Carondelet Area Community School
Introduction to the Internet

Lesson 4

Lesson 1 | Lesson 2 | Lesson 3 | Lesson 4 | Glossary

Portals-Choose one and personalize it (and why you should consider free e-mail)

Portals
Portals are all the rage now. Just what is a Portal? A Portal is an entry site into the Web. They try to be everything to you. They want you to start your Internet journey at their site. And, the advertisers will pay them according to how many people they believe will do just that. I suggest that surf through a few of these Portals and go ahead and pick to personalize it to start your Internet day. They all are basically the same. You may find that you like one over the other right away or you may find that it doesn't really matter to them. So, first just take a look at each of the big ones. Spend a few minutes on each and then go on to the next. Make a point to go through all of them. Here's the big ones:

You'll undoubtedly notice the similarities of each of these sites. They all offer the same basic categories to browse through, the all offer stock quotes, local weather etc. And you can "personalize" any of these pages. This can be useful, especially when you're first starting as an Internet "Newbie" (that's you.) You could theoretically join and personalize every one of them, but that would be rather time consuming. After surfing through all of them pick on that you like and "register" with them. All you're really doing here giving them your name, address, e-mail etc. for their marketing purposes. If fairly harmless, but if you have a problem with it, either don't do it at all, or give a fictional name and address. Then, when you're done personalizing your page, make it your default home page. (Do you remember how to view your Internet Options?) This whole process simply helps you to begin to focus on a direction that you can take on a daily basis. At first, the Internet seems overwhelming, and you seem to wander aimlessly for hours at a time. This is only natural, and, as you become more experienced, your wandering becomes "surfing." Usually this implies that you have a general direction to head in, though you may take a side trip here and there, but eventually end up where you want to go.

So, where do you want to go? It's no mystery why Microsoft's slogan is "Where do you want to go today?" This implies the general state of mind of the typical web surfer. Number one, you should know where you want to go and number two, it could be completely different from where you wanted to go yesterday or where you'll want to go tomorrow. These Portals are a good way to start your day.

Free E-mail

Most, if not all, of these Portals offer free e-mail. What is this? What are they talking about? Is it really free? I would like to suggest to use that it is a good idea. It is just what it says it is. Your e-mail travels along a different route that all the web pages that you're surfing through, so it's easy to separate the two. In other words, it's not big deal to have your e-mail provider different than your access provider. And, remember, don't confuse this with your e-mail client software which is the user interface that you have to manage your e-mail. We talked about e-mail last session so I'm just going to say here what I think are the benefits of signing up for a free e-mail account. The main one is this: Your e-mail address is no longer dependent on your access provider. You can keep the same e-mail address conceivably for the rest of your life. For example if your e-mail address now is joe@aol.com and then you switch to ninenet for your access your address then become joe@ninenet.com. Subsequently every time you switch access providers, your e-mail would change again. I believe that even infrequent changes are awkward and too much trouble to put all your friends and family through. Pick one and stick with it. You can have more than one, so why not have one for the family and one just for you.

The other thing about these free e-mail services are that they are "web based." At first this seems very confusing, but actually it's a good thing. What this means is that initially you read, send and manage your mail on a web page. That web page belongs to the service you signed up for and wouldn't you just know it, there's a commercial on that web page! That why it's free. The good part about this setup is that you can access your e-mail from anywhere in the world with a browser. And, just to confuse you even further, you can also have this e-mail forwarded to whatever e-mail address you have with your access provider or you can have it come straight in to your client software. Got all that? Good! Just remember that when you're ready to try any of this you can refer back to last week's lesson on e-mail and that will help you with the technical steps of setting up your e-mail client.