Many good organisations have not yet caught up with New Media techniques and practices. I am talking about “web 2.0″ and collaboration. I have decided to focus on taking a step back and attempting to explain what is going on and how to join in.

Over the next few months I will gather together resources that will help not so tech savy leaders get up to speed with well established web technology. Some of these tools are really really useful and will take your interaction with the web to the next level. Its about using tech to make collaboration easy, its about managing information, finding what you are interested in quickly and keeping up to date with what your peers are doing and keeping your punters informed.

The software that I suggest that you use to browse the web is Mozilla Firefox. http://www.mozilla.org/

(Go to the above link and install it now.)

This is a Free Software success story with a long history, for those of you that are interested, it has played a key role in the evolution of the internet and is the best known alternative to Internet Explorer.

According to the above website Firefox has a number of attributes which make it stand above the Microsoft offering, security, customisation, and performance. From a freedom point of view, it is based on open standards and is open source.

I would take the time to get to know a few of its really useful features:-

• tabbed browsing (Now in IE7!)
• Search window (top right)
• Right click Word Highlight and Search Google feature

Now that you have Firefox up and running, I woudl strongly recommend that you install a plugin called “No-script” . You can add components by clicking on “Tools” and then “Add-ons” in Firefox under Ubuntu.

The combination of Firefox and No-Script is thought to be one of the safest ways to browse the internet. According to its blurb, “Winner of the “2006 PC World World Class Award”, this tool makes Firefox the safest browser around.”

I am recommending Firefox because this series will be aimed at fairly inexperienced IT users and Mozilla Firefox is well known. However there is an even more Free web browser (but less heard of yet) IceWeasel, it is almost the same as Firefox.

Now that you have got that working, you will be ready for the next part of this series - RSS feeds!
I look forward to seeing you. If this was useful please do leave a comment!