Free resources on the internet

A friend is learning how to use a computer and is very curious about things. So here's my guide and explanations for him.

• Information: Google is a word now so I don't have to mention that. www.wikipedia.com is an online encyclopedia. That has everything. If you do academic writing, they won't consider that a trustful source, because it almost can be edited by anyone. But if you just want to know about something, it is certainly where you can go.
  
• Software: Here are a few softwares I think are cool. I want to add that free and open source softwares now are very good and usually light too so your computer won't semi-freeze. They can almost replace all paid softwares and work as a charm. But you want to consider portable softwares first. Here's my rant about portable softwares.
  
• Skype: Skype is a software that let's you call other people with skype for free. You can do video calls too. The quality is great even though sometimes you get cut off because the software is not solid stable. They also have paid services that lets you receive calls and make real calls to other phones which is much cheaper than phone calls too especially if you make international calls.
• P2P download: You can download movies, music and almost anything free. But there are legal issues involved. In some places like HK, they'll put you in prison if you download with bt. But in many countries, downloading through bt is not illegal. So do figure out the legal side and if it is OK to download in your country, read on. So you first of all need a client software. I use utorrent which can be used portable. Then you need to find a torrent which contains what you want to download such as thepiratebay.com or www.mininova.org. Then search for what you want to download. The download speed vary greatly. The more popular the thing you want to download is, the faster it is (when it has more seeders and leechers). There's also http download, ftp download, free sharing space like rapidshare download. For these, you usually need to find a forum where people with similar interest share links like that.
  
• books: if you like reading books, I found a website that provides legal free classic and also audio books. (I never liked reading books but I liked to listen to them much better.) So check Gutenberg project out.
  
• Blog space: I keep a blog but I really know very little about alternatives in this category. You can at least choose www.wordpress.com where you'll get a yourname.wordpress.com subdomain name or a blogger with a yourname.blogspot.com. If you want simplicity, first start with wordpress.com. It will be complicated for a beginner already. After you know what's going on, you may move to blogspot.com where you have more control to change the template code etc.

That's all I can think of right now. I'll post an article for what is Linux like later.