. It is only fitting, as the Internet was created primarily for the dissemination of information.

It is a common misconception that the Internet was developed by the American military's top scientists to survive a nuclear war. The truth is far more mundane than that. The US Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency funded what it called the ARPANET project as a way of allowing expensive, but incompatible, mainframe computers to communicate with each other. This meant that they became shared, and cheaper, resources for the scientists.

The network that this research enabled first allowed one computer to "talk" to another on October 1st, 1969. InternetBut the huge success of the Internet could not have been anticipated. Its recent popularity is mainly due to the advent of the World Wide Web, which was invented in 1989 at the CERN laboratories in Switzerland by English software engineer Tim Berners-Lee.

The next giant leap forward for the nascent technology came five years after that with the development of the "Mosaic" Internet browser by Jim Clarke and his team at Netscape in California.

Although it is untrue that the Internet was originally designed to survive a nuclear war, it is certainly true now that not even an event of that magnitude could destroy the web. Even conservative estimates now put the number of web pages at more than one billion. The Irish Times website, ireland.com, alone adds more than a thousand pages every week.

The Internet is by far the fastest-growing communications medium the world has ever known. Radio took 37 years to reach 50 million listeners, and TV took 15 years to reach the same number of viewers. In contrast, the World Wide Web took just over three years to acquire 50 million users.

And the number of people online continues to grow in leaps and bounds. As of June, 2000, it was estimated that there were 332.73 million people using the Internet worldwide. The vast majority are, as you would expect, in North America.

However, Ireland is no slouch in terms of getting connected. Last March, Irish company Amarach Consulting announced that 592,000 people (16.3 per cent of the total population) here were using the Internet. Two months later, US company Nielsen NetRatings came up with an even higher figure: 778,000 (20.49 per cent of the population). With all of these users, and all of these pages, separating the wheat from the chaff is a major concern. There is no doubt that the Internet is a hugely important research tool, allowing access to aspects of education long unavailable to most people. However, finding the good stuff can be a long and laborious process.

Which is where this column comes in.

Over the coming weeks and months we will endeavour to point you in the right direction for your educational needs. It won't be all dry and academic either because there is plenty of educational fun to be had on the web.

Readers are invited to send queries to WebWorld on how to use the Internet for educating themselves or others. Questions from lecturers and students, teachers and pupils, parents and children are all welcome.

A number of websites will be reviewed here each week, from educational resources to general research sites to entertainment to the utterly bizarre.

The Internet is easy, it just takes a little patience. Questions can be emailed to this column at pcollins@irish-times.com or by post to Padraig Collins, The Irish Times New Media, 4th Floor, Ballast House, Aston Quay, Dublin 2.