Like kids saving up their allowances, the Kawartha internet user group has been building up our "coffee fund" for various projects. One item that has long been on our wish-list is an overhead projector. With just one monitor, we really couldn't have "hands on" internet demonstrations at the meetings.
At the January meeting, our wish came true. With a state-of the-art projector on loan from Nexicom we were taken on an impromptu "world tour", viewed in amazing clarity on the Lions' Club wall. As audience members suggested each site, from Bobcaygeon to Orlando, we were there with the click of a mouse.
From Bobcaygeon.com, of course, we had to take the first link to the "Tragically Hip", whose best-selling "Phantom Power" CD features the song "Bobcaygeon". Their page, incidentally, links back to ours - which may account for the increased traffic at the Bobcaygeon web page!
The next few stops were to illustrate how to find virtually anything on the internet.
For instance, theultimates.com is a collection of world-wide telephone directories. Look up someone by name or by 'phone number. This site also features a map search - give it an address, and it returns a map to get you there. When I tried this with a Toronto address, it showed a detailed street map of that area. A search on "Bobcaygeon" highlighted the town on a road map of sourthern Ontario.
One highly recommended address was "megasources" - a list of resources maintained by a professor of journalism at Ryerson University. He has included directories and search engines, for all subjects from politics to gardening. This is a wonderful place to start a newcomer to the 'net. Bookmark it!
If you're looking for something specific, your best bet is a "search engine". These are web pages which will find sites relating to any given topic. Two that were included on our tour were "Inference Find" and "Metafind". Both of these will submit your query to multiple search sites (eg. Yahoo, Alta Vista), then summarize and "rate" the results. For example, a search on "Chocolate chip cookie recipes", will give you a list of lots of cookie recipe sites, with those for chocolate chip cookies listed first.
On to the Clinton impeachment hearings, broadcast live on the C-span TV network. If you haven't access to this on cable or sattelite TV, you can watch / hear the same information, with about a five-second delay, at their web site: www.c-span.org.
And, finally, how about some online newspapers? The two most popular were www.canoe.ca, for the Sun chain and Macleans magazine, and www.torstar.com for the Toronto Star. And, just for variety, we dropped in at the Orlando Sentinel.
Not a bad tour for a snowy January night in Bobcaygeon! George Willis summed up the response when he said he had learned more in that hour than in any previous meeting. Not only did we "see the sites", but people were able to make suggestions and ask questions as we went along. "How did you do that?" "What's that button for?" or "Oh, that's what ------ means" (substitute your least favorite acronym).
You can retrace our tour by visiting our web site, where I have listed all these addresses. We're on the bobcaygeon.com page, under "special interest groups". Then, come to our next meeting (see the Hometown Calendar), when we will decide what to start saving for next.
