Well, given all the activity that’s been going on in the “we want to get the whole country online” market, the chances are you have by now bitten the bullet and installed the software on that CD-Rom you found with your breakfast cereal. Even my own service provider - UKOnline - went free out of the blue at the same time all these new companies appeared out of the woodwork. Quite why everybody got ants in their pants at the same time will probably remain one of life’s unsolved mysteries - such as why you never see a baby pigeon, or what exactly is the point of Peter Snow - but ants in their pants they certainly got, and you are probably now subscribing to the Currant Bun, Freeserve or another of the numerous Internet service providers which have suddenly offered their services for free. Which begs the question - is there such a thing as a free ISP?
Well, first you have to be careful about the phone call costs. Make sure your dial-up connection is made to a local or a lo-call number (0345). There are even ISPs offering a freephone line (0800). Next, you have to make sure that if you need to contact support services, you are not suddenly entering the realms of premium phone lines. This tends to be where companies will start to claw back some of their lost income. If you are, just don’t use their support lines. My advice is to find someone - schoolchildren are usually pretty capable or there plenty of people around like me - who will help you get online, and once there you can usually find all the technical help you need in the newsgroups or on many Web sites.
The other place organisations like Dixons and Tesco will make their money is in the advertising they carry, but don’t forget you don’t actually need to visit their home page at all. Once you have signed up, it makes more sense to choose a start page for your browser which is useful and loads quickly - such as a search engine like Yahoo. My browsers are set up with pages kept on my PC (see example) with my most regularly visited sites listed and but a click away once I have dialled up. And please believe me, it is not difficult to create such a page, whether in a simple text editor such as Notepad or Simple Text, in FrontPage if you use Explorer or in Composer if you are a Netscape fan.
If I have collected a load of sites I want to visit in preparation for an article, for example, it is much easier (and cheaper!) to write the addresses into such a file while I am offline, so all I have to do is click on them once I am connected. Any reader who wants me to send them a template from which to create their own start page is welcome to email me. All you have to do is say nice things about the column. See - there is such a thing as a free template.
It’s been a funny few months in uk.music.folk, what with news of poor Damien Barber’s awful accident in March and then, in April, Dave Swarbrick’s nightmare - or was it a treat? - of leaving intensive care after recovering from a serious chest infection only to read his obituary in The Daily Telegraph. I wish both of them well. As usual the newsgroup was otherwise dominated by discussions of the What is folk? variety.
Two of the sites I have included on the start page shown here are Olga - the Online Guitar Archive - and Digitrad - the Digital Tradition. These are ideal sites to begin with if you are searching for the words or music to a song. Olga tends to be more useful on the singer-songwriter side of things, with songs by the likes of James Taylor and Leonard Cohen - or why not try an acoustic version of The Offspring’s latest hit at your next singaround? - whereas Digitrad is much more centred on the public domain. Controversy surrounds both sites, which are regularly targeted by major corporations waving litigation papers, but why not use them and if it makes you feel better, send money to the artists if you think you are doing them out of their rightful earnings?
Another way of learning songs is of course by listening to them, and a rather nifty site I only recently discovered is the Online Folk Music site run by the Folk Federation of South Australia. This gives a list of sites where you can listen to radio programmes, live or archived, from all over the world. It has even started up a video section - though I think I might need to upgrade my machine before I tackle that one. But could this be a prospect for the future? The ability to watch say Pete Seeger, Si Kahn or Eric Bogle, let alone The Coppers or The Watersons, in the comfort of my own home and with little more effort than a click of my mouse button I find quite exciting.
No more will we need to rely on the whim of the BBC deciding whether people want to listen to folk music, which is the other topic that has been well and truly argued over in uk.music.folk. But why should that only be available to people with a reasonably powerful PC? So while I welcome the information and material available of interest to the folk music lover on the Internet, it is still necessary to write those letters to the BBC complaining bitterly about the lack of interest it shows in us. Even better - send an email.