Why is the Internet good for you?

Making life easier

Computers can store all sorts of useful and positive information such as letters, photographs, music and video and, at its most basic, the Internet is simply a multitude of computers linked together by telephone line, cable or satellite that share the information they hold with others.

For most of us now the Internet is a part of daily life, it is a tool we can use in our personal and professional lives.

Using the Internet can make your life easier and make it possible for you to do things that would have cost thousands of pounds and required a high level of skill a few years ago.

• It enables people to talk to each across the globe from their own home or office
• It allows people to do research by connecting to libraries and institutions
• It empowers people to tell their stories and to hear other individual voices from around the world
• Small communities with small budgets can publish information and keep in touch with each other at a low cost

On a practical level

Think of the Internet like your TV, radio, mobile phone and postal service rolled into one. The Internet allows us to access and share, not only text documents, but also photographs, artwork, audio and video material. We can download software, music, films, participate in interactive forums where users post and respond to messages, and pass confidential information across secure networks.

This ability has lots of practical applications, we can now:

• Shop online, comparing prices instantly and buying almost anything from anywhere in the world
• Get the latest news from a variety of sources
• Find international weather reports
• Listen to or download music
• Watch movies and the TV programmes we missed
• Keep an online diary of events
• Send messages to people around the world with email and also to other devices like mobile phones
• Do our banking, pay our tax and a whole variety of social services
• join in online auctions where we can buy and sell almost any object you could imagine

More than the WWW

There is a difference between the Internet and the thing we know as the World Wide Web. "The Web" is actually a part of the Internet. It is the part that most of us are familiar with but here some of the others:

Allows us to send and receive electronic mail messages. These messages may also contain attachments such as photos, printable documents, sound and video files.

For posting and responding to public "bulletin board" messages. Users, sometimes called Usenetters, read and post email-like messages called "articles" to a number of distributed bulletin boards

Allow us to download music, films, videos, television programmes, software -- virtually anything that can be stored electronically can be shared over the Internet.

Instant messaging is pretty much what you would imagine in that typed conversations happen in realtime. Most services offer a "presence awareness" feature, indicating whether people in your contact list are online and available to chat.

It is now possible to make telephone calls over the Internet using your computer as the receiver. "Voice over Internet Protocol" or VoIP as it is known, is the routing of voice conversations over the Internet or any other IP-based network. Some companies like Google are beginning to offer free phone conversations via its Internet telephone service.

A webcast is a television programme transmitted or "streamed" via the Internet. Webcast "clients" or players allow a user to connect to a server, which is distributing (webcasting) the programme, and displays the televisual content to the user.

Internet radio is a programme "streamed" via the Internet.

Because the radio signal is relayed over the Internet, it is possible to access the stations from anywhere in the world.

The World Wide Web

Along with email, the World Wide Web has contributed most to the popularity and growth of the Internet. In simple terms, the WWW is a system set up to organise published material on the Internet and present it to people in an easy-to-use form. It is the part of the Internet that lets us see things in a graphical form using what we know as websites. It also allows us to set up direct links from one piece of content to another.

The World Wide Web uses a method called “HTTP” or HyperText Transfer Protocol to convey information. When you type a Web address into your browser and hit “Go”, the address is sent to the computer holding the page you requested using “HTTP” and the page is sent back to your computer.

The language used for building pages on the Web is called HTML or HyperText Mark-up Language. This contains all the information about the page such as the colour of the text and the size and position of the pictures and graphics. It also allows us to put links to other documents on our page.

Just after the second World War, a scientist named Vannevar Bush published an essay entitled “As We May Think,” which proposed a huge index of information that people from all over the world could access and search. The original system was never developed but his essay later influenced others who would, one day, design the Internet and the World Wide Web.

The original World Wide Web was planned as a way for scientists to share their research data. In 1989, scientist Tim Berners-Lee and his team developed the initial World Wide Web standards. Probably the most important was the use of hypertext or “hot” portions of an electronic document that, when selected, would take the user through to a linked document.

The next great innovation for the Web came in 1992, when programmers at the University of Illinois developed the Mosaic browser, a software application that displayed not only the text of a Web page, but also embedded graphic elements as well.

What makes the Web so good?

Web pages can be viewed on almost any computer with an Internet connection and a Web browser.

Just point and click on your browser to access the information you need.

For any individual or organisation wishing to distribute information, the Web makes publishing easy and cost-effective. Putting information on the Web is much cheaper than traditional publishing, yet puts that information before a potential audience of millions. And, unlike printed publications, a Web document can be revised and updated at any time.

Websites -- for the record

Before we leave this section let's just look at what a website is. A website, Web site or WWW site (often shortened to just site) is a collection of pages in the form of coded documents which sit on a computer linked to the Internet, called a "host". All publicly accessible websites in existence make up the World Wide Web. The pages of a website are accessed from a homepage.

The address of the website is called the Uniform Resource Locator (URL). URLs for Web pages begin with the code http:// ("http" stands for hypertext transfer protocol). You don't need to know that right now but you may come across it in future.