Using the Internet to collect data

The Internet is not one single, monolithic medium. It consists of many services with different functions and needs for input, even more so than the medium telephone varies between clunky devices made from wood that we sometimes see in old movies, the iPad, smartphones, and Voice over Internet Protocol.1 Using the Internet can mean writing and receiving e-mails that may be purely text based or rich in media. It can mean to surf using a Web browser on a desktop computer, laptop, or smartphone. Driving a car often automatically means using the Internet, as information about the location of the car is sent to satellites and databases connected via the Internet. The Internet of Things, one of the next steps in the Internet revolution, will connect more and more of the world to the Internet. This connection can be made by the average person with the help of services like http://www.touchatag.com. According to the Gartner Group, by the end of 2012, physical sensors will generate 20% of nonvideo Internet traffic: “The extent and diversity of real-time environmental sensing is growing rapidly as our ability to act on and interpret the growing volumes of data to capture valuable information increases” (Plummer et al., 2009). Universal addressability of things and people (sometimes called the Semantic Web; Berners-Lee, Hendler, & Lassila, 2001; World Wide Web Consortium [W3C], 2010) allows Internet-based data collection even about people and things that are not connected to the Internet.2 Other agents refer to them by sending their location, images, and so on. A case vividly demonstrating this principle is Google Street View: Combining location information with panoramic images creates a highly informative and immersive tool to explore the world at a human scale (i.e., with the eyes of a traveler). The future combination of visual location information with the Internet of Things will create an increasingly tightly meshed representation of the world on the Internet. This chapter shows the major steps in collecting data on the Internet. The first section, InternetBased Research, narrates the short history of Internet-based data-collection methods in psychological research, describes their characteristics, and presents a systematic overview of the four basic types of methods. Some notions about planning Internetbased research lead to the second section, Generating a Web Experiment. The section describes an example and provides the reader with the opportunity to become active and experience Internet-based data-collection methods by creating and conducting a Web experiment in a step-by-step fashion. The example introduces the important concepts of client-side versus server-side processing and illustrates a number of important techniques. The third section, Pre-Testing, emphasizes the need to take extra care in preparing the materials and procedure and