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Is the Net any better?
December 1, 2006

(Third in a series of comments on editorials from Personal Engineering & Instrumentation News)

In his April 1996 editorial "Net ambivalence," PE&IN editor Paul Schreier questioned that value of the web as a serious research tool. He expressed his disappointment that the web as one of my least valuable resources when searching information on a specific topic. What would he say now?

As an editor, I find the web a far easier way to get information than I did ten years ago. At that time, there wasn't much good technical information available online. Today, I can get data sheets, manuals, white papers, user opinions, and prices that were difficult to get or, at the very least, required more time than ten years ago. I don't keep print catalogs or even catalogs on CD anymore and I suspect you don't either.

Although there's far more good information available online that there was ten years ago, the signal-to-noise level is probably higher. For example, I recently wrote an online article on a lab test for IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). But, researching the technology IMS is still difficult. Try typing "IMS" and "telecom" into Google. You'll get tons of hype, mostly press releases and business-related articles, but you have to dig down several pages to find anything that explains the underlying technology. Even worse is finding a site that spells out IMS, which I need to do with all but the most common acronymns.

On the other hand, good articles live far longer online than in print. I routinely get e-mails from readers who find useful Test & Measurement World articles online that we published for or five years ago.

Posted by Martin Rowe on December 1, 2006 | Comments (0)