This Guardian piece titled Wikipedia’s School for Scandal…by Seth Finkelstein is worth reading, perhaps if nothing else to ponder the truth of the statement that “…one lesson from all these scandals is yet more evidence that Wikipedia fits a familiar pattern of idealism being vulnerable to exploitation”

Much of the culture of the Net has been built upon a kind of idealism, especially in relation to people offering their time to contribute content at no charge….

I should note that I came across this article today by getting recommended to it by one of the people I “follow” and trust on Twitter: Jason Calacanis. Another example of a type of “social graph search”,and something I will be discussing in some depth in the May issue of The Information Advisor.

On another note regarding whether idealism will and can work on the Net, I am attending a lecture later today by a professor in Media Studies in SUNY Buffalo, Trebor Scholz, who is giving a talk at the New School here in New York City that looks like it will be on a topic I’ve been wondering about recently: the labor implications when Internet users that contribute their time and efforts, at no cost, help firms “co-create” their products on the Net. The title of his talk is

“What the MySpace generation should know about working for free”

OK, so we’ve moved from plain old information overload to people overload!–that is, how do you keep track of all the news, status updates, photos, messages etc. from everyone in your various social networks?

One promising, fun, and intriguing, though still imperfect solution, comes from Chirp. If you download Chirp’s Chripscreen, you can seemessages and content from your friends and connections from a wide range of social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and others, all gently “floating” onto your PC in a very elegant and pleasing manner.

Its set up as a screen saver, but Eve Phillips, the CEO of the firm told me that the firm is planning on adding functionality so it can run as a sidebar. It also does not yet have enough personal controls built in yet–eg. deciding whose updates to see from which network, but apparently this is all in the works too.

In the meantime, I would recommend anyone that is wondering how to keep track of their various social contacts to give Chirp a try…(I’ll be covering it in some depth in the April issue of The Information Advisor) to go along with my piece on the potential of Twitter as a business research tool.

I’m in the process of researching the topic of the use of Twitter as an actual tool for doing useful research. The results of this will be published in the April issue of The Information Advisor, but so far I’ve been able to locate two different sites that permit levels of keyword searching of recent Twitters–that’s the first step at least: These are:

 Twitterment and TweetScan

Of course there’s more to a good research tool than the ability to conduct a search–the content has to be valuable and useful too…and there is a possibility that Twitter could be used for near real-time and archival business intelligence, and competitive intelligence as well as for identifying trends–maybe! That’s what I’m looking into now.