When I'm not writing articles for magazines or working in my recording studio I'm an author. I peck away at my keyboard at all hours of the night in the hope of creating my next masterpiece.

A long time ago my first book was unkindly reviewed on the Internet by this pimply, irritating nerd-child called Matthew Reilly. This was back when young Matthew was
still scribbling with crayons, wore nappies and wasn't yet recognized as the purveyor of fine literature as he is to today. The problem from my point of view wasn't his unfortunate opinion — reviews are all taken with a pinch of salt — but the fact that he wrote "Hague sucks" (or something similar) so many times that search engines were giving that particular web page top billing. It's like the old trick early unscrupulous website advertisers used. They would write something like "Britney Spears naked" hundreds of times in white lettering on a white background, rendering it invisible, and use it as a wallpaper for their intended website. So anyone
searching for pictures of Britney in the buff (again) would strangely find themselves directed to a web page covered in completely different, unrelated material.

The point is that Matthew's snivelling reviewing was accidentally given more credibility and recognition by the search engines than it deserved. Okay, so now he's really famous and I'm... not much famous. But back then it was downright annoying to have that review popping up all the time simply because he used my name so often.
It's not adverse reviews and opinions I really care about here, it's poor content and how easily researchers like me can be misled by authentic-looking websites that
are based more on enthusiasm than hard information. People get quite i funny about inaccuracies even in fiction and you have to make sure you don't make any silly mistakes.

In one of my later books I had a young girl picking a snowpea in her family's garden in 1914. My editor Mark, who is a legend of the publishing industry, pointed out that snowpeas weren't available in Australia until something like the 1950's. I was gobsmacked. Not only could this bloke correctly spell every word in the English language (and a few others probably) but he knew the detailed history of snowpeas! Further on in the story one of my Biggles-like characters was shooting down in flames a hydrogen-filled German observation balloon over the Western Front. I'll give you a few seconds to figure what's wrong with that sentence... that's enough - they used helium, not hydrogen. Boy, did I get some emails about that one! How Mark caught the errant snowpea reference and let the hydrogen/helium thing slip through is a mystery.

With my fingers well and truly burnt by the Hun "sausage" (a "flamer" as Biggles would say) I'm pretty fussy about my research these days. If you play it safe, you only use websites that are certified, gold-stamped and authenticated by Encyclopaedia Britannica and have a picture of the Queen somewhere. Don't even think about Wikipedia.

Unfortunately, when you need to dig deep and find the really good stuff you usually have to search further afield and wander into dangerous territory. It gets difficult to keep track and your browser favourites folder starts to bulge at the edges. Worse, it's always much easier to find conflicting information than confirming data. There's a strong Murphy's Law factor involved in all research. Just when you think you've got a fact nailed, something new suggests it's all rubbish.

By the way, this allows me to digress and mention that Michael Crichton passed away recently. I wasn't a big fan except of his earlier work. It seemed that after the success of the Jurassic Park film they dragged out everything he'd ever written since he was four years old and called it a novel. Some of that stuff needed to be left in the bottom drawer. What does fascinate me about Crichton is his supposed work methods. It wasn't completely unique, but Crichton was one of those authors who researched and planned his novels for anything up to a year, before closing the door and taking the phone off the hook, then writing the whole thing in 6-8 weeks. That's a serious typing effort even with a word processor. Getting back to his research I reckon he'd need a terabyte of storage just for his cookies folder.

The communication revolution we've witnessed in the last decade means that anyone with an opinion, worthwhile or otherwise like the fledgling Matthew, or a passion for something can fill web page space without a hell of a lot of quality control. It can look great, even accurate and authentic, then before you know it idiots like me are shooting down hydrogen balloons and munching on snowpeas 40 years too soon.

Worst of all, there's not much we can do about it. Conspiracy theorists will have us believe that every website posted and every email ever sent is scrutinized by the CIA, FBI and all those other acronym-labelled government agencies as they seek out terrorists and people who actually bought those Richard Clayderman CD's
in the 1980's. But if that were true, surely they'd dabble in a bit of grammar and spell-checking, too? I know that I couldn't stop myself.

So no, instead the Internet is largely inaccurate, uninformed, misleading and filled with "blogger" opinions from people who otherwise wouldn't have an audience apart from their mum. So take care and don't believe everything you read, just because it's been posted on a forum or published on a website.

Ah... apart from this column, of course.

Reprinted from the December 2008 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia

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