The most powerful use of the Internet is for communicating with other users. Never before has a communications medium made it so quick, easy, and cost-effective to communicate with tens of millions of users all over the world. So great is the benefit that the Internet can truly be called a supermedium for communicating.

In this part of the book, you will learn techniques for communicating more effectively via electronic mail, which is a store-and-forward type of communications medium between two people; listserv, a way of communicating ideas to a specific group of people; newsgroups, which are online discussion groups in which the topics are organized hierarchically, allowing users to read and write messages and converse about the topics in a manner comparable to attending a conference; blogs, in which you publish a Web-accessible log that other users can read to keep up with what you are doing; chat rooms and other real-time environments for carrying on live conversations; and streaming, which you can use to tune in to real-time audio and video channels on the Internet.

Before you begin communicating on the Information Superhighway, however, you should learn some of the rules of the road. Therefore, we begin with a discussion of Internet etiquette.