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INTERNET TOOLS 

E-mail

The conventional mailing by post can take several days to travel across the country and weeks to go around the world. That is why nowadays it is referred to as ‘snail mail’. In recent times, e-mail or electronic mails being used to send and receive messages. It saves time and money, is fast, easy to use and less expensive than the post. You can send e-mail practically to anyone with an e-mail address, anywhere in the world. So what is e-mail? Its simplest form, e-mail is an electronic message sent from one computer to another.  You can send or receive personal and business-related messages with attachments like pictures or other documents.

Just as a letter or document stops at the different postal stations along its way, e-mail is passed from one computer to an- other as it travels along the network. Each computer reads the e-mail address and routes it to another computer until it eventually reaches its destination. It’s then stored in an electronic mailbox. With the internet this whole process usually takes just a few minutes, allowing you to communicate quickly and easily with millions of people around the world anytime of the day or night, for the cost of a local
phone call.
Until recently, e-mail on the internet was good only for short notes. You couldn’t send attachments like formatted documents or graphics. With the advent of MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension) and other types of encoding schemes, like UUencode, not only can you send messages electronically, but you can also send formatted documents, photos, sound files, and video files as attachments.

Search Engine : Search engines are Web sites that help you search the Internet for other Web sites based on keywords you provide.

Databases of web sites that use spiders or robots to search the web and catalog web pages and make it convenient for you to search. Popular search engines include:

Special www sites that offer a facility by which you can search the web or Usenet for information. example, provides a keyword search that scans every word of every page on the web. Yahoo permits you to search by following ever-decreasing menus. Your browser will take you to a site featuring  a number of web search engines.

Newsgroups

Discussion groups on the Internet (not on the Web, which is only one area of  the Internet). Newsgroups are classified by subject matter and do not necessarily deal with journalism or “news.” Health, hobbies, celebrities, and cultural events are the subjects of many newsgroups. Participants in a newsgroup conduct discussions by posting messages for others to read, and responding to the messages posted by others.

Newsgroups, also referred to as forums, have been around almost since the dawn of the Internet. They enabled scientists to post questions (and answers) to each other. Today, newsgroups resemble virtual coffee houses, where people get together to discuss subjects of mutual interest. Except with newsgroups, the communication is written, not verbal. Newsgroups revolve around specific topics, such as wireless technology or organic gardening. You can read what others have written and post your own comments.

There are literally thousands of newsgroups covering every topic imaginable--from computers, social issues, literature and science, to recreation, entertainment, hobbies and current affairs. In newsgroups you can find job postings, business and health care advice, announcements about events, referrals, political and religious discussions--even photos you can download.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC)

IRC works because a series of IRC servers band together in a network to share channels of communication, like communicating with someone or a group on a single radio frequency. If you connect to one server in such a network, you have access to all the channels and all the users connected to any of the servers on that network
.
There have been chatting on the internet since Unix users were able to page each other using the talk username @ address command. Unlike e-mail, chatting takes place live and is  called  as  real  time,  meaning  both  people  participating  at  the  same  time.  Chat is synchronous (happening for all participants at the same time), and e-mail is asynchronous (taking place at different times).

Chat protocol permitted many people to converse with each at once. Finally IRC (.Internet relay chat) provide for multiple channels where completely separate conversations, all potentially many-to-many become available to anyone on the Internet. The IRC protocol remains the underlying basic for other forms of real- time communication (such as voice or video conferencing). The standard chat interface, with a big dialogue window, a narrow list of participants and a command line at the bottom for typing your responses, continues to be used in many real-time collaboration tools.

Video Conferencing : It’s the technological age, there’s no doubt about it. You look around and you see people speaking on cell phones everywhere; people working on their laptop computers or  PDA’s; People taking pictures with their digital cameras, or listening to music on their digital mp3 players. The technology is evolving so quickly that it can barely keep up with itself. One area in which we are seeing rapid technological developments as of late is within the video conferencing industry.
Although the technology that makes video conferencing possible has been around for a several years now, it is hasn’t received too much attention until recently, now becoming more and more popular every day. What is video conferencing? Basically, video conferencing can be easily described as a telephone conversation that allows you to be face-to-face with one another. This technology will never replace the person-to-person meeting completely, but it does offer an incredible tool for better telecommunication & can save companies hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel costs; and these applications are just scratching the surface:

Internet video conferencing : High quality Internet video conferencing offers an internet based software product that allows users who log on the ability to partake in video conferences. After some form of software and its accessories are installed and the hardware components are set up, users have the ability to engage in face-to-face meetings with family/friends/business  associates across the globe through the Internet. The quality of the transmission/reception depends entirely upon the amount of bandwidth and the quality of the software employed. If you have a great deal of bandwidth and superior software complete with top-of-the-line codecs, your compression/decompression rates will be higher and so too will the level of  quality.