Communication webagogy 2.0: More click, less drag

The authors first published "Communication Webagogy: Using the World Wide Web for Research and Teaching," in the fall of 1997 (Radford & Wagner, 1997). Now, as the new millennium is beginning, it is time for communication researchers and faculty to freshen their approaches to the web, to become more sophisticated, to refine skills, and to ensure that time spent in searching the web has a high quality result. What major changes have taken place in the web during the past three years? Obviously, the number and size of web sites and resources has grown enormously. Commercial sites have exploded in number along with annoying push technology that brings them unannounced to everyone's desktop. Web pages now number in the billions with development continuing at an ever quickening pace. Portals and Vortals have made their appearance. These sites (e.g., Excite, Yahoo!) are commercial in nature, making profit from prominent advertisements and fees charged to featured sites. They provide search engines plus additional features such as customized news, weather reports, stock reports, shopping, etc. Vortals offer even more extensive services, and have been humorously described as "portals on steriods." The good news is that the proliferation of web resources has included the development of high quality, authoritative sites in the communication discipline. The bad news is that it is increasingly difficult to find the best sites because there are so many that are of poor quality, such as the commercial sites which are low in content, but high in advertising. Despite this reality, many people continue to believe that they can search the entirety of the WWW and quickly come up with a handful of sites that will address their need or answer particular questions. The