Online Resources
The Internet offers wonderful resources for writers (and everyone else) – and they're all free. This article describes some of my favorites. I've also listed a few sites for bargain hunters.
If you're just getting started, begin with the Internet tutorial. Try a search engine or click your way through one of the lists of research tools described below. You’ll
quickly learn how to navigate. But don't expect to become an expert
Internet researcher in a few hours or even in a few days. It takes
time to develop these skills, just as it did to learn how to use
a print library.
Updated November 22, 2004
Internet tutorial
This is an excellent tutorial about online research:
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu
/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/FindInfo.html
Search engines
- Most people like Google best: http://www.google.com.
Download the free Google toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com to make searching even easier.
Check out Google’s
advanced search capabilities – for example, you can tell Google
to exclude results that contain particular words, which would be
handy if you were searching for information about Saturn, the planet,
and not Saturn, the automobile. Also read through Google’s
description of its features at http://www.google.com/help/features.html.
You may be surprised to learn that you can use Google as a
reverse telephone directory and as a dictionary, among many
other things. If you've looked at this page before, but haven't checked it out in the past few months, look again – new features are added all the time.
- Yahoo – http://www.yahoo.com– is often best
when you’re looking for a list of sites, such as a list
of radio stations.
- To learn more about search engines, see Search Engine
Watch at http://searchenginewatch.com.
Research tools
Directories
Writing tutorial
Analytical Writing for Science and Technology, by T. M. Georges,
is an excellent online writing tutorial aimed at the technical
writer, but useful for anyone who wants to write clearly: http://mywebpages.comcast.net/tgeorges/write.
It's based on an excellent book called Analytical
Writing, by Thomas Johnson, which is no longer in print. Later chapters of the tutorial
may be more useful to experienced writers than early chapters.
Legal resources
Travel
- Bidding for Travel – http://www.biddingfortravel.com – decodes
Priceline, enabling you to place informed bids for air travel,
hotels, and car rentals. By following their advice, you can stay at four-star hotels for YMCA
prices
via Priceline.
- Seat Guru – http://www.seatguru.com –provides annotated seating plans for the planes flown by most airlines. Their information can help you avoid seats that don't recline or that have other problems.
- David Rowell, a travel consultant, has an informative website called The Travel Insider, focused on air travel and gadgets for business travelers; he also offers a free weekly newsletter: http://www.the travelinsider.info.
- Journeywoman – http://www.journeywoman.com – is
an excellent resource for women travelers (and men too).
- Travelite has all the information you need to travel
anywhere with just a carryon: http://www.travelite.org.
Bargains
- Consumer World is the place to go before you shop for
anything: http://www.consumerworld.org.
Sign up for the free weekly newsletter to get tips on outstanding
deals and links to useful articles.
- For nearly anything you can buy, eBay (http://www.ebay.com), the leading Internet auction site, is worth a look. It's more than the world's largest yard sale; many conventional stores have outlets on eBay. And some items are available at fixed prices, without bidding. When you bid, you offer a price that's a fixed amount above the current price (e.g. if the current high bid is $24.00, your bid must be $24.50). You can also enter a maximum; if you do, eBay will automatically submit a bid for you if anyone outbids you, until your limit is reached.
- If you're planning to bid on eBay, a service called Auction Sniper (http://www.auctionsniper.com) can help by entering your bid, including your maximum, in the last seconds of an auction. You won't beat anyone whose maximum is higher than yours. But many people bid emotionally in auctions. They get caught up in the competition and raise their offering price accordingly, rather than deciding ahead of time how much they're willing to spend. You can avoid this kind of bidding war – and avoid getting carried away yourself – by planning a last-second bid (called a snipe) via Auction Sniper. You get three free snipes when you join; thereafter, each successful snipe costs 1% of the purchase price, with a minimum of 25 cents and a maximum of $5.
- Telephone calls can be made for 2.5 cents per minute within the US and at low rates to other countries if you use a prepaid service called One Suite: http://www.onesuite.com. Get 20 minutes free if you join with
this link. The service has no monthly charges and it's easy to use: When you're traveling, you can use access numbers within the US (there's an extensive list) or an 800 number (which costs 2.9 cents per minute). Your PIN is your home phone number plus four digits, so it's easy to remember. You can also set up your account so that when you dial from home you don't have to enter the PIN.
- Telephone calls for an incredible $5 for 1000 minutes – that’s
half a cent per minute – or an even more amazing $10 for 3000 minutes are available from RNK Telecom. And no, there are no extra charges. Caveats: RNK offers access numbers only in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, and the service is less convenient to use than One Suite. Information and signup at http://talk1000.rnktel.com.
- Efax allows you to receive up to 20 fax pages per month free via email – very useful when
you’re traveling and have access to your email but not
to a fax machine: http://www.efax.com. Note that you will be given a fax number that is not in your own area code; if you want a number in your area code, you must sign up for their for-pay service (currently $12.95/month) which has a 300/month page limit for receiving faxes and which also lets you send faxes via email for 10 cents/page (more outside the US).
- Send faxes by email via Faxaway: http://www.faxaway.com. You simply address the message to 12223334444@faxaway.com (where 222-333-444 is the recipient's fax number), attaching a file if you like. You'll get an email message from Faxaway when the fax is received; if the line is busy, they'll try again and if they can't get through they'll let you know. This is very convenient when the to-be-faxed document is generated by your computer (less so if you need to scan it first). Because the fax is generated digitally, the quality is excellent – usually better than with a regular fax machine. Faxaway is considerably less expensive than Efax for occasional users: $1 per month plus about 11 cents per page within the US, and more to numbers in other countries. With an account, you also get a free incoming fax/voicemail number; this number has a 206 area code no matter where you live. I sometimes use Faxaway to print short documents when I'm staying at a hotel: I simply fax the document to myself at the hotel's fax number. (Caution: If you do this, be sure to ask about any charges for incoming faxes; they're usually free, but some hotels charge as much as a dollar a page.)
For more information about useful Internet resources, see these articles elsewhere on my website:
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