Rhys Darby
Cover
The 2008 How To Guide
How to … Use the internet
By Matt Nippert
Google allows users to search more than eight trillion web pages. But given this sheer volume of information – ranging from reputable to rabid – finding exactly what you want is like trying to find a microdot in a megabyte.
When Doris Lessing accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature last month, she warned that the breadth of the internet had “seduced a whole generation into its inanities”.
Although Google is highly regarded and can be very effective if used properly (see box), Richard MacManus – whose blog on internet developments, Read/WriteWeb, is one of the world’s most popular – recently ranked Quintura as the best alternative search engine. Instead of presenting results in the form of a list, Quintura puts together a cloud of related terms and allows users to browse results by topic.
Specific fields of knowledge often demand a different approach to searching, says MacManus. “If I wanted to search in health, for example, there are hundreds of specialist health search engines out there – but I can find those by entering ‘health search engine’ into Google.”
Although news organisations have higher standards for accuracy than personal web pages, finding specific information on current events, or even choosing a source, presents similar difficulties. The images of newspaper front pages from around the world put up each day by Newseum currently number 566.
New Zealand Herald multimedia editor Jeremy Rees suggests finding a media outlet you trust and becoming a regular visitor – he frequents the New York Times and Guardian – or using a “portal” site. “Find someone who has done the filtering for you,” he says.
In this category he recommends Arts & Letters Daily, a series of links to quirky, literate and usually interesting stories from around the globe. “Suddenly you’ll find a story about Stalin as a lovelorn teenager, in the Jerusalem Post,” says Rees.
To build your own iGoogle home page with feeds from news sources, blogs and websites, visit google.com/ig. It will ask you to pick from popular sites such as BBC News or cnn.com and you can also click on Add Stuff in the top right-hand corner to include more feeds – like videos from The Daily Show or joke of the day.
A very popular meta-site is Wikipedia, an online encyclopaedia written by users. Although prone to the odd inaccuracy, it is, says MacManus, an invaluable research tool: “I love Wikipedia. You have to look at it with a critical eye, but it’s definitely the first place I go to search on a topic.”
One way of verifying Wikipedia’s accuracy is to double-check where it got its information – facts are annotated with information sources.
There are treasure troves of primary information online if you know where to look. Project Gutenberg, an initiative aimed at digitising the world’s old and out-of-copyright texts, has a online collection that includes, among many other titles, every Shakespeare play and every book of the Bible.
And if words don’t take your fancy, then pictures might. The Art Renewal Center is trying to build an online repository of images of paintings from the world’s great artists – including the complete works of Michelangelo, da Vinci and van Gogh.
It’s even possible now to get your photos retouched through the www.picwash.com website (they’ll remove acne, reduce wrinkles, remove red eye or whiten teeth for $9 a photo). And for $13 a month, you can subscribe to emusic.com, one of the largest online music stores, and get to download any 30 tracks.
For many more addresses of useful sites, visit the Listener website: www.listener.co.nz
SENDING EMAILS
Nearly everyone sends email messages, but have we really learnt to use the medium properly?
David Shipley, who co-authored Send, a book about email etiquette, says although the immediacy of email is generally beneficial, our brains often have trouble keeping up with our computers. “Once you’ve written an email,” he says, “there’s very little time for common sense to intervene.”
The problem is that email messages are so easily disseminated and, once sent, cannot be recalled. Applying common sense to email usage could have saved some people their jobs. Auckland University senior lecturer Paul Buchanan was dismissed from his position after sending an angry email to a student. (Buchanan is appealing the decision in the Employment Court.) And Michael Brown, head of the United States disaster relief agency, lost his job and was publicly castigated after sending inappropriate emails to his staff while handling the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina. (Sample: “Are you proud of me? Can I quit now? Can I go home?”)
In Shipley’s book (co-written with Will Schwalbe), the chief problem with email is diagnosed as lack of tone control. “The message written without regard to tone becomes a blank screen onto which the reader projects his own fears, prejudices, and anxieties.”
The solution, then, is to write as clearly and formally as possible – particularly for business correspondence or messaging people you don’t know well. Shipley suggests using “Mr” and “Mrs”, signing off with “Sincerely”, avoiding abbreviations and continually refreshing the subject line to signal what your message contains.
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