Finding your own "HELP"

I'm disappointed with the help available in the Internet. If you put these words into Google - "beginner novice newbie internet" - You will gets lots of links. Some of them useful. You can't learn about the internet quickly. It will take you about 300 hours, 6 months if you work about 2 hours a day. You must give it some time, no effort no results.

Still using search engines is not a bad way to start. So do your own search but try three search engines that look at the Internet in different ways.

For instance try Google:
http://www.google.com
This search engine gives you a small number of pages that are "popular" based on the number of other pages that link to them. Often that works well.

I should add a note here about the use of "http://" Usually in a browser you omit this. "www." will open "Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol for you. The double slash indicates a base directory, like saying "this a new address starting here." If you are creating a link on a web page the full text "http://www." must be used.

This is a good time too to suggest that in typing addresses, email addresses, or file names you always use only lower case letters. (This is not the practice of some programming styles.) The http: protocol is case sensitive, and mixing upper and lower case letters causes errors. Upper and lower case does not affect email at all, but it's easier to be consistent.

Or you might look at Vivisimo which is a clustering search engine.
http://vivisimo.com/

And Mooter is another search engine that tries to group results for you.
http://www.mooter.com/moot

For specialist topics, Temona is suggested.
http://www.directhit.com/

Take your time to read the material you find. Print the best items. Reading a printed document is much more efficient than reading on screen. It costs more of course, but you remember more, and you have the document to file away.

But don’t stop there, because the best way to learn stuff is from other people. So JOIN some groups, even if all you do for a while is sit in the background. I used to recommend joining groups at Yahoo, or getting onto specialist mailing lists. That might sill be good for you.

However I suggest you join either Ryze or Ecademy. Take the time to build your own homepage or profile there. Try to participate. Ask some questions. Once you get started you will soon know that the fear you may have now is un-necessary.

John