Subscribing to RSS feeds is a great way to keep up with lots of timely news and blog postings, of course, but as we all know, it’s easy to suffer from RSS Overload, and it can be hard to know where to find the best feeds on a particular topic.

I recently came across a post that caught my eye that presents an interesting solution for serious researchers and for enterprise use of feeds that can help with this:

Bill Ives, who writes on the excellent FASTForward blog is one of my trusted sources in the area of knowledge management and sharing information in the enterprise. He recently posted a very interesting blurb on a future of work blog, called the AppGap about an RSS discovery tool, titled BlogBridge Feed Libraries for Enterprise 2.0

There Ives discusses BlogBridge Feed Libraries, which he says “are designed to help companies provide guidance to their employees on where the useful content is located and then make it easy to subscribe to it.” One of the key features of BlogBridge Feed Libraries are its “Expert Guides”, which, according to that site “is simply a collection of feeds around a specific topic that have been selected by someone who has real expertise in that area.” You can find them under BlogBridge’s “Topic Guides” here:

For instance, for business related topics, there are expert guides about advertising, branding, entrepreneurship, financial markets, learning/collaboration, and many others. Bill Ives, in fact, was the creator of a knowledge management guide.

Ives noted that not only is this a useful way to find a “best of” collection of feeds on a particular topic, but it also can be used inside the enterprise, and edited and customized to the needs of the department and staff’s own information needs.

This all sounds promising to me, and I plan on covering BlogBridge in some depth in a future issue of The Information Advisor.

Gee, I’ve been so interested in talking about all the other books I like so much, I forgot to blog the fact that last month my own book, The Art of Strategic Listening: Finding Market Intelligence through Blogs and Other Social Media was published by Paramount Books.

It’s basically a book on why today good market research means paying attention and monitoring what’s going on in social media forms: eg. blogosphere, Web forums, social networking sites like Facebook etc., where to find relevant conversations, and using the best tools and strategies to find, filter, evaluate credibility of what you turn up, and make sense of it all. The idea is by attending to those near real-time, authentic discussions, you can better find out what your current customers like/don’t like about your firm and products; where to find potential new customers; get early warnings about trends that will impact your industry and so on.

One interesting thing about this book is that the publisher has also put together a hotlinked PDF version of the book too (not free though), that includes live links and onscreen video tutorials.

For more information on the PDF version, link here

Let me know if you like it, or if you have any questions (either before or after purchasing)

business research

market research

social media 

If you think the most common language in the blogosphere is English– think again.

At least according to Technorati, in its April State of the Live Web report, the language with the most frequent blog posts in Japanese, with 37%, followed by English with 36% and then Chinese at 8%.

In doing some research on how business researchers can effectively find and understand blogs in non-English language (for the August issue of The Information Advisor, and my forthcoming book, The Art of Strategic Listening, Paramount Market Press 2007), I had an extremely enlightening email interview with Michael Darragh, the digital strategist for China and Asia Pacific for Ogilvy PR Worldwide who is based in Shanghai. Darragh generously and insightfully answered several questions I emailed him about the state of Non-English blogging, particularly in China and other Asian countries at detail. His responses, too long to be published in full in these formats, are too valuable to let go waste, so I am posting them here on this blog.

I received an instant education from Mr. Darragh—read through his responses and I know you will as well.

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It’s always fun to come upon a new research oriented blog that is truly fresh, fun AND provides intelligent insights and valuable information. And it’s been awhile since I stumbled upon something that fit that bill and wasn’t widely known–and that blog is infodoodads

The blog was started just a few months ago by a five female librarians, and they describe their mission here as follows:

infodoodads is a blog that reviews and discusses existing and new tools, services, and technology for finding information on the internet. What kind of information? Any kind. The women behind infodoodads love to learn and find information, and every day new tools are being created and unveiled that help people find, sort, and interact with information.

I already had great fun with two sites the blog just highlighted–one a great people information search tool called Pipl and another was NameVoyager a very cool site that provides “a visual representation of the 1000 most popular US first names back to the 1880s.”

Check these out and more at infodoodads.