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.

I mean, sure we can have (and do experience) information overload, and today we even have “innovation overload” to some degree with our feeling that we have to find and try out all the countless Web 2.0 tools, widgets and applications being developed.

But imagination is something that we really can’t ever have too much of….

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”

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 

But what a great feeling it is to find a truly insightful, well-written book that both clarifies existing concepts and trends in how the Net is evolving, and raises our thinking to another plane. I found that to be the case with NYU Professor Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. It’s the best book on the Internet that I’ve read since probably Ambient Findability back in late ‘05!

So far, it’s my recommended “must read” for ‘08 for anyone trying to get a sense of the potential (and limitations) of today’s online networks, organization of knowledge and people, and social media…

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.

 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.

The picture that emerges from internet research is that most visitors to scholarly sites view only a few pages, many of which do not even contain real content, and in any case do not stop long enough to do any real reading.This is either a symptom of a really worrying malaise - failure at the library terminal - or maybe a sign that awhole new form of online reading behaviour is beginning to emerge, one based on skimming titles, contents pagesand abstracts: we call this `power browsing’. We urgently need to understand the root causes of this phenomenon…

As part of these efforts I’ve been doing a lot of scouting for new bloggers that have something truly insightful and compelling to say about social media.  The one that I’ve been most impressed with recently is called The Praized Blog. Its a creation of a company called Praized Media, a Montreal-based firm, which focuses on trust, and the local angle of social media, which most observers feel is going to be a very important part of how this area evolves. The Praized Blog is written primarily by Praized VP Sebastien Provencher.

I’ve been enjoying Sebastien’s insights. One in particular that I’ve been pondering is his posting that one should consider Facebook simply as “a game”. Another very interesting post on this blog illustrated the level of overlap between the major social networking sites.

Scan it for yourself–I think you’ll like it.