Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Virtual Advisor

I need to get into work early this morning to meet a repairman, so I thought I would let y’all do the work. Marta and I were recently emailing (well, I was panicking, she was emailing) on the topic of advice and she wanted to know what’s the best advice y’all have received during your internet searches?

How did using this advice in real life play out?

To this I’ll add: was it weird to realize you were acting on advice from a person you’ve never seen?

Thoughts?

5 comments:

Jean L. Cooper said...

I've gotten a lot of good advice on the internet. And I've been using the internet so long, I can't remember the first time, so, to me, it doesn't feel weird to take such a person's advice.

Here's one of my favorite pieces of advice: "Holding a grudge is like allowing your enemy to live rent-free in your head."

Something more practical ... hot flashes and mood swings can be controlled by taking 500mg of magnesium per day. Also, I found out about an interesting use for plain yogurt that has nothing to do with nutrition ...

Marta said...

Hi, BSC,

I'd have a difficult time deciding on the most useful info I've gotten from the web about the publishing biz, but here are a few important things I've learned:

-Talk to booksellers and arrange drive-by signings. It's not only a pleasure to meet people who spend their days with books, but they'll frequently place your book in a more prominent location and handsell it.
-Put your website link on your book jacket.
-Spending money on banners, bookmarks, etc., may not be effective.
-Adding more links to your blogs and sites will pull it up on internet search engines.

Christine Fletcher said...

Well, this relates to professional advice, not personal, but I'll chime in anyway. The best I've gotten on the internet is from an online veterinary forum. Joe Schmoe veterinarians like me can post tough cases -- including labwork, photos, X-rays, you name it -- for specialists to review and answer questions.

We used to rely on textbooks (outdated as soon as they're published, hopelessly incomplete) and calls to local specialists (phone tag, anyone?)Honestly, I don't know how we ever got anything done.

As far as finding it weird, no, I don't. Maybe because everyone giving advice on the forum has their bona-fides. Also vet med is a very small profession--chances are I've heard the person speak, or they were one of my or my colleagues' professors, back in the day.

Nancy said...

Not sure what the best advice I've gotten online was, but the worst was definitely from MapQuest.

Bernita said...

I'll be mining Miss Snark and industry blogs like this for years to come.