Talking about Metal On-Line here.
In the old days my preferred way to read about metal was USENET newsgroups. With the ever declining signal-to-noise ratio, it's of course no longer desirable. It's ironic that the fall of metal's popularity coincided with the rise of WWW. That explains why there wasn't many must-visit websites for metal fans in the 90s, at least that's my experience. A lot of metal sites were created by amateurs/fans/students who eventually quit maintaining the sites, with the exception of BNR Metal, which is still going strong and serves as one of my favorite metal encyclopedia (BTW, I know it's kinda surprising but Wikipedia is also a good source of metal band info.)
RSS
With a resurgence in its popularity and the advent of RSS (a mechanism that make updates to websites appear on subscribers' client software automatically,) I've finally got back in touch with the world of metal again. For example, Death Metal News on Topix.net provides RSS feed (if you don't wanna install any RSS client, you could always use my.yahoo.com) Most of their feeds come from Blabbermouth.net, a metal news site provided by one of the most prolific metal label, Roadrunner records. The nice thing about it is that it also covers bands other than their own!
Online radio
You won't hear a lot of 24x7 heavy metal only radio station on the air. There's none, even in a "metal-active" area like the San Francisco bay area. Fortunately, thanks to internet, now metal fans have many choices.
First of all, major internet radio providers like AOL Radio and Yahoo Music all have 1 or more metal channels. While Yahoo Music delivers higher quality sound, AOL provides more channels, each dedicated to a sub-genre like Death Metal, Black Metal, even one for "hair"/glam/pop metal bands of the 80s! You could skip to the next songs if you don't like the current one on Yahoo though. And Yahoo do have 2 sub-genre station: Emo and Metalcore, but they're available to subscriber of Launchcast Plus only (If you use SBC Yahoo DSL, it's free)
If you wanna listen to less mainstream produced metal radio, you could find plenty of them on ShoutCast under the metal genre, for example, ChroniX Aggression, BrainGell, The Edge.
Finally, this is not free, but XM subscribers could listen to XM's Liquid Metal channel online (in fact, it's only available online but not thru satellite anymore.)
Podcast
I consider Shoutcast as the first step in the direction of liberation of radio from corporate conglomerates, giving normal people like you and me power to broadcast. All you need is setting up your PC as a Shoutcast server and play some music (or talk non-stop like a "real DJ".) Of course, you still need a high bandwidth upstream internet connection. With Podcasting, even this requirement is gone. You record your show as MP3, write an RSS XML enclosure for it, then upload to your webhost and you're done! So it's not surprising to see that lots of "niche topics", including heavy metal, get healthy podcast coverage, since it's very low cost.
Unfortunately, the proliferation of podcasts made it difficult to pick out relevant ones, let alone good ones. Podcast directories help to a certain degree but it's still a lot of trial-and-error. Or you could rely on word-of-mouth, like my recommendation of The Entropy League. Also, don't miss the accompanying blog: Be Metal
Hope you enjoy this 3 part series about the current state of Metal!
[Update: I just heard Metallica's "Damage Case" played on Yahoo! LaunchCast Radio and they bleeped out the swearing by Hetfield. Lame Lame Lame. Thumbs down from me.]
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