Like millions of other people I have found myself turning to the web for news of the conflict in Iraq.

Apart from the major news sites like BBCi, Sky and CNN, I can look at many other broadcasters, even the Arab satellite channel Al-Jazeera, although their site is in Arabic of course.

Most newspapers now have special Iraq sections of their websites too, and they are updating them throughout the day in an attempt to keep up with what is happening over there.

The wide range of sites and channels means it is possible to get the latest information and hear different points of view. It isn’t just the news sites that are getting lots of visitors.

Points of view

Everyone from the Stop the War Coalition to the US Army has a website, giving their point of view on what is happening.

And there are literally thousands of personal websites, or ‘weblogs’, covering the conflict.

Some of these are being written by journalists who are out there, some by pundits and commentators in other countries, and one is apparently from an Iraqi living in Baghdad.

These blogs vary in tone, with many of the US ones criticising what they see as inadequate coverage of events on TV and in the newspapers.

Others are full of links to other blogs and news stories, trying to make it easy for readers to find their way around the vast number of websites and online reports.

However sometimes rumours which would never be broadcast get reported online as if they were fact.

Before the first missiles were fired, the Israeli news site Debka claimed that Iraq’s deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz had been killed while trying to defect.

This was not true, and Tariq Aziz appeared on TV to deny it. But for a while the net was buzzing with the story as if it was correct.

When we see something on TV or read it in a newspaper we know that it has been checked out - and we know that if a mistake has been made then there are ways to get it corrected.

People accused of wrong-doing can sue for libel if a mistake is made.

But when someone posts a story on their personal website then nobody apart from the writer is checking it first.

A story can start on one site and quickly be linked to from other sites, making it seem well-founded even when it is just a rumour or speculation.

Just because something appears on a professional-looking web page doesn’t make it true or accurate.

We all know how to judge whether a TV news story seems to be credible, but sometimes we accept what appears online too easily.

This may be the first serious conflict to be reported as it happens, with film of fighting in Umm Qasr being broadcast live and weblogs updated minute by minute.

But when it comes to war, everyone looking for information on the web needs to be very careful about who they believe.

Fact or Foe?
Click here to have your say!

In my last column I complained loudly about the number of junk commercial email messages I was receiving.

I’m fed up with this spam, so I installed a program to help me sort them out.

Mailwasher lets me look through the list of emails I’ve got waiting for me and decide which ones are spam before my email program fetches them from my Internet Service Provider.

It is one of many different anti-spam programs you can get from websites around the net.

I was rather hoping that after I’d used it for a week I would see the number of unwanted emails come down significantly.

That’s because as well as deleting the messages I don’t like, Mailwasher also sends an email back to the spammer telling them ‘this email address is not working’.

The idea is that the people sending the spam will then remove me from their mailing lists and I’ll get fewer offers to lose weight, get rich or get ripped off.

It isn’t working yet. I’m still getting fifty to sixty spams every night, and more at weekends.

However I do think it is worth doing, because it’s a lot faster to check my email first and delete the messages I don’t want than to wait for them to download and then have to go through them.

I’ll see how it goes after a month - and let you know.

Got Junk Mail?
Click here to have your say!