By the end of this course, you should: Have a basic understanding of Internet terms and what they mean. Be able to send and receive email and email attachments. Know how to find a Web page on the Internet. Figure out who has registered a site and when it was registered. Be able to search effectively, by using different search strategies (narrowing or broadening your search terms) and by using different search engines. Bookmark sites on the Web you find useful Be proficient with an Internet browser, including saving a page from the Web to your computer. Apply everything above to researching and preparing news stories.

Brief History & Explanation of Terms

For example: http://209.140.244.238/

But numbers in a sequence of four are hard to remember, so names began to be assigned, which correspond to registered numbers.

For example: http://www.poynter.org/search

Information (bits) is broken down into packets and sent in batches to a server that either responds back, or passes on the information. This happens repeatedly until the packets all arrive where they were destined to and you see what you are supposed to on your screen.

And all that is done by a simple click of the mouse. When you click on a hyperlink, the computer looks up the IP address or name and finds out where it is stored and asks that server if it can see the contents of the page or file. You say that you 'go' to a Web site, but what you actually do is ask to see the information on your screen, which is why they call it browsing. (Not to worry, you can't break anyone else's machine by clicking on a link.)
So you can go anywhere, to anywhere, from anywhere on the World Wide Web. To see the route your browser takes to www.poynter.org, the example above, type this into the Location or Address bar of your browser:

http://nitrous.digex.net/mae/sn-lg.html

It's a site that I like to Bookmark (Netscape term) or mark as a Favorite (MS Explorer term). The 'http' stands for hypertext transfer protocol, and it's a language, just like TCP/IP. I bookmark it as an easy way to return here without going to the trouble of typing in the address each time. Your bookmarks are just a collection of links. On this page, near the bottom of the screen, you can see a box for typing. Enter www.poynter.org, click on 'trace' and then click once on the gray 'Submit' button. You'll soon see a new page with the path your request took over the Internet and how long it took to travel from server to server. (Yes, those are milliseconds!)

In most browsers you no longer have to type 'http://' because it's assumed. That's the Internet standard for finding a file -- protocol:domain is its simplest form. The slashes and names after the domain name,'.net', indicate folders and files on the computer that is storing the page you want to see. Think of addresses as directions to a large file cabinet, holding file drawers that hold documents. The html or htm on the end stands for hypertext markup language, a text-based computer code that all browsers understand, and luckily, that's easy to learn.
 
 

SOME INTERNET TERMS
TCP/IP	http / https	ftp	irc	email
cookies	cache	telnet	news	gopher (rare)
chat room	bulletin board	listserve	URL	intranet

 

DOMAIN NAME CONVENTIONS
country codes (.ba, .hr, .de, .yu)	.org	.com	.net
.edu	.gov	.mil	.int

Basic Browser Use

• back, forward, home, reload
• 'find' in a page (Ctrl + F)
• selecting text from a Web page
• setting a home page
• saving a page or a file
• looking at a file locally
• deleting cookies
• clearing the cache / history folder
• making a bookmark / favorite
• organizing bookmarks / favorites
• multiple browser windows
• reloading-refreshing
• browsing history
• viewing a page's source code

How to Find Information on the Internet

Searching Rules of Thumb:

1. Do you know who might have this information?
2. Can you guess ?
3. Who should have this information ?
4. Think through a search, pick your search engine, then type.
5. Try more than one search engine.

Other Internet Topics

Signing up for free email -- How To (yahoo, hotmail, eudoramail)
Using email as reporting tool
Viruses, attachments and security
"Real" (www.whitehouse.gov) vs. "Fake" (www.whitehouse.net) Web pages
 

Information About the Internet Itself

Reporting Resources