“Please to call it… research”

Man, I love Google.  It’s fabulous to live in an era where just about any silly question I want to ask can be answered in moments.

• Who was that amazing, skinny-waisted, tap-dancing sister who played opposite Rosemary Clooney in White Christmas?
  
• How do HTML table styles work, again?
  
• What could I make for lunch with kale and tahini?
  
• Are there any new virus removal programs?
  
• Who wrote Le Grande Maunes?
  
• What good shielded outdoor lights are available?

Of course, there’s a downside.  If you’ve got the discipline to find your answer and then get off the web and move on, you’re good.   I don’t seem to have it.  So many of my Google searches turn up all sorts of interesting things that I want to explore.  Often they spawn more Google searches (I’d love to blame this all on a nefarious plot by Google).  Articles have links to other articles.  

I mostly ignore videos on the grounds that they take too long (unless I’m trying to learn something and so far the written answers aren’t helping). But that's probably a false economy.  I can get lost for big chunks of time reading stuff that, eventually, is not even related to my original question.  Is it fun? Sure.  Does it help me get my work done?  Well…

In this age of infinite information, it’s very easy to get lost in it, especially if you enjoy reading and the process of learning like I do.  How do you decide when you’ve had enough?  For me, it depends – on how black-and-white the question is, how comfortable I am that I know what I’m doing right now and don’t need much input from an expert.  And how much I’m enjoying the task at hand.  If I’d really rather not be doing what I’m doing, it’s easy to rationalize that a differently-worded search might come up with better info, or that these 4 related articles might be useful before I get back to work.  All in the name of …research, of course.  

I already set a timer for Facebook because aside from keeping in touch with friends, the thing’s a time sink.  Maybe I should do that before I type something into that search box, too.  

What do you do to keep from endlessly wandering around in all that delicious information out there?

Slideshows – articles for dummies

I really, really hate it when online sources turn lists into slideshows.  Maybe they think the pictures will make the list more memorable, but mostly it makes it a waste of time and bandwidth as the photos – or now, gifs! – load. 

To me, things are done as a slide show for one or more of the following reasons:

• The writer doesn’t have enough information to write a real article of substance, so is taking something short and making it long 
• The writer doesn’t really know how to write.  The pause of page reloads makes it less obvious that there's no flow.  Or even, no content of value. 
• The website wants every reader to have to click 5, or 8, or 10, or 50! times so that the page reloads and new ads can be presented along with the next photo
•  As above, the writer thinks the pictures will make the list more memorable.  But this implies that the list doesn’t stand on its own
• The writer thinks the article is funnier with the pictures

It’s not that I mind pictures as part of an article.  Even I do it occasionally.  See? 

Here’s the Brookfield Zoo’s new baby gorilla, Nora, with her mom, Koola.  It has nothing whatsoever to do with this article, except that I have significant respect for our gorilla cousins.  I doubt they’d communicate with slideshows.

What I mind is an article that essentially consists of One. Picture. At. A. Time. Each with a one-liner (the “list”) or possibly a short explanation along with it.  No matter how much the title intrigued me, I am very likely to X the browser tab and move on.  A picture is NOT worth a thousand words when it’s just a representation for a sentence of six.  

There are also “fake slideshows” showing up.  This is only slightly better.  You don’t have to click to see the next picture, but for every sentence there’s a picture.  Or two.  This morning I clicked on something and it took FOREVER to load.  It turned out to be because essentially for every 1-2 sentence “paragraph”, there were, side-by-side, one photo and one gif.  I didn’t even let it finish loading.  I no longer remember what the topic was. 

Boys and girls, when I just want to look at photos for fun, I’ll visit the Cheezburger network.  When I want information, I want to read it (okay, exceptions for TED talks, about which more in a future post).  If you don’t have enough to say, don’t go looking for pictures and then publish them.  Please. 

My favorite information sources

I’m one of those obnoxious facebook friends who tends to look things up before I repost, and when I discover something is incorrect, or only partially correct, I don’t hesitate to post additional information in a comment.  I’d say about 70% of my friends are glad to learn more.  The rest, well….have you ever heard of “don’t confuse me with the facts”?  It’s really more like “don’t annoy me with the facts”.  

I find facts to be very handy things.  They are, however, tough to find on the internet sometimes.  The web is the ultimate democracy – anyone can post anything.   There is no Fact Police.  There can be plenty of pushback for a post, but there’s no guarantee the pushback has anything to do with actual facts.  

I tend to stay away from most news sites, especially the ones connected to television stations.  The ones with obvious political biases – BOTH left and right – are, to me, pretty transparently off base.  The only newspaper I read regularly is The Economist.  If you usually get your news from a US source of any kind, I encourage you to give it a try.  It’s very enlightening to read about us from a point of view outside the country.  And I also like learning about other parts of the world.  One of the things I really hate about American media is the apparent assumption that if it didn’t happen in the US or directly affect Americans, it isn’t really important.  The other source I trust for news is NPR.  Folks on the far right seem to think it’s very left leaning, but I find it pretty balanced, and it often has the detail I crave on a topic that interests me.  

For many other things, I might read them but unless an article feels solid and I can corroborate it with other sources, I usually won’t repost it.  Snopes.com and Politifact.com are good friends.  I love that Politifact pulls no punches: you’ll find “pants-on-fire” labels on untrue statements no matter who made them.

As a geek, I do my best to keep up with what’s happening in IT.  It’s tough. There are so many subspecialties that no one person can possibly stay current on everything.  Fortunately, there are lots of good blogs and news sites.  Here are some of my favorites:

• Sophos’ NakedSecurity keeps me up to date on what to watch and I find them mostly written in English rather than tech-ese.  I repost their articles a lot. 
• InfoWorld has several interesting blogs, especially Tech Watch
• TechRepublic’s multi-topic site
• Gizmo’s reviews of freeware, known as techsupportalert.com
• Wall Street Journal’s CIO Report
• My friend John Ahlberg’s blog at Waident.com, which also tends to cover many IT-related topics.  

Then there are the sites for cycling, for knitting, for gardening, for fun, and for inspiration.  Just having that list might make you think I couldn’t keep up with them ALL, all the time.  And you’d be right.  Still, I imagine there are good ones out there that I don’t know anything about.  What are some of your favorite sources?