I Don’t Know Anything About the Internet.

It’s true. I don’t.

But I’m trying to learn.

I’ve always had an affinity for logic (A leads to B leads to C), which by definition has meant I’ve always been somewhat OK at computers. I spent loads of time on my family’s Mac Apple IIGS (so much time that I actually remember the name of the machine though I couldn’t have been more than 6 years old or so). Then I got a Nintendo (original NES, ghetto fabulous), and game systems replaced computers in my life for a few years.

Then Prodigy went mainstream.

Do you remember Prodigy? I don’t, not really. I just remember the chat rooms. I remember that a window opened and would fill with words that you hadn’t typed in. The words just showed up. And there was no way to tell what would be typed in that window next. And you could type your responses. And other people would see it! Even though the window was on YOUR computer!

It was an epiphany. It was also a monstrous pay-per-minute bill for my friend’s family, since my Dad refused to get Prodigy so I could only use it when we went to visit my friend. If memory serves, his parents blamed him and forgot I’d also been there at the time. Sorry, dude.

It took my family a few years to get AOL, but when we did, I was unstoppable. Hours upon hours upon hours. Trying to type as quietly as possible so my parents wouldn’t know I was online at 2am. Learning about fascinating people from all over the world. Thinking private chat was the coolest thing in the world, as long as you knew who you were chatting with. Making furtive, never-to-be-realized plans of meeting up in real life and knowing this group of people on a “deeper” level.

Bear in mind, this was before the first Dateline special on Innernet pre-verts.

But still. I was fascinated by chat. Every now and then, someone would mention something they had run across on the “Internet.” “What’s that?” I’d ask. “What else is there beyond chatting?” They tried to explain it. I didn’t buy it. I opened my browser window a few times. Poked around here and there. But I just found it all to be boring. There was no interaction. It was just… pages. Like in a book. Information that I didn’t have a particular interest in, information that didn’t change. I figured if I ever needed that stuff I’d just go look it up in an encyclopedia, then closed my browser window and went back to chat.

It’s safe to say I didn’t get it.

Even when I went to college, I still didn’t get it. I still primarily used my connection for chatting. This reluctance to use the Internet for informational purposes was also not helped when my professor from my very first class freshman year decided to jump on board with this whole “online thing” and email us our first assignment. With a MASSIVE virus. MASSIVE. We all crashed. My computer was brand new. Brand. New. I ran as much anti-virus stuff as I could get my hands on, but the old girl was never the same. Haunted does not even begin to cover it.

By the time I graduated from college and had procured an un-haunted laptop, I was starting to grasp the whole browsing thing. In fact, reminiscent of my Prodigy days, I went overboard. Being at my first job, having no clue what I was doing combined with free access to my own connected computer all day, I was online ALL THE TIME. Yahoo. CNN. The New York Post.  MapQuest. Random links from friends. Constant Googling of anything that popped into my head.

But I still didn’t get it.

After a couple of years I settled in to my current company, and in my first role I had to do some work with the company’s intranet. All I had to do was write for it, then follow a couple of simple steps to post the content up on the appropriate site.

I was in love.

Before long, I was doing entire site redesigns – obviously not from a development side, but from a content management/communications perspective. After begging my boss, I stopped having to create content for most of it. I could focus entirely on site architecture and organization - again, not as a developer, but in terms of marrying what was perfect from a communications perspective with what the developer could realistically do without having to kill me. Considering the fact that almost 4 years later the developers still talk to me, even though they don’t have to, I think I did OK.

But the intranet could only go so far. Since the intranet fascinated me so much, in my spare time I began taking another look at the Internet as a whole, this time from a larger communications perspective instead of “how can I be entertained.”

Holy schnikes.

A whole new world had sprung up! There was music! Video! Something called MySpace! And people were doing things in about 500 million different ways.

Well. I wanted in.

So my next role within the company was focused on the “real” Internet. I moved into something of a hybrid between account management and online marketing. And I dug it. The online marketing part. Not so much the account management. So I quit… and just did the online stuff. For my whole team. I built websites. I created email campaigns. I edited standing marketing platforms to keep the content constantly updated and refreshed.

OK. Enough with the resume. But you get the idea.

So then I started thinking… what else can the Internet do? What all is out there that I can take advantage of?

Would you believe I didn’t know how to use an RSS feed until about 3 months ago?

Now I follow blogs and content communities (I’m sure that’s not the right phrase, but, hey, I’m learning) through my feed reader – that’s where I keep the stuff I like personally. That’s where I can check out the latest from people like Seth Godin, Ian Lurie, and David Vinjamuri. I’m relying on them and folks like them to catch me up on all the experience I missed because I was too busy chatting. Also within my iGoogle I have more feeds that I consider primarily work-related - I keep my feedreader on my home computer’s browser and my work-related stuff on my iGoogle, accessible from anyplace.

Did I mention I USE iGoogle? I also use Twitter, Technorati, WordPress (obviously), Facebook, eHow, LinkedIn, Sphinn, StumbleUpon, and Flickr. I’m thinking about using Digg, but something about it doesn’t appeal to me. Not sure why. I’m incredibly interested in things like SEO (note that the words in my headlines now always start with a capital letter, thanks SlightShadySEO) and blog optimization and targeting (note my not-quite-passing thought that I devote this blog to Gordon Ramsay which Pocklock wisely talked me out of, suggesting I make Ramsay part of a variety of topics I write about instead of the sole subject). I’m trying to teach myself HTML (then XML then CSS then everything else) so I have more flexibility with what my online presence looks like.

So I don’t know anything about the Internet. Now. But I will. I’m coming into this late in the game – I’m a late adopter, remember? – but I’ll get there.