Why Use the Internet?

01 - Why Use the Internet?

You've seen the hype, heard the buzz, been pummeled day and night with ads. What is this Web stuff everyone's babbling about? And even more important, what's in it for writers?

The short answer is: if you need information fast, the Web is the best thing to come along since paper.
Oh, come on now. That can't be true.

It's two in the morning, you're still up because you simply must have this story in the mail tomorrow to meet the contest deadline. Your cowboy hero is about to zip up his jacket when you realize that maybe zippers weren't around in 1889. Should you switch to buttons? Or your romance heroine is telling another character about a car wreck she saw in New Orleans ten years earlier, but you've never been to New Orleans and don't know anything about the city. Maybe move the story to Houston? That Czech word for cat that you used on page 4, the stupid spell checker doesn't recognize the word and you're not sure how it's spelled. What to do?

Take a quick side trip to the Web. The zipper was patented in 1893, but wasn't used much until after 1905. It's buttons for the cowboy. You find a street map of New Orleans and select Ursuline Avenue in the French Quarter for the car wreck. You open a Czech-English dictionary, plug in the word cat and get back kocka in three seconds.

Time spent on research? If you know what you're doing, less than five minutes. So am I saying that all human knowledge is on the World Wide Web? Nope, but there's more than anyone will likely ever need.

ARTICLES: Magazines, newspapers, academic journals, and more.
BOOKS: Entire novels, especially older out-of-copyright works. No one wants to read a novel online, but they're very handy if you want to find a particular quote or locate a character's name.
DICTIONARIES: Hundreds them, language, medical, legal, slang, ancient Greek or whatever else you might need. Use'm and leave'm, no cost, no storage.
DOCUMENTS: No need to lie awake at night wondering whether the Treaty of Ghent was a good deal. Read it yourself.
GOVERNMENT FORMS: From the IRS on down, your characters can keep their red tape in order.
HOBBIES: If someone does it, there's a Web page about it. And they'd love to tell you the details.
MAPS: Ancient, modern, world, local, keep your characters on the right path.
MUSIC: Classical, rock, country, it's all there somewhere. Song lyrics and bios of the singers, too.
PAINTINGS: Great art, bad art, you know what you need.
PEOPLE: Bulletin Boards, discussion groups, chat rooms, and more. On every subject imaginable (and some not so imaginable).
PHOTOGRAPHS: Need to see what Wild Bill really looked like? How about a nice German Pz IVE tank from 1939?
SOUNDS: Let's listen to that bandicoot mating call one more time, just to get it right.
TRAVEL: What's a nice restaurant in Madrid where a couple of spies can get a decent meal? What brand of gasoline would your character buy in Nigeria?

From quick reference material to in-depth research, the Web is the fastest way to get what you want with the least effort. Least effort, says he? What about all the horror stories of people spending hours in frustrating, futile searches? Alas, they're true stories. But the good news is that most of the pain could have been been avoided.

Which is exactly the point of this article and the ones to follow, to explain Web research. More precisely, what writers who are new to the Internet and the Web need to know : tips and tricks, the secrets of cyberspace research for beginners.