Okay, so this has nothing to do with business research, but as someone who has spent decades (OK, so I turned 50 last week!) studying information, and how people use and analyze information, this finding by Pew has really got me stumped. I’d love to get some comments by people who have a theory as to why this is so–here it is:

This recent Pew Study, sadly, but not surprisingly, shows that Republicans are much less inclined to view global warming as a serious problem than Democrats.

What is baffling to me, though, (other than the fact that a public safety/scientific data issue like global warming is still seen as a political issue in the U.S.), is that the survey shows that :

“…for Republicans, unlike Democrats, higher education is associated with GREATER [caps added] skepticism that human activity is causing global warming. Only 19% of Republican college graduates say that there is solid evidence that the earth is warming and it is caused by human activity,while 31% of Republicans with less education say the same.”

How to explain this? Speculations, theories?

I find this really confounding….

There’s been tons of good stuff written over the years on how libraries are/need to be evolving to meet the needs of the information age, but I’m really looking forward to reading the NY Review of Books review of The Library in the New Age, by Robert Darnton.  Not only to learn about this book, but because whenever I read a review in the NY Review of Books, I also typically receive an instant and compelling up to date education on the subject matter of the reviewed book by an intelligent and thoughtful reviewer.

The review begins as follows:

Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google?

How to make sense of it all? I have no answer to that problem, but I can suggest an approach to it: look at the history of the ways information has been communicated. Simplifying things radically, you could say that there have been four fundamental changes in information technology since humans learned to speak.

Somewhere, around 4000 BC, humans learned to write….

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.

After attending a couple of related conferences this past month, Search Engine Strategies, and Computers in Libraries, one of my big take aways about what’s going on in the really big, big picture is that one really good thing that all of these new technologies and user generated content is doing is unleashing our imagination. And that, of course, is a good thing.

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….