Can’t beat this one for getting up to speed on social networks from a trusted expert. It’s a public, just released PowerPoint presentation by Forrester’s Charlene Li, one of the finest thinkers on social media around. And I found out about it from her Facebook status update–an example of the “social graph search” in action: that is finding relevant and substantive information by following your trusted colleagues on a social network….

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.

I just came across this very interesting study that analyzes how GenY/the Millennials “Google” approach information gathering and research particularly in relation to access of scholarly information, as well as the use of Libraries. It’s a free 32 page document, released a couple of weeks ago by the British Library and the (Joint Information Systems Committee)  JISC. Here’s a blurb from the conclusion:

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…