One of the most exciting abilities of the Internet is chat. You can sit in your room in Mayo and talk to someone in Azerbaijan.

Strangely, this is not being used by business, the obvious market, but mainly by hard-edge techies and kids all around the world.

The commonest form of chat is probably IRC, Internet Relay Chat. To talk on IRC, you download and set up mIRC (if you're using a PC) or Ircle (for a Mac) - there are other programs, but I like those two, especially mIRC.

In the last couple of years I've made friends with a playwright in New York, a history student in Chicago, a couple of screenwriters in the Netherlands and the Philippines and New Zealand, a sub-editor in Australia, and half a dozen others, by chatting on IRC.

A Connemara student in Cambridge used to chat because he couldn't talk Irish to anyone in England. "Ar chuala tu a leithead riamh?" we'd say to each other in mock shock at the antics on the channels; "Nior chuala!"

I've had tons of technical help from people on IRC. Last year my computer kept freezing up every time I used Netscape. I went on to the #macintosh channel (all IRC channels have a hash sign in front of them for some obscure Finnish reason - IRC was invented in Finland) and asked advice, and someone told me to trash the Netscape Global History.

I crossed my fingers and did so - it had been a fortnight and I was desperate - and Netscape started to run sweet as a nut. So I said to the helpful techie: "I owe you a pint next time you're in Dublin". And he (or she - there's no way of knowing age, disability, sex, colour or religion on IRC, which is one of its most appealing aspects) said "You'll have to wait a few years - I'm 12!"

By the same token, chat has its darker aspects. Some people immediately ask "a/s/l", which is short for "age, sex, location", and can be a signal that someone wants a nasty conversation which is better avoided.

The main thing to remember about these people is that they're invariably pasty 50-year-olds with three strands of greasy grey hair drawn over a fat head; they wear a greying T-shirt smelling of stale sweat with "I am groovy" in faded lettering under the stains.

It's also a good idea to set the defaults not to automatically accept DCC sends - fish around the menu till you find the DCC section. At the moment it is popular among the sadder types on IRC to send a script.ini file which will cause problems on your computer. Never accept DCC sends from strangers. Oh, and don't take sweeties, either.