Perfection with a little help from your friend

With the possible exception of The Beatles' music, nothing in life is perfect. This includes the internet. However, with a little practice, it comes pretty close.
You can find almost anything on the internet. Whether or not you want to believe everything you find is a personal choice, but the beauty of the internet is that you have the ability to cross check almost any information that you find.
To test the power of the internet, I was given three things to find: Governor Perdue's campaign finance report, NC Voter registration information, and the salary of a UNC Professor.
The first was a little tricky solely because I couldn't figure out if the information I found was about the most recent campaign. I found that as of July 10, 2008, she reported a campaign finance of $2.34 million and $1.4 million in cash on hand. All I had to do was a quick Google search of Beverly Perdue's campaign finance and I found this data. There was a lot of other information because, apparently, there's a lot of controversy surrounding the governor's campaign finance so I had to filter through some stuff but it didn't take more than five minutes of looking to find what I needed.
The second was much easier to find. After a search of NC voting registration info, I could find any information on North Carolina voters that I wanted. As recently as this past week, North Carolina voters totaled over 6 million, 1.9 million Republicans and 2.7 Democrats. I also found gender and race break-downs.
The third was probably the hardest to find and to fact check. I found a Raleigh News&Observer Web site one which I could search for any university employee in the state. On this site I could see their salary, title, hire date and more. I found that Professor Thomas Thornburg in the UNC Chapel Hill School of Government makes $187,055 a year. I couldn't really find anyway to fact check this number besides actually emailing the associate dean and asking him.
The moral of the story? The internet rocks. It's easy to use. It may take a little practice to figure out how to find your way around, but practice makes perfect. Well, at least as perfect as possible until Yoko finds you. ONO!

Posted by Jordan Powell