It’s official. Everyone in the country has high speed Internet access now. How do I know that? Because my mom is getting it (tomorrow to be exact) and I’ve always known she would be the last person in the country with broadband access. She’s finally leaving the world of dial-up and as we were talking the other day I realized there’s a lot of stuff she’s going to want and/or need to do now that she’s got a good connection.

Here’s my list of ten things she’s going to need to do. (By the way, mom, when you read this I’ll walk you through it. This is just our list to get started.)

1. Download Firefox. Forget Internet Explorer as your web browser. Firefox is the way to go. It’s so much more stable than Explorer, has great add-ons, uses tabs for multiple pages (though the new Explorer actually does this now), and doesn’t make that clicking sound all the time.

2. Update your anti-virus software. If you already have an anti-virus program, make sure you’re running the latest version and set the auto update feature to update automatically. If not, you can use a free version of AVG to give you basic coverage.

3. Set up a Google account. Google is more than a search engine. Much more (with more on this below) but you’re going to want a Gmail account to get started even if you want to stick with your current email. Once you have that you’ll be able to fully utilize the world of Google (again, more on this below.) I’ll send you the Gmail invitation to get started.

4. Get a webcam. I have Logitech webcam but there are other good brands too. With free services like Skype, Tokbox, and ooVoo we’ll find one that works for us to connect via live video so you can talk with the grandchildren.

5. Download iTunes. This will become your music and download destination. You can listen to online radio stations, create playlists from CDs you have, download podcasts (I recommend you get mine first of course), and purchase new music. When you get an iPod we’ll talk more about this too.

6. Upgrade programs. It’s likely that you’re not running the latest version of Windows, so we’ll check that out along with your Adobe Reader version too. Even though you won’t use Explorer and Windows Media Player much we will make sure you’re up to date there as well.

7. Discover Google Maps. You’re going to love this…maybe. Be sure to look up your address first and check out the satellite view. Ok, now relax. It’s okay. Pretty cool, huh? It’s really helpful and once you’ve used it a few times you’ll be hooked on it for all future direction needs.

8. Discover iGoogle. We’ll be setting Google as your default homepage in Firefox and with that and your Google account you can customize your hompage to include several of the things here in this list plus news, weather, and many other things you might want to see right off the bat when you open your browser.

9. Discover Google Reader. I’ll explain RSS feeds and all that stuff when we talk…but all you want to know is that there’s a way for you to bring the content of blogs and many websites to you rather than going through your bookmarks to visit all of them. Google Reader can make that happen. Now you see why Google is more than a just a search engine (as noted in #3 above.)

10. Discover Wikipedia. Remember that Funk and Wagnalls encyclopedia set you got us when we were kids. This is like that but bigger and easier to find stuff. You personally can add to it too. You may find that you can provide some insight on American literature for instance, and you contribute by signing in. I’ll explain when we talk.

Any MicroExplosion readers have additional thoughts?

I’ve been using the social bookmarking site del.icio.us for a long time. One thing I’ve never really done was use the notes feature on the bookmarks because I didn’t want to take the time to write the note. I would tag it as I wanted and move on. Today I discovered by accident that if I highlight a section of text on the page I’m going to tag with my Firefox del.icio.us add-on it will automatically import that text into the notes field. Maybe this is common knowledge to del.icio.us users but it wasn’t to me. I think it’s fair to say I’ll be using the notes feature a lot more from now on. It’s a great little shortcut.

Like many people I use Outlook professionally and Gmail personally. For those of us who have adopted Gmail and the full service of Google applications, we long for more integration between our various email accounts and calendars. I know one person who goes so far as to double up her professional calendar on Lotus Notes with her personal Google calendar. I’m personally not willing to do that much double work so when I heard about the Outlook gadget for iGoogle I knew I had to check it out.

Basically, this gadget (not to be confused with a “widget” which is the same thing though Apple has cornered the verbiage on that word so companies like Microsoft and Google have adopted “gadget” to say the same thing) brings your Outlook email, calendar, tasks, and contacts right into your iGoogle page. It’s really pretty handy. If there’s any drawback to this gadget it’s that you have to open the tab in Internet Explorer if you’re a Firefox user. The instructions give you a step by step process for how to do that and it’s easily done in about two minutes.

I’ve been using this gadget for a week now and have been happy with it for the most part. If there’s anything I dislike most it’s just the fact that I have a tab in Explorer and anything I click within iGoogle now opens up as a new Explorer tab. It’s not a big deal most of the time but I use the Del.icio.us extension in Firefox and it’s not compatible with the Explorer tabs. Like I said, it’s not usually a big deal but it has been a speed bump a couple of times. All in all, the benefits have outweighed the drawbacks so I plan to stick with it.

[HT to Ray for the link with other great iGoogle gadgets.]

With so many tools emerging on a weekly basis it’s hard for me to determine which ones are actually going to make my life easier. Every once in a while I’ll see one that really makes sense and this week I had one of those discoveries. I found Clipmarks, a Firefox add-on, that lets you very quickly highlight entire articles, paragraphs, sentences, images and video to blog or send as an email. I used this a few days ago to send part of an article to some coworkers and it worked out really well. I’m a big Del.icio.us user and am always saving links there but Clipmarks seems like a better way to pass along something I see or read rather than sending people a link to a page where the content on that page may not apply entirely. For instance, I can just clip an important paragraph or two without and email it to a friend rather than sending a link to an entire article with a confusing explanation like “hey, this article is decent but you’ve really got to check out the 6th and 8th paragraphs…those are really interesting.” Whereas Del.icio.us is really for my own reference, Clipmarks is going to be what I’ll use to send articles, blog posts, pictures, etc. to other people when a simple link won’t be sufficient.

I’ve been a Firefox user for about two years now and I love it. I can’t even remember what it was like to use MSN’s Explorer browser. The default homepage for Firefox is a modified version of the Google homepage and that was all I ever really needed but a while back I got to messing around with Google’s personalized homepage to see if I would like it. I didn’t. Actually, it wasn’t that I didn’t like it, I just didn’t know if I needed it. I was interested to know how Google’s personalized homepage compared to some of the competitors in that market so I also looked at Netvibes and Pageflakes but none of these really seemed to be of significant value to me either for the same reasons. There was anything wrong with any of them, I just wasn’t ready to use them. Now, however, things have changed.

In an effort to continue to consolidate information as much as possible I’m officially a Google personalized homepage user and am really liking it. I’ve got my Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Notebook, Google Reader (do you see a trend here?), and weather widgets all arranged on the page just like I want it. I’ve got a few other widgets there too like a Wikipedia search bar and a Bible verse of the day. I’ve created a tab with all the “news” stuff I’m interested in from numerous outlets so I can just jump over there and see the top stories from those areas.

With all the information we have available to us today the issue is no longer content, but filters and context (I got that from The Long Tail). A personalized homepage is serving to be a great filter for me to see a lot of information in a short amount of time with very little effort once it’s all set up.

If you find yourself visiting the same blogs and news outlets on a daily basis you might want to do yourself a favor and roll it all up into one location with a personalized page. Since it’s a web application so you can have it both at home and the office too. What else could you ask for?

The culture that surrounds technology is an interesting thing. There are dividing lines between the people who are “in” and everybody else. A little over a year ago I learned that the people who are “in” don’t use Microsoft Explorer for their browser…they use Firefox. Firefox introduced (or at least popularized) the tab browsing function which means you don’t have to use numerous individual windows running anymore but just his Ctrl+T (Apple+T for the Mac folks) and BOOM…a new window is ready to go in the original window you opened.

The Firefox guys really got it right when they started letting people create add-ons that let you do all kinds of stuff to customize your browser. Its popularity has soared and the Firefox users became evangelists for the browser.

Firefox just recently released version 2.0 and it seems very sweet as usual. Interestingly enough, there’s a new Microsoft Explorer now that strangely Firefoxish.

In the tech culture, there are a few products or services that elicit emotional responses from the user base. Apple computers tend to fall in this elite category. So does Firefox. I recommend Firefox because it’s a great browser…the coolness is just gravy.