• How to find ordinary people
• How to find experts

How many people are online? The truth is: nobody knows. Whether it's 120.5 million as NUA Internet Surveys claims or 137 million as Global Internet Statistics states. One thing is sure: there are a lot! And while it can already be difficult to find someone in your own city or own country, doing so online can be a nightmare. And very often it will be unsuccessful, no matter how hard you try. But as a journalist you will often need find people to talk to for a specific story. On this page we will provide you with some information how to look for specific people and how to find experts for a specific topic.

How to find a specific person

When looking for a specific person, your course of action depends on what you already know.

If you have someone's name and city, it might be a good idea to check out the various telephone directories which are available online. Flip's Search Resources gives a pretty good overview of which phone books in the U.S. are online. If you are looking for someone outside the US, you might want to check out the local version of Yahoo or a similar search engine, and look for that country's phone directory. Remember that in this case you have to know the local word for "phone directory", e.g Telefonbuch (in German) or nummerupplysning (in Swedish). Please note that some of these services might not be free. Even today, it might still be simpler to call your telephone company's directory enquiries instead... For U.S. residents, there's also a rather good reverse-lookup at Infospace. This will tell you the address and name to most U.S. phone numbers.

If you have a name and you are looking for an email address, you need somewhat more luck than ability. After all, there is no central institution to which everyone has to report new addresses. And the few email directories that exist tend to be rather small and very incomplete. MESA alleviates this problem a bit by searching seven email directories simultaneously.

top

If you have a name and you know which service provider the person uses, the best idea might be to go to the provider's homepage. They often have a searchable directory of their members. Note that this is not only true for commercial online services but also for many universities and companies. If that fails and you are looking for someone within a specific company or you can also try to send a mail to the postmaster. He's the one who's in charge of all the email-adresses and can ceratinly help you if he has the time and if you ask nicely. Unfortuantely postmasters are permanentmy overworked, but it sure is worth a try. In 99% of all cases you can contact the postmaster by sending a mail to postmaster@... (e.g.: postmaster@tl-media.com, postmaster@sct.se etc.). Don't bother to try this with big online-services, like AOL, Compuserve etc.

If you just have a name, it gets a bit complicated. The first thing you should do is go to AltaVista or a similar net index (for an explanation about the differences between search engines, check out "Searching the Web") and type in the name as a phrase. In most engines you can do this by putting the name in quotes. This works best if the person you are looking for has a homepage or has published something online. Hower, it is a very poor method of searching if the person you are looking for has a very common name. If that search doesn't help, you might want to take a look at Google Groups. This service archives all the messages send to any newsgroup since the middle of 1995 - more than 650 million messages so far. So if whoever you are looking for has posted anything to a newsgroup, you might find his message and therefore his email address there. For more information about how to search newsgroups, please take a look at "Searching mailinglists and newsgroups".

top

How to find experts

Sometimes you might look for an expert in a specific field, rather than for a specific person. Fortunately the Internet has made this much easier than it ever was before. Probably the best way to get in touch with experts is via Profnet, "a collaborative of 4,000 public relations professionals linked by Internet to give journalists and authors convenient access to expert sources". (Quote: Profnet) And the best thing is: it's for free! Profnet is financed by the institutions who hope to benefit from the media coverage they receive whenever an expert of theirs is quoted.

Whereas Profnet has an international database, regional versions of Profnet are also being developed. A group of South African universities are working on one; in Canada Medialink offers access to the experts of 800 companies, associations, organizations and universities; and in Germany the Informationsdienst Wissenschaft links over 250 universities together. Another two interesting resources for finding (mainly American) experts are the 15th Annual Yearbook of Experts, Authorities & Spokespersons and the the Community of Science (COS) Expertise database, that claims to give you access to 63,000 experts. A slightly more informal resource is "Pitsco's Ask an Expert"-Page that is organized around various categories.

An other way is to take a look into relevant newsgroups and mailinglists and post your question there. Please take a look at "Searching mailing lists and newsgroups" to find out more about how to search these and how to find lists and newsgroups of interest.

up to the top