 |
Making the Internet Work for You
By Jon Shinn  In the mid-1990s the World Wide Web and e-mail
exploded into the public eye, and many people predicted that these
and other Internet technologies would revolutionize the way that we
live and work within a few years. And while the dot com crash of
the late 90s brought us back to reality regarding how easily and
quickly that kind of revolution can occur, we have continued to see
the Internet take on an increased role in our business and personal
lives with each passing year.
As the awareness and skill of individuals grows, technology
improves, access become faster and cheaper, and businesses and
organizations learn how to more effectively use the tools that are
available to them, there is every reason to expect this trend to
continue.
The focus of this article is on sharing information and
techniques that can help you to make better use of the tools that
you are hopefully already using. Most of the topics presented here
address questions that many O&P professionals have asked me as
an Internet technology specialist working almost exclusively in
O&P for the past eight years.
Empowered E-mail
Consider the best medium to communicate.
Every medium of communication has its own strengths and
weaknesses, and it pays to put a little thought into how to balance
the different methods available to you. Do you carry on
back-and-forth discussions about the details of an issue that span
days over e-mail, but could be handled in ten minutes on the phone?
On the other hand, do you play phone tag or get involved in long
conversations when what you need to communicate can be handled with
a very simple e-mail exchange? Have you considered the differences
between a phone conversation that goes to memory (or notes, if they
are taken) after it ends, versus an e-mail that can be saved and
archived verbatim by you or the person you are communicating with?
The implications of these questions are different for every person
and for every situation, but it pays to keep them in mind.
Don't get dragged down by spam.
My Number One rule about spam is to not waste a lot of time
getting upset about it, because it is a consequence of the same
things that make e-mail great, and we'll therefore probably always
have to deal with some spam. Learn to recognize it quickly, make a
quick tap on the delete key, and put it out of your mind so that it
doesn't turn into more of an annoyance than it has to be.
With that said, in recent times technology for slowing down spam
is finally starting to catch up with the spammers. Major services
(AOL, MSN, Hotmail, etc) have made great strides and will continue
to improve their anti-spam tools, and there are a number of good
offerings for users of standalone e-mail programs like Microsoft
Outlook. Most of our staff members use an Outlook plug-in called
Cloudmark SpamNet (www.cloudmark.com) which compares each message
received with a database of known spam messages to eliminate much
of the spam without risking personal messages (it does occasionally
block newsletters that I actually want to receive, but if I
"unblock" them, then it will remember next time). Using this tool
has reduced the overall amount of spam that I receive by over 50
percent, and has almost entirely cut out the sexually offensive
variety.
Avoiding viruses.
A detailed discussion of antivirus software is outside the scope
of this article, but software is not the most important factor
anyway. Nearly all virus infections happen because a user didn't
follow one of the two cardinal rules of virus protection as it
relates to e-mail:
1) Keep up to date with critical software patches. For
Windows users, this means regular visits to www.windowsupdate.com, unless you have Windows
XP with Auto Update enabled. The most damaging viruses in recent
years have all been spread through software vulnerabilities that
were patches at least months, and often years, before the virus was
unleashed.
2) Don't open attachments that you did not expect to
receive, especially if the person has not signed his or her name
inside the message. When your acquaintances fail to follow
Rule Number One, viruses can get hold of their address books and
send themselves to you as a message, with an intriguing subject
line or body, from these e-mail correspondents. Don't be fooled
unless they told you they were going to send it or they sign their
name at the bottom of the message.
A permanent address through your own domain.
Are you still giving out your e-mail address as
JohnDoeCPO232@aol.com? Most people don't realize how simple it is
to have john@yourcompany.com, without giving up your existing
address or having two separate accounts, through a simple technique
called "e-mail aliasing" (or sometimes "e-mail forwarding"). You'll
still check your old account in the same way, but your new
addresses will be aliased to that account--sort of like adding a
toll-free phone number that rings on your regular line. You can
then start giving out your new e-mail address, and if you check
your mail through a standalone e-mail program like Microsoft
Outlook (as opposed to using AOL, Hotmail, etc), then you can also
change your return address so that it shows the new one.
If your company already has a website with your own domain name
(ie, www.yourcompany.com), you can call your web-hosting company
and it should be able to set this up at little or no cost to you.
If not, you can register a domain name and get unlimited e-mail
aliasing very inexpensively through any number of different
registrars (we use www.dotster.com, at $15 a year for the domain
name and $10 a year for unlimited e-mail forwarding).
There are a number of important advantages to having an e-mail
address at your own domain name:
1. It is easier to remember;
2. It promotes your company every time someone sees it;
3. It implies that you are up-to-date with Internet technology;
and
4. If you ever change your e-mail provider, you can simply update
the alias to point to the new address and you wont have to notify
all your contacts, who may never even realize that you
switched.
Better Searching
The World Wide Web is an incomprehensibly vast collection of
information contributed by millions of different people and
organizations, changing all the time, with no central point, and
very little underlying logic. It is the job of a search engine to
make sense of this incredibly confusing mess, and although the
technology has become quite sophisticated, search engines are still
not very good tools for finding what you need. However, they are
the only tools that we have, so if you want to make the most of the
information that's available to you, it's important to obtain as
much competency as possible in the skill--or art--of using search
engines effectively. Here are a few tips that will help you get the
most out of your searches.
Know the best tools to use.
Topic-specific search engines can be very useful because they
eliminate billions of irrelevant pages and can therefore save you a
lot of time digging through results, and they are typically updated
more frequently than Internet search engines. If you believe that a
specific company or organization has the information that you need,
try going to its website and searching or navigating from there.
For broader searches that are still O&P-specific, you may wish
to try the OPIE search engine, maintained by my company at www.oandp.com. The
OPIE search includes the websites from hundreds of O&P
manufacturers, organizations, etc., the archives of
industry-specific journals and magazines, and the full history of
discussions on OANDP-L, the orthotics and prosthetics e-mail
listserver, among other resources.
If you can't find the information that you need using a
topic-specific engine, or you have a broader search to perform,
then you must turn to one of the many engines that searches the
entire Internet. In the past few years, nearly everyone agrees that
Google (www.google.com) has taken a commanding lead in
this area. In addition to having exceptional technology for
determining the most relevant results for a particular search,
Google claims to search more pages than any other engine, is
extremely fast, and is one of the few major engines that still
shows the most relevant results first, rather than placing paid
listings at the top.
I highly recommend obtaining the Google toolbar (toolbar.google.com), which is a free add-on for
your web browser that lets you search directly from the browser,
rather than visiting the Google website and then entering a search
phrase. This not only makes searching faster, it also encourages
you to perform more searches, which increases your chance of
finding what you're looking for.
Perform similar searches.
Because a search engine is a very imperfect tool that cannot
grasp the intricacies of language, it is crucial that you search on
as many different variations of a topic as you can think of. As a
simple example, go to Google, search for Upper Limb Prosthetics, and look through the
first ten results. Then go back and search for Upper Extremity Prosthetics. Surprised? When I
tried, not a single result in the top ten was the same between
these two searches. Now take it one step further and try searching
for trans-humeral with, and then without, a hyphen. Again, there was not a
single result that appeared in the top ten of both searches when I
tried [Note: since this article was published, Google has improved
it's handling of hyphenated words, so you will likely now see more
similarity in the results for this particular example]. Now imagine
how much different the results are when you combine variations with
a different angle of approach, such as Above-Knee Amputation versus
Transfemoral Prosthesis.
What this means is that if you only search for one or two
variations on a particular term or phrase, you are likely seeing
only a small percentage of the information that is available. Be
creative and try to come up with as many ways that people might
refer to your topic of interest. Another lesson is to narrow your
searches as much as possible, particularly when you are using an
Internet-wide search engine that searches billions of pages.
When search engines fail.
Keyword searching is very effective in many cases, particularly
as your skills at choosing the right keywords and phrases improve.
But sometimes you don't know exactly what you're looking for, or
you can't seem to find keywords that really hone in on a particular
topic. In this case, your best bet is to use a search engine to
find topic-specific sites, and then start surfing. Use the search
tools or navigation on these sites and follow the links that they
provide to other related sites, branching out to get a feel for the
information that is available and narrow down what you're really
looking for.
Often you can more clearly define what you need in this process,
and then you can return to a search engine to perform a more
refined keyword search. The key here is discipline. It's not hard
to spend hours drifting into many related topic areas that interest
you, and while that's one of the greatest things about the web, it
can also distract you so much that you don't find the information
that you originally needed in a reasonable time frame.
Tying It All Together
When faced with a tough clinical issue or a question about a
specific product, many O&P professionals have learned that the
Internet can be the quickest and most effective place to turn. Here
is an example of how you might apply the techniques described
above:
1. Try a topic-specific search. Visit the website of a
company or organization that is directly related to your question
(for instance, the manufacturer of a product), or an
O&P-specific resource such as oandp.com. Although it still pays
to try multiple searches, you can spend less time refining your
search and digging through results at these narrower sites.
2. If you haven't satisfactorily answered your question,
move on to an Internet search engine like Google. Now you will
need to spend a little more time thinking about the best keywords
to use, trying multiple variations, and possibly digging through
results to find the ones that are applicable. However, you'll have
the advantage of searching virtually the entire Internet, using the
best technology that's available. Be aware that the results from an
Internet search engine are typically one or two months old, so you
may find some bad links or pages that have changed significantly,
and you won't usually find new websites.
3. If the answer doesn't seem to be out there, tap into the
knowledge of thousands of O&P professionals on OANDP-L. If
you're not already signed up for the OANDP-L e-mail discussion
list, you can subscribe using the blue box at oandp.com. You can
then post your question to the list, and wait for responses from
any of the over 3,000 list members worldwide. Note that it is best
to put some effort into searching the Web first, as this will get
your answer more quickly and save all of the list members' time. In
particular, be sure to search the OANDP-L archives, available
either through oandp.com or oandp-l.org, to be sure that no one has
already asked the same question!
There are, of course, many other ways to use the Internet in
your clinical practice, from ordering components online to
interacting with referral sources to promoting your business. Jon Shinn is lead project architect for O&P Digital Technologies. During his eight years with OPDT, he has managed the development of oandp.com and dozens of other leading O&P websites. He can be reached via e-mail at jon@oandp.com. 
Table Of Contents - June 2003
|
|
