The Internet exacerbates information overload. In the "good old days" (about five years ago) we were overwhelmed by traditional media -- ever-proliferating refereed journals, hourly news broadcasts, a plethora of daily newspapers, and tens of thousands of new books every year. Now, anyone with an Internet account can publish, and it seems that everyone does. One might compare traditional media to having so many nice restaurants that it's hard to decide where to eat and Web content to having the restaurants hidden in fields of raw vegetables.

The Internet is an interactive medium. E-mail, discussion boards, and chat forums let you interact with publishers (content providers) and other Internet users. Web storefronts like Amazon.com let you buy books and other products. Some Web sites let you customize your browsing to match your interests. All of these forms of interactivity make the Internet more interesting and engaging than other media, but they also make you do a lot of work. Older media let you passively consume information. Interactivity makes you an active participant in the communication process.

The interactive nature of the Internet combined with the vast amounts of information found there can make cyberspace seem intimidating. Fortunately, a third characteristic of the medium can help. The foundation of the Internet's World Wide Web is hypertext linking, the ability to create links from the page you are browsing to any other Web page anywhere in the world. Hypertext lets you follow your fancy as you read, wending your way from page to page as if you were browsing a library-with an important difference: Your browser remembers where you've been.

A well-conceived Web site takes advantage of hypertext to create a useful context for your browsing. Applied Clinical Trials Online's Industry Links page (http://www.actmagazine.com/links.htm), for example, has organized links to government and commercial sites of interest to people who conduct and evaluate clinical trials. Web pages like this can be infinitely more useful than the results of even the most advanced Internet search engine. The editorial sensibility that underlies the selection and presentation of the hypertext links creates a useful context for the links. The difference is the human element, the fact that a trusted guide is leading you.

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