For those of you who’ve had your head in a bucket for the last decade or so, or are simply chronically technophobic, I guess I’d better write some sort of an introduction to the Internet.

The Internet is a collection of computers, connected together by all sorts of means and techniques, but with one simple thing in common. All these computers are capable of talking IP, or Internet Protocol. This is a shockingly simple data format, where quantities of data, each one labeled a packet with a destination and port address, is transferred around the network until it finds its home.

By itself, the Internet is amazingly boring. After all, you can only take so much sending of 1s and 0s before you lose it completely. However, once you start distributing software, such as electronic mail systems, news systems, chat systems, and especially web browsers, things get just a little more interesting.

The main reason that the Internet has taken off as it has for minority groups, such as ours, is that it is reasonably anonymous. When I’m chatting to someone on the net, either via mail, or IRC, I have absolutely no idea who that person is, except for the details that they chose to reveal. It’s this very anonymity that has allowed the closet crossdresser, for example, to get in touch with others without fear of being sprung. It is also this simple fact that makes the Internet all but impossible for government and do-gooders to control.

The native home for this publication is the World Wide Web. This is a software system, making use of the Internet, that allows reasonably computer illiterate people to find information surprisingly easily. It’s analoguous to a huge, very disorganised library.

The reason for this section is by no means to map the gender oriented sites on the world wide web. It’s impossible to do that, as they are simply too dynamic. Search engines, such as Yahoo or Infoseek, do a much better job of that than I ever could. Also, the nature of the web, with each site having links to others, means that within a fairly short time, you are fairly sure to find what you want.

In order to keep this section reasonably concise, I'm only going to list stuff that's of special interest to Australians and New Zealanders, including groups that have a reasonable Aust/NZ patronage, and stuff that isn’t so obvious to the newcomer.

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