The main advantage of Internet use is a substantial increase in information flow both from and to your organization. More people will be aware in a faster and cheaper way of your activities, services and publications. They will also be able to contact you very easily. On the other hand you will stay up-to-date with the latest information and activities in your specific professional area.
We already explained the way an electronic mail message is sent to somebody else in the world. The big advantage of this way of communication is the speed, the low cost and the opportunity of editing the text before sending it back to somebody or forwarding it. It is also less formal than a letter or fax and you can use it even for transmitting a few words or large documents.
E-mail offers the opportunity to stay in contact with colleagues who are working on similar domains all over the world. You can become a member of a discussion group or mailing list which keeps you up to date about what's happening in your domain. If you subscribe to a list, you can send a message to the list-server, who (or which, because this is a machine) will forward your message to all the other members of the list. In this way you can discuss, ask questions or simply make announcements to a whole group of people by sending one single message. A number of lists keep an archive of all the communications, so that you can review specific discussions on gopher. Since it is quite easy to set up a mailing list, a number of organizations use this system to enhance communication among their staff.
If you know that a certain person works at a particular university or institution, it is usually quite easy to find his or her E-mail address, office phone and fax number and regular mailing address. Most academic gopher servers provide a way of searching their staff directories. On WWW it is also possible to send messages directly through the page you are visiting.
Many university and other libraries have made their catalogs available on the Internet. In this way you can search these catalogs with Telnet from wherever you are in the world if you have the address. If you do not have the address, you can find it with WWW or more likely with gopher. Gopher can actually guide you automatically to Telnet a library. Some commercial companies give Telnet access to their scientific article database. It is then possible to search for articles with a specific subject or author and order a copy from the company by E-mail.
Both on WWW and gopher there are a number of search engines that allow you to search the WWW or gopher-space for information. Since there is so much information stored on the Internet it is important to select your search engines and your search items very carefully. For academic purposes, gopher is the best start (e.g. Veronica or Lycos search) while for commercial searches WWW search engines such as Yahoo or Infoseek will offer you a better result. If you are looking for publications and books, try to find the nearest libraries on the Internet.
A considerable number of organizations, newspapers and scientific institutions are making their quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily or hourly news available on WWW or gopher. Usually it takes only a few seconds to load the front-page of your favorite newspaper or an interesting article. For example, in Southern Africa, the Zambia Post is available on Internet.
Institutions, companies and individuals can advertise their services on WWW and gopher. On WWW it is even possible to make graphic or sound information available. People are able to find your home page by using one of the search engines that is provided on the net or by using a link on another page. It is thus important to have as many links as possible on pages that are offering information on similar subjects as your page to receive enough visitors.
Since a home page can link visitors from all over the world to virtually any other computer application, it is one of the most powerful ways of information dissemination.
E-mail has the disadvantage that you can only use it for transmitting standard ASCII characters. Impossible to send non-ASCII files (like WordPerfect, Lotus or Excel-files) you conclude… No, a number of programs can transform non-ASCII characters into codes of ASCII characters so that you are able to send these documents attached to your regular E-mail message. Uuencode, Mime and Binhex are quite popular for this purpose. The person at the other side will then have to decode your message to use your file.
FTP offers you more possibilities: you can actually search directories on other computers and load, delete or copy files. You are able to do this from or to computers of people that you know but there are also many anonymous FTP-sites. On these sites you can find shareware documents, graphics and programs, as well as demo-versions, evaluation copies and beta-versions of established programs (a lot of Internet applications, windows applications, virus-scanners,…).
If you do not have the FTP addresses, WWW and gopher can guide you to those sites and download the files automatically. The only software you need to start is your connection software (e.g. winsock and a WWW-browser, e.g. Netscape or Mosaic). Once you have this, it is very easy to download upgrades or supplementary software like FTP, Telnet,… (always check the conditions in the readme. 1st file).
