Copyright © 2002, 1999 by Michael Segers, All rights reserved
Sorry, Rogers and Hammerstein fans, no raindrops on roses, certainly no snowflakes (let’s hope). But, after a year of rovin’ around the Internet, I want to share with you some sites that will help you understand why the Internet itself is one of my favorite things. Of course, the murderer’s home page with his plans, the threat to a Columbine student in an Internet chat room, and the sites dedicated to pornography and violence are the ones that make headlines.
But, the Internet is simply an extension of ourselves, to steal Marshall McLuhan’s phrase. I’ve referred to it as a mirror: we see ourselves in the Internet. Most of all, it expands our possibilities to be whoever or whatever we are. So, by showing you my favorite sites on the Internet, I suppose I am doing a sort of cyber-striptease. Don’t unplug your computer—that’s just another of my infamous metaphors.
To rove around the Internet, to find things to rave about, you need some way to search for appropriate sites. Of course, one way is to get ideas from friends (such as the one who writes columns for Peanut.org), magazines, and other sources. But, you will eventually turn to a search engine. It seems that most people choose their search engines by a sort of gut feeling. I honestly do not know why, but when I need to look for sites, I head for Altavista, my one-stop center for searching the Web, getting maps and driving directions, finding people, and even getting translations. But, I cannot tell you why I don’t use Yahoo—
Maybe some one will write a Ph.D. thesis correlating one’s preferences for search engines with one’s religious or political affiliations—or preference for cats or dogs. The idea behind "Ask Jeeves" is intriguing, to be able to enter questions in full English sentences. It takes a long time to continue to fine-tune your question, but it can be fun to play with. Google is another useful site for searches that I haven’t quite figured out yet—
[2002 update: Of course now, Google is the preferred site for Internet searches.]
Sometimes, the search engines are just too enthusiastic, returning hundreds of thousands of sites in response to a query. I enjoy http://about.com, About.com (formerly The Mining Company), which is one of the friendliest places on the Internet, with hundreds of mini-sites, each guided by a real live human being with a real name and a real photo. They maintain articles and lists of links (which they have already checked out for you), and they will often respond personally if you have a question that is not covered by their FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions). Each site also has bulletin boards and chat rooms so that you can get in touch with other people with similar interests.
Here are several great sites for dictionaries, encyclopedias, newspapers, and other traditional reference materials, untraditionally available on-line. If there were nothing else on the Internet except for the following eight sites—oh, and Peanut.org, of course—I would recommend that you get on-line. For information and entertainment, you cannot beat the Australian Wombat site that links to over five thousand newspapers from around the world. There are many ways to use this site. Many of the newspapers are in English, even newspapers from countries in which English is not the official language, because English is virtually the official language of the Internet. If you know another language, however, this is a good place to practice it. You can learn geography here, but you can also get other perspectives on what is going on in the world. Another way to travel around the world on-line is to visit the Lonely Planet site—
http://www.onlinenewspapers.com
The Encyclopedia Britannica is available on-line, and at "One Look," you can in one look access almost six hundred dictionaries.
For dictionaries, literature, lessons, job opportunities, and organizations for hundreds of languages—some of which I have never heard of anywhere else, look at "iLoveLanguages"—
Here are three vast libraries of on-line texts. The last, appropriately, is named Project Gutenberg, since the Internet has done more to make texts available around the world than any invention since Gutenberg’s movable type—
www.cs.cmu.edu/bookauthors.html
You can access the wonders of the National Geographic Society and NASA at their sites. By the way, I would rather give you the URL than link from a word. You can, for instance, just click on the word NASA. But, I enjoy looking at the web addresses, seeing how they are composed. National Geographic Society is a nonprofit organization (.org), while NASA is a governmental agency (.gov)—
Another useful nonprofit organization is National Public Radio. If you are caught in traffic while listening to one of their news programs and cannot concentrate on what you are hearing, you can listen to it at this site—yes, listen to it—
One of the most fascinating aspects of the Internet is that you can find just about anything or anyone on-line. Here, for instance, are sites dedicated to a variety of creative people, some of whom we’ve never forgotten, some of whom, it seems, no one else remembers. If none of these interest you, at least you may be inspired to look for your own favorites. Let’s start with the great comic, Lord Buckley. Lord Who? Look here—
www.industrialhaiku.com/LBO/LBOPages/Welcome.html
Now, the better-remembered actress, Marlene Dietrich—
The great British novelist, Charles Dickens—
www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/Dickens.html
Georgia’s own Flannery O’Connor—
Everybody’s Bard—
And my beloved writing teacher, Marguerite Young—
http://home.earthlink.net/~eichfr/youngweb.htm
No matter what your interests or obsessions, the Internet can give you a lot of information for your ravin’ on any topic. As you know, we take movies very seriously around here, perhaps too seriously. Whenever I begin a movie column, I check the best source of information about movies, the Internet Movie Data Base, and I find biographies and gossip at "E On-line"—
If you don’t get out to movies much, you can keep up with your favorite stars’ films on television and find a great deal of information about films being shown on American Movie Classics and Turner Classic Movies—
www.tv-now.com/stars/stars.html
Just to run through a variety of sites, some old, some new, that might stimulate you to rove around and learn some more about an old or new interest, let’s begin with herbs and gorillas. Trust me, there is a lot of material on the Internet—
If you are researching your family history, either the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ almost overwhelming genealogical records or the amazing one-woman show known as Cyndi’s List will keep you off the streets for a long, long time. These two sites could be enough to motivate some genealogists who might otherwise be afraid to touch a computer to get on-line—
The Internet is not just about fun. If you cannot get to Washington to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, you can honor those who died in Vietnam by visiting The Wall in cyberspace—
http://thewall-usa.com/index.html
A site that gives you a chance to do some good is The Hunger Site, which allows you to "donate" food at no cost, simply by logging onto its site and giving its advertisers a chance to reach you. You could do much worse than making a New Year’s resolution to log onto The Hunger Site once a day (twice a day, if you can log in from your computer at home and at work, if the boss does not object)—
For spiritual growth on the Internet, the Internet Sacred Text Archive has enough material to keep you growing for a long time—
http://www.sacred-texts.com/index.htm
Unfortunately, not everything on the Internet is as it may seem. Like any community, the Internet is full of gossip and rumors. You can keep track of what is true and what is, ahem, legendary at—
Now, at the end of a year, and moving into the last year of the twentieth century and second millennium, I look forward to rovin’ to strange new places on the Internet, but I notice that the Internet allows me to visit three places where I have worked for most of my life:
So, it seems that the Internet blurs not only the boundaries of geography but also the boundaries between past and present. Again, here at the end of the year, I want to thank you for rovin’ with me and following my raves, and I hope you’ll join me, your feet dry and your heart full of noble thoughts, as we step into a brave new year.
Rovin' on the Internet: Online Adventures