On beyond email

• email: just one of those things you'd never thought would be useful until you use it, then suddenly you use it all the time
  
• discussions: Talk, talk, talk, and more talk is the soul of the Internet. The Net has revived the arts of conversation and correspondence. They can be take place in real time or over long periods. They can be one-on-one, in a small group, or in a large group. They can be one-to-many (like a lecture) or many-to-many (like a discussion), moderated or "anything goes," private or public.
  
• information: databases (free and subscription), search engines, directories, lists, address lists, dictionaries, useful and useless, well-arranged and chaotic, reliable and questionable. You can find out almost anything online - government regulations, tax forms, population surveys, airline schedules, translations of Homer, the subway system of Paris, the odds on the Rams taking the Super Bowl
  
• articles: Whether written for the Net, or uploaded from print sources, the Internet has an enormous number of articles about an amazing variety of subjects, from co-enzyme reactions, the moons of Jupiter, and the future of healthcare to the sacred texts of Tibet.
  
• services: Buy your airline ticket, find out the weather, join a dating service, check your stocks, shop for CDs, consult an oracle, order a book - you can find a rapidly growing array of services online, some free, and some for fee.
  
• software: A great deal of software is available online, a surprising amount of it "freeware" or "shareware" (see glossary), from screen savers and clock utilities to games and word processors.
  
• chats: Discussions in real time. For this reason, the collective wisdom in most chat "rooms" is noticeably lower than in conferencing discussions - in a chat session, you hear only from people who happen to be on at that moment. These are available on the Internet itself, where they are fairly anarchic, or on proprietary systems, where they are sometimes more organized, complete with special guests.
  
• gaming and role-playing: A variety of games can be played across the Internet. In "MUDs" and "MUSEs" the participants themselves build whole fantasy worlds in text, and play out roles in these worlds - some in sword-and-sorcery mode, others in outer space or the Old West. A few pioneers have begun to explore the educational power of such role-playing games.

What are the different ways I can get to these things?

• proprietary systems: America OnLine, Compuserve, Prodigy and the like are the giant malls of cyberspace - private property, separate from the Internet itself, with their own rules, run for profit, with everything from chat rooms and moderated discussion groups to databases and Internet access. Their advantage used to be that they were easier to use than the rest of cyberspace, but with the advent of fast, easy, powerful Web browsers and search engines, that advantage is disappearing - and they can be frustratingly slow and quirky themselves, despite the slick exterior. Smaller systems, such as the Well, Echo, the Utne Cafe, and the River, specialize in conversation in hundreds of different subjects. Others, like HealthOnline, cater to a particular industry.
  
• World Wide Web: Web sites mostly present articles, but increasingly they include interactive sections, such as chat rooms, conference-style discussion groups, and forms for the user to fill out. Unlike ftp sites or Usenet newsgroups, Web sites can use graphics of all kinds, special formatting and fonts, and different background colors, and are quickly integrating sound, animation, and video clips. This versatility - and their ease of construction (my nine-year-old is working on his) - makes them the burgeoning frontier towns of cyberspace.
  
• Usenet discussions: Discussions known as "newsgroups," with names like rec.arts.disney, bionet.diagnostics, misc.health.arthritis, and alt.med.outpat.clinic. There are over 10,000. They use a "newsreader" program that your Internet provider will have online. Anyone can start a group in the "alt" domain, so that domain has a lot more junk and joke groups. Some groups are moderated, and have a higher signal-to-noise ratio than the unmoderated ones. Disadvantage: your Internet provider must carry the newsgroup you are interested in, or you can't receive it. One big value: FAQs (see glossary)
  
• listservs: Organized email rings that are a prominent form of online discussion. Join such a group, and you get (as email) any comment that anyone else in the group wishes to make. Want to contribute a thought? Just mail it to the listserv address, and it is automatically distributed to the whole list. Some are moderated, with a volunteer editor weeding out the superfluous and organizing the responses. Some have archives of valuable information. The advantage over other forms of discussion is simple: Not everyone can access AOL or Compuserve, or even all Usenet discussions, but everyone who is online gets email.
  
• ftp sites: Collections of documents and software put online so that others can freely download them. An efficient way of distributing documents that somebody, somewhere, might find extremely valuable, without taking up clerical time to transport them.

How to get online:

• a computer
  
• a modem (a 14.4k baud rate is adequate, 28.8 will make things a lot more swift and comfortable)
  
• some communications software (proprietary systems often provide their own)
  
• an account with an Internet provider.
  

How to get to a Web address: Getting into the World Wide Web on the Internet takes a little more horsepower. You can get on the rest of the Internet with a decade-old command-line computer that just shows lines of type. But to get on the Web, your computer must be graphics-capable (preferably with a color monitor) and sound-capable if you want to hear sounds (which are becoming more common on the Web). You will also need:

• a heftier connection to the Internet (called a Slip or PPP account)
  
• a few more pieces of software (in the Windows world called Winsock and the TCP/IP stack, on Macs called MacTCP and Config PPP) that help the computer handle the Web connection. These are available for free online, included with communications software or with modems, or in disks that come with books about the Internet
  
• a Web browser for looking at the Web
  
• other small programs that work with the browser (or by themselves) on specific tasks, such as handling email, graphic images, sounds, and compressed or encoded documents. These small programs are also available at little or no cost.

How much does it cost?

Lots. Almost nothing. Depends. If you decided to build your own Web site, you could easily spend $2 million to hire a design firm and a half million a year to maintain it. The Change Project's web site, which was recently featured in PC Week and The Los Angeles Times, cost me $58 and some time. Some institutions maintain Web sites at costs that are so small they are lost in the budgetary noise. Others hire a crew.

Private databases online can charge from $25 to $300 per hour, others are free.

Proprietary systems like AOL and Compuserve typically charge a low monthly fee (less than $10) with hourly charges that kick in after a certain point, plus special charges for particular services. "Frequent Fliers" on these systems can rack up bills for hundreds of dollars per month.

Basic access to the Internet, Usenet, the Web, and email is the cheapest. At this writing, Internet providers are typically charging a flat monthly fee of $15 to $20 for basic access - and AT&T and many of the other phone companies have announced that they are about to enter the competition, in a business in which the incrimental cost is close to zero.

Cheapest of all? Free email service. The catch? Every message is "packaged" with an ad.

Phone charges are next to nothing - local calls in and near most metro areas, 800 numbers elsewhere for some systems.

The price trend? For access, it's down, trending toward zero. For building things such as Web sites in cyberspace, it's up, trending toward movie production costs.

Glossary: some basic Net terms

Acronyms: Like CBers and old-time telegraph operators, people online sometimes write in acronyms to save time, such as YMMV ("your mileage may vary"), ROTFL ("rolling on the floor laughing") and RTFM ("read the f-ing manual"). If you don't know what they mean, ask.

Browser: Software for viewing and navigating the Web. The most popular by far is Netscape. They also coordinate the tasks of "helper" and "plug-in" software handling such things as email, sounds, and video. Usually inexpensive, or bundled with communications packages, browsers are also available online.

Downloading: Find an article or piece of software that you like online? Much of the time, you can simply copy it onto your own computer.

Emoticons: Emotional icons, or "smileys." Here's one: :-) Tilt your head to the left, and you'll see a little smiling face. Some people put them in online messages to show when they are amused, or shocked :-0 or weargin glasses 8-) or dressed up like Santa Claus *<|:-) There are hundreds of them.

FAQs: Frequently Asked Questions - Usenet discussion groups quickly get tired of new people asking the same questions over and over, so almost all of them have put together lists of these questions, with answers. These FAQs are surprisingly useful and pragmatic introductions to the basic outlines of subjects from earthquake prediction to AIDS. The Usenet group news.answers is a collection of FAQs on a wide variety of subjects.

Flame: Both noun and verb. To "flame" someone is to insult someone and derogate their ideas in an online discussion. As in the "real" world, some people consider this a form of sport. Others consider it bad manners. A "flame suit" is a mythical garment that renders the user immune to flames.

Freeware and shareware, demo, and beta: Different types of free or inexpensive software available online. Even if cost is not a problem, these can be very useful ways to evaluate your own needs. "Freeware" is free - they just give it away. There is a lot of it, and some of it is quite good. "Shareware" is a little different - if you like it you're supposed to send the author a check, usually much less than retail software would cost. A "demo" version of retail software either will show you all of its chops, but without saving or printing, or it will work for a set period of time - three days or so - and then self-destruct. "Beta" software is a test version. It's not quite ready for prime time, but they're letting it out for free to find out where the bugs are.

HTML: HyperText Markup Language, the very simple coding (with marks such as <p> for paragraph and <br> for line break) that turns plain text documents into pages ready for the Web.

Internet ("the Net"): A physical global network of networks of millions of computers. Founded by the U.S. government, originally for defense research purposes, now run privately, overseen by the Internet Society and the National Science Foundation. Often loosely used to mean not only the Internet itself but the whole realm of networks connected to it, i.e. anyplace to which you can send email from an Internet address.

Search engine: Powerful programs, most of them available for free online, that can search millions of Web pages, ftp sites, and public discussion groups for keywords. Popular ones include Lycos, Yahoo!, and InfoSeek. Recommended: Excite for surprisingly human-like intuitive searches, and Alta Vista for speed and power.

Unix: The operating system used for much of the Internet. Occasionally, you may need to know a few very basic Unix commands - and you can find guides to them online.

URL: Universal Resource Locator, an address for a place in cyberspace (such as a Web site or ftp site). HealthOnline's URL is http://www.healthonline.com. Mine is http://www.well.com/~bbear/. Type or copy URLs just as they are, with no spaces, and no periods on the end

World Wide Web (WWW): The World Wide Web is a virtual network of millions of documents on computers all over the Internet, all available for public perusal and downloading through easy-to-use Web "browsers." Anything on any document can be "linked" to another document, or even to a particular word on another document - click on a highlighted word or image, and you're there. Going from one link to another is called "surfing the Web," or "Web crawling."