Here is his explanation on Social Media.  You can see why it is such a power house these days.

To use Google, go to google.com and type in what you are looking for and click the “Google Search” button. A listing of websites which contain the information you’re looking for will show. Just click on the website in the list that is most likely to answer your query.

Rather than reinvent the wheel, I would like to direct you to Google Guide, a website devoted to teaching people how to use Google. If you are a total beginner, click the “Novices Click Here” button. The basic what’s and how-to’s are explained in a nice tutorial.

An example search: I would like to know what an “RSS feed” is. I go to Google.com and type in “RSS feed” and click the “Google Search” button. This page lists my search results. As you can see, there are several sites to choose from which explain RSS!

Google is not the only search engine out there, it’s not even the first search engine on the internet! But it is definitely the biggest. In fact, the verb “google” has come to mean “look up something on the internet” no matter which search engine you use!

FYI, some other search engines are: Yahoo Search, MSN search, Ask…If you want to see more, look up “search engine” in a search engine!

Witchy Says:  Since different search engines seek and sort results in different ways, you can sometimes find information on one that you can’t find on another. There are engines (programs) that search the same terms in several search engines at once! If you are having trouble finding something, try Dogpile.com… it will give you results from Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK at once!

What would you add to this list?

In computer talk, the first version of a computer program or website is called “version 1.0.” This is the first time the program is operating and doing what it is supposed to do. Quite often, when a program is in actually in use people find that it has problems and the programmer has to tweak it a bit. The tweaked version would be version 1.1, 1.2 and so on. When the programmer decides there is a better way for his program to work, he will re-write the program, including all the tweaks he has made into a completely new version. This would be version “2.o.”

How does this apply? Well, let’s think of the internet as you first heard about it… there were websites to visit. Maybe a guestbook or message board to sign or a chatroom to join. And that’s it. As a browser on the internet, you had to use the sites on the web as you found them. You read, you comment and maybe… you can tell a little bit about yourself in the bargain. This worked great! Little “cyber communities” would spring up and the host site would change the site on occasion to keep everyone’s interest. But you couldn’t change the website yourself. You couldn’t affect the content except informally in the community areas. This is the old web… the first popular version.

Somewhere along the line, someone figured out that everyone had something to contribute or share, but not everyone knew how to make webpages to share their information. If there were only a way where people could share content without having to worry about how to format it. Enter Web 2.0! The new version of the internet!

A Web2.0 site or program provides the basic structure (the formatting) and all the end user has to is provide the content! And other users can comment on the content, organize it, add their own content, their opinion of the content and create their own similar content. End users are no long passive viewers of virtual billboards on the information, they are creators of billboards!

Services like flickr and photobucket are great examples of Web2.0… YOU, the end user, put up your content without knowing a thing about making webpages and allow others to view, comment and otherwise interact with you about the content. If you make a list of “contacts” or “friends” on the site that you regularly interact with, this is called Social Networking. There are whole sites built around the concept of social networking/online interaction (myspace.com and facebook.com are examples of this).

Have you been enjoying Web2.0? Well, yes you are! If you read and comment on WitchyTech, you are participating in a blog, which was one of the first popular manifestations of web2.0. With this blog, I am not only an “end-user” of the web, reading and responding to what’s already there.. I’m an active participant in creating internet content! And by commenting on this site or submitting articles of your own, so are you! Welcome to web 2.0.

For further information and discussion, check out the Wikipedia article Web2.0 (Wikipedia itself being a user-created compilation of knowledge! Very web 2.0!).

Or check out the marvelous film below, showing the progression from written text to Web 2.0, and what thought-provoking concepts might be inspired by this new way to interact with our fellow humans:

The Machine is Us:

VideoJug: RSS In Plain English

Short Answer: A blog is an internet webpage that is easily updated with articles and pictures. The word “blog” is short for “web log.” That is, a web log or blog is an online journal. While journaling was the original function of a blog, they are now used as websites by themselves due to their ease of use. They are ideal for family newsletters, hobby sites, travel sites, teaching sites and even business sites! In fact, Witchy Tech is actually a blog.

Want to know more? Want a blog of your own? Read on!

Long Answer: Think of a regular website as an advertisement in your newspaper. The advertiser can put up images and words and there it stays every week, until the ad is taken down and a new ad put in its place. This involves changing out the pictures and rewriting the text, and possibly changing the size of the ad which would affect where it is placed in the newspaper. A blog is more like the editorial page of the newspaper. Not only can someone say whatever they wish, but the entire layout of the paper doesn’t need to be changed to accommodate the new articles, AND people can respond and talk about what you’ve written!

Because it is so easy to add content to a blog, it is ideal for hobby sites and family newsletter sites.  A blog has a built-in “dashboard”…a place for the author to go to type in articles and upload pictures from their computer, without having to make or remake the webpage.  Just like a newspaper can add letters to the editorial page without changing the format of the page, a blog can add articles within the framework, or template, of the website.

This makes it ideal for sites that require frequent updates, like a family newsletter site.  For example, we live very far away from family and it is difficult to write letters and send pictures to them all. But I would still like our family and friends to know what is going on in our lives and hear what is going on in theirs.  In order to keep the grandparents and aunts and uncles “in the loop,” I post the latest pictures and news on a blog for them all to see. I just log into my dashboard, click “write a post” and that’s it! I do the same for Witchy Tech, and my husband, Mr. Wonderful, regularly updates his hobby blog the same way.

Incidentally, Mr. Wonderful doesn’t know anything about making webpages, but he does know about his hobby!  Would you like to share your hobby, growing kids or grandkids, travels, your thoughts, or your online community in a blog? It’s EASY!

How do I get a blog of my own?

Well, you can get one for FREE! You do not need to own a webpage or pay any money. The best services I have used are WordPress.com and Blogger.com. All you have to do is sign up and follow the directions. Even a non-technophile like YOU can do it!

Witchy’s Tip: Try to limit your blog’s topic and theme, and update on a regular basis!

Did you find this article helpful? Did it give you this confidence to make a blog of your own? Please let me know in the comments section! I would love to hear from you!

Short Answer: A website’s RSS feed is a document which directs the site’s new content to you. You don’t have to visit the site every day to check for new content! You use it by subscribing to the feed in a “feed reader” or your browser, if it has a built-in reader. The advantage of this is that the website comes to you when it has new content, and you decide if you want to read that content before visiting the site.

Long Answer: “RSS” stands for “really simple syndication” and it truly is simple. Well, once you understand the basics. The “syndication” means just what you think it does. Your favorite TV shows or comics are “syndicated” to appear on your local TV station or in your local paper, even though they were produced to appear on one particular network or for one newspaper. On the internet, content written for your favorite sites can be syndicated in a similar fashion. If you think of an RSS feed as a “broadcast” of a websites articles or content, you have a good grasp of the concept.

How do I know if my favorite sites have a feed?

Websites like to say right out if they are broadcasting a feed. You can look for the RSS symbol of a dot and parentheses (), or “subscribe to my feed” or just the letters RSS somewhere on the website. All of these will be linked directly to the feed. Look around the Witchy Tech home page. We broadcast two feeds: one for the articles or entries like the one you’re reading now, and one for just the comments people make on the articles. Do you see the links? Click on them to see the Witchy Tech feeds.

(Note: Witchy Tech broadcasts its feeds already formatted. If you click on one of your favorite websites’ feed link and you get a page with a bunch of gobbledygook, that’s okay! It just means they are sending their feed unformatted. It will look okay in your FEED READER, which we will discuss below.)

How do I use RSS?

In order to use RSS feeds, you need something called a “feed reader” or “feed aggregator” for your computer. This is a little program which displays the headlines/articles from your syndicated sites and you just click on the articles you want to read. This can be a real timesaver! For example, Witchy Tech isn’t updated everyday. So why come to the site every day? If you have a feed reader, you are alerted to when a new article is posted on Witchy Tech, and you just click on the feed if you want to read the whole article or “mark as read” if you don’t to remove it from your feed list, Feed readers are free to download and easy to use. All they need is the webpage address with the feed on it (the page to which the RSS symbol or “subscribe” links).

If you travel or don’t always use the same computer, the search website “Google” offers a feed reader online, which collects your favorite feeds onto a website. All you have to do is log in to it from anywhere and all your feeds are there for you to browse.

However, the most convenient way for us non-technical types to use feeds is to have them appear in your Internet Explorer or Firefox browser, or in your email program.

Internet Explorer:

In Internet Explorer (Version 7 or later), look for the “Feeds” button on your toolbar. It will be the orange symbol.

Witchy’s Note: If it is not there, and you have Internet Explorer 7, just right click on a blank space on the toolbar. The toolbar is the row of the browser that has the “star” for the favorites list, the tabs of the webpages you have open, and the “Home”, “Print”, etc. buttons. From the menu that pops up, rest your cursor on “Customize Command Bar” and from the submenu, click on “Add or Remove Commands.” From the column on the left, select “FEEDS” option, then click the “Add” button. You will see that the “FEEDS” option is now in the right column. Click the “Close” button.

If you are on a site which does not broadcast a feed, the FEEDS button will be grayed out. If the site you are on broadcasts a feed, the FEEDS button will be orange. Click the button to see the feed the website is broadcasing. It will usually be the titles of the articles or a summary, or the first paragraph.

If you would like to subscribe to the feed, click the “subscribe to this feed” link, represented by a star symbol with a plus symbol on it. As you can see, you can sort your feeds into different folders, but for now, just add it to “Feeds” and if you subscribe to a lot of them, you can make folders.

To check your feeds, click on the Star button on the left side of your browser toolbar (or hold down the “Alt” key and press the letter “c”). This takes you to your Favorites Center. At the top of the favorites center, click the FEEDS button. Feeds you haven’t read are in bold, so you only have to read feeds that have new content (“unbold” a feed by clicking on it and viewing the feed).

Firefox

Firefox will tell you in the address location bar if a site broadcasts an RSS feed. It will show the symbol at the right margin of the location box.

Click on the symbol to see the feed. You can subscribed to the feed using a number of feed readers, but the simplest is “Live Bookmarks”… Select “Live Bookmarks” and click the “Subscribe Now” button. This stores the feed as a bookmark (or “Favorite” if you are more used to the IE term) and you can sort it just as you would a bookmark. To see the articles. just rest your cursor on the feed’s bookmark and the titles of all the articles will pop up as a submenu.

Witchy Tip: I keep my Firefox feeds in a folder on my “Bookmarks Toolbar Folder” for easy access. You can leave them like that if you wish, but I have installed an extension to show my feeds as a ticker at the bottom of my browser. If you would like to try this here is the info on the RSS ticker, but please note, it only lists the titles of the articles being broadcast. Some people might want a little more info. There are lots of RSS feed reader and feed applications you can plug into Firefox.

Conclusion
Once you are comfortable with checking and reading your feeds, you will naturally start to sort them and customize them for your personal browsing style.

By the way, if you subscribe to Witchy Tech by email, you are already getting our RSS feed in your email inbox! If you find that you like collecting feeds in a reader or in your browser, you can unsubscribe to the email update and just subscribe to our feed in your reader.

Short Answer: A Wii is a video game console (video game deck) made by Nintendo.

Long Answer: Do you remember the “Atari” game deck of the 80′s? It was a deck that you plugged into your TV. Then you bought games for it that came on cartridges. If you wanted to play “Asteroids”, you bought the “Asteroids” cartridge and inserted it into the game deck. Or, if you don’t remember the Atari, think of the Wii as a computer, the TV as a computer monitor, and the games you play on it are just like the programs you buy for your computer.

You have probably heard of the Wii’s competitors, as they have been advertised heavily in the last year or so: Sony Playstation 3 and Microsoft XBox 360. The person on your gift list may already have one of these. The more practical side of us wonders why they would need another game deck. You must remember that video games are a hobby. A fisherman doesn’t have one fishing pole, a hunter doesn’t have one shot gun, an artist doesn’t use one pencil. Neither does a videogamer have just one game deck.

Witchy Tip: If the practical side of you still cramps up, think in the long term: game decks need games! Your gift-giving options expand with each game deck, as some games are only available on specific systems. Wouldn’t you love to be the cool relative who gives the FUN things?

Now here’s something you probably DIDN’T consider… wouldn’t you love to have a game deck that you could actually PLAY with your child or grandchild? The Wii is specifically designed to be easy to learn and play. There are programs designed especially for non-gamers! And the controllers (the hand-held remote that works the way the mouse does on your computer) function by waving them at the TV rather than complicated button combinations. The Will could be an activity that you can joyfully SHARE with your grandchildren!

To give you an idea of the possibilities of the Wii, you can enjoy bowling, tennis, golf, boxing in your living room. With the Wii, you actually have to get up and go through the motions of swinging or punching. This is not a sit-on-the couch video game. There is also Wii-fit, a workout program that you do in conjunction with the Wii and a balance pad (Wii-Fit’s release date is January 1, 2008 and the balance board will cost about $70), so you could keep a Wii at YOUR house and do the workouts, and then have something for your grandkids to play with you when they come to visit.

“Witchy, one of my friends has this little thing that you use with a stylus. It had her phone numbers, calendar… it was like a mini-organizer! It wasn’t a phone, I know that. What was it?”

The short answer: It’s a PDA, which means “Personal Digital Assistant.” It is your address book, appointment calendar, note pad, and yes, sometimes phone, all on a little gadget that is about the size of a pocket calculator.

The long answer: Truly, the PDA is a marvelous thing. It’s a little mini-computer that fits in the palm of your hand.

And just like a computer, the price of a PDA varies by what kinds of features you want. If you just want a calendar, address book and notepad, you can find them for under a hundred dollars. Some have the capability to be true computers on the go, complete with a downsized version of Microsoft Office and internet capability. The more features, especially memory and versatility, the higher the price. PDA prices can go up into the $5-6,000 range.

You can purchase a PDA anywhere nowadays. Some drugstores carry low-end versions in their electronics sections and the discount stores sell them, too. Of course, your favorite computer or electronics store will have a wider selection.

Some high-end cell phones have PDA capabilities. These are called “smartphones” and you can get them from your cell phone provider. The price varies greatly.

If you are going to purchase a PDA for yourself or someone else, think about how much money you want to spend and do a little research on the features. As with any other purchase, try to get the most of the features you want for the money you want to spend.

And here’s a Witchy Tip: Definitely get an extra packet of styluses (those pen things that you use to tap the screen). They’re usually small and get misplaced easily. If you find you use your PDA a lot, you might want to look for a bigger one to keep clipped to your PDA’s case.

With the best of intentions, you ask your kids and grandkids what they want for Christmas. They reply in gibberish! You have no idea what they are talking about. As they try to explain, your eyes glaze over and you end up getting them a sweater. Well, not this year!!

So.. what IS an MP3 player, anyway? Read on to find out:

The short answer: An MP3 player is the digital age’s version of the “Walkman” personal music player and recorder, or better yet, the transistor radio of the 70′s. It plays back recorded music, or books on tape, and some have radio or video capabilities.

The long answer: A compact disc (CD) holds music files. Like any other computer file, music files can be in various formats. One of those file formats is called “MP3.”

Remember records? Different formats would be LP, long playing, or SP, short playing, for the different sized records.

You can take several CD’s of your favorite music and save their files to your computer, and download them all from your computer onto your little MP3 player.

This is the modern-day equivalent of taking all your records and transferring them to cassette tape so you could carry them with you in your car or while jogging.

The most popular MP3 player these days is the Apple iPod. There are several other brands of players out there that function just as well which do not require the iTunes software to use. If your child or grandchild specifically asks for an iPod, though, that is probably the exact brand that they want. If they say they want an iPod “Nano”, for example, they want an Apple iPod with the “Nano” styling (That is like saying they want a Ford car, Taurus styling… it is a specific request so pay attention to the word they say after “iPod”… definitely go back for clarification on this if you are unsure!)

If your child or grandchild is not specific on the brand, the door is wide open to get a good quality MP3 player. The most important things to compare in MP3 players are memory (how many songs it can hold) and battery life.

• MEMORY: For today’s kids (and adults), less than 1gig of memory is definitely considered sub-standard (unless the child is very young). You can get a decent MP3 player with 2 gigs of memory for very reasonable prices these days.
• BATTERY LIFE: This may be listed on the package as “hours of play” or “battery life” and obviously, the longer, the better. If the player requires AAA or AA batteries, they probably don’t have enough hours of play for today’s kids. Look for players that can use nicad batteries.

Other features which may be included are: Radio, video player, voice recorder, and picture viewer.

These are just the VERY BASICS you need to know to shop for an MP3 player. I hope you found this article helpful!

If you have questions regarding MP3 players in general, or if you have any comments regarding this article, please post them in the comments section of this article.

If there’s something else someone on your gift list is asking for that baffles you, please post your question in our forum.

~Witchy