September 2006 Mechanical Engineering: Editorial

editorial

time online

By
John G. Falcioni,
Editor-in-Chief

Inevitably, the amount of time we spend online varies with who we are, what we do, and what we're looking for.

Much to my chagrin, my 12-year-old's penchant for understanding the details of how the folks at Disney redesigned the Pirates of the Caribbean ride for its Paris theme park has him glued to the Web for hours, as he searches for every scrap of information he can dig up.

Students and researchers spend countless hours searching sites such as asme.org, where they can access scholarly journals and other publications to help them in their pursuits. Then there's the practicing engineer, representing another important market.

It's no mystery that print advertising in the technical publishing industry has fallen on hard times recently, as more OEMs and other vendors and suppliers are spending a growing portion of their advertising dollars on the Web. The reason is that they feel more engineers are turning to the Web, because of its overall ease of use, to find what they are looking for fast.

Web usage has become integrated into specialty areas like engineering.

During the summer, GlobalSpec—a specialized search engine and information company serving the engineering and manufacturing markets—surveyed its users in the technical community. Not surprisingly, one major finding of the study is that 90 percent of the respondents said they use the Internet to find components and suppliers, and 45 percent say they spend six hours or more a week on the Internet for work-related purposes.

It stands to reason that users of the Web-based search engine would say they use the Internet, and respondents certainly didn't say that they were using the Web in lieu of a magazine. Nonetheless, that such a huge segment reported that they now use the Internet in their jobs is, if not startling, at least confirmation that Web usage has become integrated into specialty areas like engineering.

In our own online research poll, conducted in June, 40 percent of respondents said they use the Web to find most of their engineering-related news, and 35 percent said they use magazines. This month, in our poll at www.memagazine.org, we ask the question: What do you spend most of your time on the Internet looking for? We want to know as much specific information as possible on how to serve your needs so that we can try to do just that.

Invariably, cultural and attitudinal differences on proprietary material published on the Web have led to some interesting sets of circumstances, and some have hit the courts of law. Other issues over access to certain technical matter
remain in dispute among those trying to protect intellectual property and those who feel that the Web now has rendered virtually all technical matter as open access—free to whomever can find it.

Philosophical and legal discussions based on the premise abound.

There aren't any discreet answers when it comes to the Web. We enjoy it; we've become drawn in by its effectiveness to connect us to the world at large. Beyond that, it's a tool that we use depending on our needs, just like magazines and just like textbooks, and just like writing letters to friends and business associates, except that it's packaged a little bit differently.