I’ve only scratched the sur­face of things that you may or may not want to do on the inter­net. I know that, I accept that, and I hope you don’t mind.

Two things I might have liked to address but didn’t: pod­casts and Twit­ter. These were both kicked in pref­er­ence to what I did address because they’re rather eas­ier and bet­ter known than the top­ics I did write about. For 90% of pod­cast lis­ten­ers iTunes does “pod­catch­ing” so effort­lessly they didn’t know that was a word. Twit­ter is world-famous and pretty well under­stood, so my advice would mostly be superfluous.

But what I want to take a sec­ond to say is this: don’t wait for per­fect under­stand­ing of some­thing to give it a try. As Mer­lin Mann makes clear, the first time, per­haps times, you do some­thing you’ll really be ter­ri­ble at it. As Ze Frank said, sav­ing up ideas with noth­ing but the notion that you’ll one day exe­cute them per­fectly and be greeted with immense vol­umes of praise and money is a sure recipe for stagnation.

The internet’s the native home for ama­teurs. It’s a place where 90% of the stuff is made by peo­ple who could never have con­vinced some­one to pay them for what they built but felt a strong enough desire to that they put it out here on the web for us. The pur­pose of learn­ing How to Inter­net is so that you can bet­ter deal with the wealth of that diver­sity of stuff that exists on the inter­net and use it to enter­tain, inform, and improve yourself.

The inter­net is a freer place than any other because of the twin engines of anonymity and low costs of entry. Surely anonymity has prob­lems, which /b/ shows well, but it also cre­ates scary bril­liance. Imag­ine how unlikely some­one would have been to pub­lish LOL­cats if they were risk­ing their rep­u­ta­tion on it.

A low bar­rier to entry makes it pos­si­ble in a way it never was to be only con­strained by your effort. This is incred­i­bly empow­er­ing and a lit­tle scary. Never before have you been so able to rise through a rather pure mer­i­toc­racy, never before have you been so unable to blame some gate­keeper for your lack of success.

Great things are afoot on the inter­net. Mind-bendingly great things are pro­duced every sin­gle sec­ond of the day and put on the inter­net. What I hope I man­aged to give you this week was a com­pe­tent sam­pling of the tools you can use to find, fol­low, and share those great inter­net things you love.

Thanks for your time and attention.