Is the Internet Still a Resource for Information?

Bored with your internet experience? Everyone hears about the desperate housewives who live an imaginary life on the other side of the monitor; flying across the world to meet strangers with whom they have fantastic sex, and start a new life. Young adolescent girls who just wanted to have a cool friend to talk to that ended up doing a lot more with some middle-aged pervert at the local city park. Every day when we log on and again when we check our email, we are inundated with ads for dating sites or dating personals, or financial schemes in which we can work from home as a word processor and clear $20 an hour. Yet there is useful information on the internet, and there are still useful ways to be productive on the net, and not just through looking up your old pal on Classmates that probably does not wish to talk to you today anyway.

• Utilize the News portion of your search engine instead of looking up videos of Paris embarrassing herself. You can get quick information about seemingly trivial issues because the data retrieved are on things editors found to be important to their readers, rather than the self-promotional drivel offered from most vanity publishers of electronic data through personal websites. There are also, News Alerts, offered through Google through which you can actually track the changes in a story in real time, for those of you who do not watch the news.

• Group searches tell you what the people are talking about in the newsgroups, which is useful if you are deciding whether to talk about an issue in the first place. You might not want to deciding on what type of responses you see in these groups, dependent on how passionate they are, or not, about the subject at hand.

• Hoovers.com is a great resource for anyone looking for the latest information on any publicly traded company. And Nexis.com continues to offer valuable business information for anyone who simply wants to take a deep look into what is going on in the corporate environment around them, or the one that they are trying desperately to become a part of.

• Anyone who isn’t informed about how RSS can help them deliver their publishing on demand, rather than have their audience search for them, only to become frustrated and move onto the next content provider, isn’t that serious about maintaining and growing an audience to begin with. I have used RSS to search for job opportunities without my having to go out of my way to do so and deliver all types of useful data to my start page. Sometimes the best opportunities and information are available when you are not looking for either, and that is exactly what RSS is for.

There are numerous examples but these are just a few ways in which you can make your internet experience a productive and profitable one. Have fun and enjoy your new place in the World Wide Web, by actually taking control of the driving rather than following the traffic wherever it may go!