Publishing Your Information - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 276

In the last chapter, we looked how to organize the information you gather.
In this chapter, we look at how you go about publishing it.
Is there a diference? Deinitely. As you might have noticed in the last chapter, a
lot of the options for organizing and gathering your information are designed
to be private. While you're gathering, polishing, or just thinking about how all
the bits it together, you may not be ready to make it available to the public. he
publishing aspect is when you have pulled something together—an article, a
report, a book—that you're ready to unleash on the world.
Of course, some of you might be doing research that's not designed for
perusal by the entire world. In this case, there may be a private arena—an
intranet, perhaps—where the information can be stored. Or maybe the
information is just for you. I ind in this case that making an efort to sum-
marize it—even if it only amounts to writing a rough article or an e-mail to
myself—helps me understand the information I've gathered together and
maybe even gives me a few more insights. Even if you only want to share
your information with a small group of people, it's critical to discover a
good way to make sure the information gets where it needs to go.
You might think that when publishing information online you're pretty much
limited to one option: create your own Web site and publish your pages there.
Seven or eight years ago, that might have been the case, but these days you
have lots and lots of options for getting your information online.
I'm going to cover just a few broad categories here and not get too much into
the details. he creation, care, and feeding of a Web site or another online
publishing solution is way out of the scope of this topic. I'll recommend
topics and other resources as we go along.
he irst option is a possibly unexpected solution—a plain old Word or PDF
document!
Publishing a Word, PDF, or Text Document
It may seem counterintuitive to focus on “oice” documents when we're dis-
cussing the Web, but you can easily publish the information you've gathered
to generate a report and simply upload it to your corporate or institutional
Web site. his works equally well for Word documents, PDF documents, or
TXT documents. More obscure formatting (like WordPerfect or other word
processors) might be a little harder for people to read.