After you've gone to the trouble of identifying, reading, evaluating, and talking about a great deal of Internet information that pertains to a subject that interests you, it makes sense to do something with all of that work. Remember, anyone can publish on the Internet -- why not you?

After a browsing session or research project, you will have a list of sites in your "bookmarks" or "favorites" list. You will also know much more about the subject than when you started, and you will have seen many different Web-site designs. Turning your new knowledge and your list of sites into a rewarding, context-setting Web page is fairly simple.

American Online and most other Internet service providers include with your account the use of space on their Web server (a special computer that serves up Web pages), and many also include instructions on how to create and publish your site. Web communities like Tripod and Geocities make Web publishing easy by providing templates and tutorials that let you publish without delving into the intricacies of HTML, HTTP, and the Web's many other acronyms. If you just want to publish quickly, AOL, Tripod, and Geocities are great places to start.

If you want to get fancier, you can publish your site on your Internet service provider's server. First, you have to create your Web page(s). You can either learn the Web's lingua franca, HTML (HyperText Mark-up Language, which is less complicated than most word processing programs were five years ago) or you can buy one of the many Web-page editors (like Microsoft's FrontPage) that let you create a home page without having to learn HTML.

Next, you must set up your Web page on the server. Your Internet service provider's "help" pages usually have the information you need to set up your site. Unfortunately, these pages are often anything but helpful. Just remember as you proceed that (for a basic site, anyway) Web publishing is really simple, similar to saving a word processing document. The main difference is that you are saving the document on a different computer -- the Web server.

If you opt for this fancier do-it-yourself path, the odds are good that at some point in the process you will want to throw your computer out the window. Despite its rapid adoption, the Internet is still somewhere between infancy and adolescence. Its tools and procedures are often designed more for old-time internauts (like the author) than for normal people (like ACT readers). If you'd rather wait until the medium outgrows its awkward stage, you can in the meantime visit more user-friendly cyberspace regions (like America Online).