Once you’ve signed up, bookmarks can be added via the website or (much more conveniently) via Firefox and Chrome extensions, as shown in the screenshot above. These add-ons are a bit fiddly; you must be signed in for the Chrome add-on to work, while the button for the Firefox add-on is hidden down at the bottom-right of the window. It also took me a while to figure out how to clip content from a web page.

Once saved, pages can be tagged, shared with contacts and made public (note: this effectively publishes a public cache of the page you’ve saved; there may be copyright implications in using this feature). Editing bookmarks/saved content like this can only be done via the website, not at the time of saving it with the extension. Bookmarks can also be imported from Delicious, Firefox, Chrome or any other service that lets you export your bookmarks in Netscape bookmark format.

By default, the website shows your saved pages in “fancy” view (thumbnails) and displayed in chronological order, but you can switch to a list view if you prefer. Bookmarks/saved content is searchable via the search box, although, strangely, it doesn’t seem to include page titles in the search. Mobile support is provided via a mobile-optimized version of the website, which works well, and there are also RSS feeds available: a private feed that contains all of your bookmarks, and a public one only containing those you’ve marked as public.

Copyto.co is free for storing up to 50 bookmarks, which should be enough to give the site a try to see whether you might find it useful. More than that and you’ll need to purchase a subscription, which costs $15.99 per year, or $1.99 month. While Copyto.co is similar to traditional social bookmarking services like Delicious (recently sold to Avos Systems) and Pinboard, its clipping functionality also means it’s competing with note-taking apps like Evernote and OneNote. Combining bookmarking and clipping services means it’s something of a compromise. As a simple bookmarking service, it works pretty well, although it doesn’t have the more-advanced social features of Delicious, and it’s more expensive than both Delicious (free) and Pinboard (one-off payment of $9.33 currently), plus, I find its extensions to be a little clumsy. As a general-purpose clipping tool, it’s nowhere near as powerful and flexible as Evernote, and once again, its extensions aren’t as well-designed. However, it’s still a new service, so I expect the developers will work on making the extensions easier to use, and I can certainly see Copyto.co being useful for certain use cases: researchers who need to clip and share specific portions of webpages with others, and developers who often to grab code from the web, for example.

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Once installed, Trails stores the text and images that you clip onto pages that it calls “spreads.” These are viewable in a sidebar  (via View->Sidebar->Trails or a keyboard shortcut). You can create as many spreads in your booklet as you like, and they can be can be set up as one-, two- or three-column pages.

Adding content to your booklet is done via some new Firefox context menu items: As you’re browsing, highlight some text or select an image and right-click to select to add it to your booklet. Before text is added to the spread, it pops up in a window giving you the opportunity to edit it. Content can be deleted and edited after insertion on the page, too. Trails automatically puts the URL a particular snippet or text or image came from below each piece of content on the page, as well as recording the time and date that it was clipped on.

Once your booklet is complete, it can be printed, exported in PDF format or published to the Trails Public Library online.

As a note-taking tool, Trails is nowhere as powerful and flexible as more full-featured, multi-user solutions like Evernote or OneNote.  However, it does fit seamlessly into a Firefox-based workflow, and as the booklets that it creates are nicely-formatted and can be exported as a PDF, it makes for a very easy way to share well-presented research with colleagues or clients.

Trails can be downloaded from the Mozilla Add-Ons repository.

(via ghacks)

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ReSearch.ly’s premise is that “search is a social act which relies on trust and community.” Developed by the folks behind PeopleBrowsr, ReSearch.ly creates “instant communities” around the things you publish, respond to, or search while you use Twitter. Your searches become “sharable objects” and the site purports to add context to your searches by providing additional related information–all from tweets on Twitter.

The site provides what they refer to as “degrees” of access to, and filtering of, information:

1. Geo Search. This is a local or regional search of the Twitter community that can increase relevant results, such as places to go for an evening out.
2. Local Trending Retweets. By seeing what others are retweeting, you can see what’s popular, and immediately participate in conversations of interest.
3. Your Community Search. You can search your Twitter stream for specific niche communities, and filter out less relevant conversations.
4. Search Within Search: You can drill deeper within a particular search by, for example, adding geo-searching to a topic-based community search.
5. Degrees of Separation. This is an analysis of your web of networks: who is connected to you and to other Twitter users.
6. Related Search. This allows you to enhance your search by providing other relevant information such as related hashtags, links or @ references.
7. Share Your Search. You can share your search, and make the way you are compiling and experiencing information into a social activity.

The premise of ReSearch.ly seems reasonable and potentially useful: When you search for tweets, you’ll be able to get more context to the content of interest. For a first-time user, the reality may be a bit confusing.

I tested the site by searching for “Napa” because I’m going to Napa Valley soon. By viewing search results through the Global filter, I quickly learned that “napa” is a word in Indonesian. But when I narrowed down results to my Twitter community (my followers or people I’m following), I begin to see much more relevance: reviews of Napa wines, mentions of Napa hotels, and tweets about Napa Valley events. I was able to narrow results to only male or only female Twitterers, only positive or only negative tweets, or only retweets. I could also click on the United States tab to get a broader view of who was tweeting “Napa.”

When I hovered over a person’s tweet, a “Degrees of Separation” link appeared. Clicking on that link showed the path between me and that particular Twitterer–how I might be connected to that user and, by extrapolation, how much I might be able to trust him or her. Based on the information I discovered, I could opt to follow individual Twitterers.

Search results also included charts showing global use of “napa” in the past 7 and 30 days. I could view the “Sentiment” for the word, and its popularity. I could also see words surrounding the original search term, such as “valley” and “wine,” but also “napas” and other words in Indonesian. Below that, I could see the most tweeted links where Napa was mentioned, related hashtags including #wine and #loveindonesia, and @ names referenced in tweets mentioning “napa.”

After that, there were images of pictures and videos where “napa” was mentioned, including wine-related images, plus random images where I couldn’t discern the context. They could have shown up because “napa” has other meanings internationally. A quick tweet to my followers revealed it’s short for “kanapa,” meaning “why.” So I learned something, but not directly from ReSearch.ly.

I’m all for slicing and dicing search results in new ways. At first blush, I found the results from ReSearch.ly to be curious. But ReSearch.ly is billed as a social search platform for “online marketers, brand managers and social media experts” that provides demographic data, psychographics, and instant viral analytics, along with location, gender, and retweets. I saw the location, gender and retweets data, but I didn’t immediately see how the information would help me as an online marketer, brand manager or social media expert.

I did another search for “SXSW” and the results were more relevant, most likely because SXSW is a much more distinctive term. The breakdown of the search results, however, didn’t seem particularly useful. Then again, I was searching not as a marketer or social media expert, just as someone thinking about attending the SXSW 2011 Interactive conference. I did discover when adding “Interactive” to the search that there are SXSW Interactive events in other cities happening in January. Now that’s interesting.

In conclusion, the service is complex enough that users may need more help from the company. You’ll need to decide whether the value of ReSearch.ly’s “social search” goes beyond mere curiosity by adding social pathways and context to search results.

What are some of your experiences with “social search” so far?

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The group identified the ten key changes that they see shaping the world of work during the next decade:

1. “De-routinization” of work. “Non-routine” activities that cannot be automated, such as innovation, leadership and sales, will dominate employment: By 2015, 40 percent or more of an organization’s work will be “non-routine,” up from 25 percent in 2010.
2. Work swarms. Rather than traditional teams of people familiar with each other, ad-hoc groups or “work swarms,” with no previous experience of working with each other, will become a commonplace team structure. Gartner’s “work swarms” concept sounds similar to the Noded philosophy, which describes how groups of individuals, often but not necessarily geographically distant, come together to form temporary or recurring project teams.
3. Weak links. Weak links are the cues people can pick up from people who know the people they have to work with. Exploiting our own networks will help us to develop the ties that are required for participating in wider “work swarm” opportunities.
4. Working with the collective. Being able to influence the complex ecosystem of suppliers, partners, clients and customers will increasingly become a core competence.
5. Work sketch-ups. Informality will define most “non-routine” work activities; the process models for these activities will be simple “sketch-ups,” created on the fly.
6. Spontaneous work. Seeking new opportunities and creating projects around them is likely to be an opportunistic, rather than strategic, activity.
7. Simulation and experimentation. The culture of Google’s “perpetual beta” is likely to spread to other industries, with rapid prototyping taking place in very public environments.
8. Pattern sensitivity. Extrapolating from history and experience will become less reliable; the ability to detect and parse patterns and trends in society will provide better insights.
9. Hyperconnected. With formal and informal work diffused across organizational boundaries,  the support mechanisms for workers (healthcare, HR, IT) will need to evolve to support fuzzier, ad-hoc relationships between people and departments.
10. My place. The boundaries between home and work life are already blurred. Balancing almost 24/7 availability against burning out will become a critical skill.

Editor’s note: We’ll be exploring how technology is shaping the modern workforce at our Net:Work conference, coming to San Francisco on December 9th. It’ll be interesting to see whether our speakers agree with Gartner’s analysts.

Do you think Gartner’s views are obvious, fanciful or accurate predictions for the coming decade?

Image courtesy Flickr user totalAldo

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Printing is still an important part of every web worker’s workflow, and though it’s quite arcane, much of our communication and documentation is still conducted via a paper trail. Not only does this leave piles of paper to manage, there’s the economic cost of all of that ink and paper and, importantly, there’s also an environmental cost involved with printing that we all bear as a society.

In a recent issue of Wired UK, Thomas Counsell from the University of Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing speculated that up to two percent of greenhouse gases are a result of paper consumption, largely driven by the production and disposal of new and used printed paper.

Counsell’s research is focused on technologies that use a combination of ultrasound and chemical solvents to remove toner from printed documents, enabling paper to reused. Though Counsell’s research is still very much in the labs and somewhat fantastical, there are alternatives, available today, that can help us make environmental and financial judgments about the paper and ink that we use.

The Paper-Less Alliance‘s web site not only provides handy advice on how to reduce paper consumption, but also provides free software, in collaboration with PaperCut, to help individuals and companies visualize their paper consumption in terms of a carbon footprint, trees, energy use and financial impact.

GreenPrint offers an inexpensive software solution that adds a new printer profile to Macs and PCs. As documents are sent to the “virtual” GreenPrint printer, they’re analyzed, and attention is drawn to wasteful or unnecessary areas, which users can then choose to remove from the final printout.

For example, many documents often have a page with just a few words or lines on the last page; GreenPrint automates the discovery of such inefficiencies.

Adobe’s Tools for Sustainable Design are yet to be released, but were previewed by Adobe’s CTO, Kevin Lynch last Spring at ETech 2009. Lynch demonstrated some great demos, including:

• optimizing a box pattern to use less paper
• tools that show the toxicity and chemical impact of various ink colors
• embedded guidelines from organizations such as Greenpeace
• calculating the number of trees or soy plants required for a print job
• suggesting digital rather than hard copy outputs

More recently, designer Matthew Robinson conducted a somewhat unscientific project entitled “Measuring Type,” which explored how much ink commonly utilized typefaces tended to use. Robinson discovered that Garamond had the highest ink efficiency.

Though I tend not to print much anyway, preferring the flexibility of digital documents, these four initiatives have forced me to understand the true cost of printing and show that software can help us make value judgments about environmental issues.

A year ago we saw controversy and ridicule around one researcher’s carbon calculation of a Google search, yet our various applications and tools still aren’t doing a great job of reporting their environmental impact to users. As we see software emerge to help us understand the environmental impact of printing, I hope we’ll start to see other categories of software and hardware reveal their environmental impact and cost.

Coincidentally, the Daily Beast just published a great article on the advantages and disadvantages of going paper-free, entitled “My Paperless Life.”

Are you mindful of the environmental impact of your printing? Which strategies do you employ to reduce waste?

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What do I mean by that? Well, for one, you have Twitter’s trending topics, but more than the 10 you normally see, and they’re arranged in a tag cloud. I also noticed that some from the official Twitter search page aren’t actually present, but it looks like it’s cut out the hashtagged, frivolous stuff, and left the more meaty subjects.

Clicking on any of the tending topics (Bing calls them the “Hottest Topics on Twitter”) generates a search for that term, which at the time of this writing isn’t returning any results. The site is still in beta, and this will no doubt be resolved, possibly by the time you’re reading this post, even. You also get to see some links below the Hottest Topics pertaining to individual trends, complete with some examples of tweets containing those links below it for context.

For now, it seems to be more of a promise of what’s to come than a fully functioning feature, but what it does provide, along with Bing’s usual helpful sidebar results, promise a much more thoughtfully organized, searchable and usable service for people using Twitter for research or to track trends. There’s even a “retweet” icon next to each Twitter result, which leads you directly to your Twitter page, so you can share your discoveries with your followers.

I’ve been skeptical of Bing in the past, but if this is what the future holds, it won’t take much to convince me that Microsoft has some great ideas about search.

What do you think of the new Bing Twitter search?

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If you’re looking to take the pulse of the web at any given moment (and you don’t want the static or excess sensationalism that goes along with using Twitter), Google Fast Flip is as good a place as any to start. It sort of feels like a concise, pre-filtered Alltop that provides a macro level view of some of the web’s most influential and respectable news sources.

Current sources include Esquire, BBC News, the New York Times, TechCrunch, and Salon.com, in addition to about 35 other magazine, news and general information sites that receive regular updates. You can browse all of these by popularity, by subsection, by topic, or by source using Google’s new visual interface that works a little like Apple’s Cover Flow technology. Each site is represented by an image capture of the relevant page.

Clicking through to a source doesn’t actually bring you to the site in question, as I would’ve initially guessed. It actually opened up the relevant article in a reading interface, but doesn’t redirect away from Google Fast Flip. The reader view gives you a set portion of the article viewed as an image file, the idea being that you can see a quick preview before clicking through to the full story at the site itself. It sort of feels like searching through microfiche in the basement of the local library.

Arrows at the side of the image in reader view allow you to browse other stories in the category you’ve chosen, and an expandable tray allows you access to the thumbnails of all the stories in that series. You can also email and “Like” any story you find, which requires sign-in with your Google credentials.

Is it useful? Speaking as someone who depends on the Internet news media for my online career, I think it may be. It’s a great way to see what the major outlets are talking about all at once, without having to visit each individually. I can see people arguing that an RSS reader does the same job without as much distracting visual flair, but for people who process information visually, Fast Flip might prove more effective or more comfortable overall.

Do you think Google Fast Flip will catch on as a search tool? Do you see yourself using it over something like Alltop or RSS?

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I carry my gear in a Timbuk2 Laptop Messenger Bag. The Washington, DC/Northern Virginia area can seem a little sterile, so I wanted a distinctive and durable bag to haul my gear. While I am seeing more folks sporting Timbuk2 bags out and about, they are still outnumbered by those carrying the typical dull employer- or client-issue laptop bags.

Inside my bag, you’ll find:

• 15″ MacBook Pro running OS X, Windows 7 RC1 (soon to be upgraded to Windows 7 RTM), and Windows XP. The Windows 7 RC1 virtual machine is just for tinkering at this point. On the Windows XP virtual machine, I am running Microsoft Visio Professional 2007 and Project Standard 2007. Mozy is always there for backup when I am online. Depending on the project I’m working on at the time, my MacBook Pro might stay home in lieu of a client’s standard notebook PC that is on loan to me.
• 80 GB iPod that is a couple of years old because I like to work to music or podcasts. My newer 120 GB iPod serves up tunes for my gym workouts.
• Bose ear buds.
• Charger for my iPod.
• Ethernet cable for those times Mr. Murphy prevents me from finding WiFi.
• XtremeMac microphone for my iPod to record meetings as needed.
• BlackBerry 8820: this goes with me everywhere. The phone is due for an upgrade this fall. My plan is to go for one of the newer Android phones or (gulp) an iPhone.
• Charger for my BlackBerry.
• Plantronics Virtual Phone Booth for Skype and Gizmo5 calls.
• A leather folio with an old school yellow legal pad. True, this is not a lightweight addition to my load but they’re typical in many of the meetings I attend on client sites in my local area. The legal pad and folio stay at home if I am going on a long trip. While I am a big Evernote and OneNote user, I still like to take handwritten notes and draw diagrams and charts during meetings and then transcribe them later. One of these days, I will get better at taking notes on my laptop during client meetings.
• Moleskine notebook for capturing WWD post and other article ideas.
• Pocket change in case I am on a client site and need a caffeine fix.
• Pens because there is nothing more embarrassing than a technical writer without a pen.
• 4GB thumb drive that includes PortableApps and MojoPac.

My Other Gear

While many of the WebWorkerDaily crew pack along a camera, mine only comes along on special occasions and isn’t part of my regular kit.  I also don’t use a mouse when I am using a laptop.

My D-Link DWL-G730AP AirPlus G Wireless Pocket Router/Access Point jumps into my bag when I know I am going to be spending time in a hotel that has only wired broadband in its rooms.

How I Roll

My technical writing career has been a mix of onsite and offsite work with periods of intermittent travel. This means I try to stay flexible with the gear I carry including swapping out my MacBook Pro for my MacBook Air and messenger bag for a backpack for my (now rare) long trips.

What’s in your bag?

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In the past, I primarily used wikis for this sort of information organization, but they really aren’t the best tool for the job. Considering how many tools can simply save web pages or otherwise collect information without requiring you to cut, paste and format it, it’s far faster to move beyond a basic wiki. And if you have a team member who isn’t particularly technically savvy, an option with a shallower learning curve than a wiki is probably good. Here are a few choices that could be useful.

Evernote

Evernote‘s web application provides a particularly easy way to capture information in just about any format. You can capture photos, add videos, and search it easily — and organize it into notebooks. Until recently, you had the option of keeping notebooks private or publishing them to the web for anyone to see. A recent upgrade to the application, however, makes it possible to make the notebook accessible to specific individuals, making it an easy way to collect information for a project like a web site redesign: Have the various people involved save web sites that they feel are good examples for the project, save copy that you’ll need to reference ,and organize any other information relevant to the project all in one place.

The only downside to sharing notebooks on Evernote is that, for the time being, the feature only works on the web-based application. If you’re using one of the many handheld or desktop versions of Evernote, you’ll have to go to the web to make use of a shared notebook. However, as Evernote has been very good about rolling features out to mobile platforms so far, I think there’s a good chance that it’ll expand the shared notebook feature to other versions in the future.

Archivd

If you’re working on comparing options across several web sites, such as researching a new piece of software for your company’s use, Archivd has some particularly useful features. Using the application’s bookmarklet, you can save a web site, as well as specify the information you’ll want to compare — like price or feature sets. It can also automatically extract information from web sites. Archivd is particularly easy to get someone new to web applications started with, although it may be less useful if your research includes significant amounts of information that aren’t available on web sites.

WebAsyst

Adding files to your research, such as older versions of a project you’re updating, is one of the key features of WebAsyst. The site allows you to add any kind of text note and organize it quickly. You can set your notes to be shared with specific individuals, and you limit exactly what is shared with whom. WebAsyst also offers the option of using the web-based application, or downloading the software and setting it up on your own server. If you need an internal system for your company, WebAsyst makes setting it particularly easy.

What tools do you use for sharing project research?

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“The simple act of comparing yourself against someone else can stoke the fires of competition. When there are just a few competitors around, making such comparisons is easy but they become more difficult when challengers are plentiful. As a result, the presence of extra contenders, far from spurring us on by adding extra challenge, can actually have the opposite effect. Garcia and Avishalom call this the “N-effect” and they demonstrated it through a number of experiments.” – Ed Yong

Many of us are freelance consultants, and I chose to go the freelance route before the economy took a turn for the worse. In the past few months, I’ve seen more and more people being laid off as a result of corporate downsizing or startups that have closed their doors under the current economic pressures. With full-time gigs becoming more and more difficult to find, many of these people are turning to freelancing and consulting to pay the bills while they continue their search for another full-time job. In a previous post about unemployment, the economic downturn, and web working, I talked a little more about this trend with a few numbers to back up my assumptions.

I’m starting to wonder about the impact of this new influx of freelancers. On the one hand, it seems like more companies are turning to freelancers to fill the gaps in their workforce during hiring freezes, but on the other, any large changes in a market are likely to have unanticipated side effects. After reading the study about motivation, I wonder how these new entrants will impact motivation to compete for freelancing jobs. More companies hiring freelancers could potentially drain motivation even if the chances of getting the contract are the same; however, I suspect that the number of people freelancing is probably exceeding the increase in freelancing jobs thus resulting in more competition and a reduced chance of success.

Keep in mind that the study was looking at motivation in student settings, not careers or job motivation, so the idea that the results may apply to freelancers competing for jobs is speculative, though reasonable, but it has given me food for thought.

What changes have you noticed in the freelancing market as a result of the economic downturn? How does your perception of competition affect what contracts you bid on and how you bid?

Image by nikolai36 from flickr

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In a recent post, I blogged about the telecommuting trend, including a data point from a WorldatWork study that found a 39 percent increase in the number of telecommuters in the U.S. between 2006 and 2008. Many businesses are actively seeking to embrace remote working, and Simon’s post on GigaOM Pro, “Enabling the Web Working Revolution” (subscription required) describes some of the other benefits and research on telecommuting.

Today, Cisco Systems released the results of its Teleworker Survey, in which the networking giant surveyed almost 2,000 of its employees to better understand the social, economic and environmental impact of telecommuting.  Here are a few highlights from the research regarding telecommuting statistics:

• $277 million per year in estimated cost savings for Cisco and employees.
• 47,320 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions saved by reduced travel.
• 69 percent of the employees see increased productivity.
• 67 percent said that their work quality improved.
• 80 percent had an improved quality of life.
  
• On average employees telecommute 2 days per week.
  

I talked to Rami Mazid, Cisco’s VP of Global Client Services & Operations, about the research and he said that one of the biggest surprises from the study is that people actually spend more time working when they telecommute. Of the time saved by not commuting, 60 percent was spent working more while only 40 percent of the time saved was consumed by personal activities. Mazid also described his personal use of telecommuting at Cisco. Based on his calendar and work scheduled for the day, he decides whether or not he should spend the time working from his office at Cisco or from home. Even when he goes into the office, most of his team meetings are conducted online using WebEx to accommodate employees working from other locations.

Cisco is also redesigning some of its office buildings with the remote worker in mind. Employees who work almost exclusively from home can opt out of having an on-site office altogether. The offices have areas where workers can drop in to work for a day without having an assigned space. A little over a year ago, Intel did something similar in one of its buildings in Oregon. It was a pilot office focused on open spaces and better accommodating remote workers. The company created a bank of first-come, first-serve offices for people who spend most of their time working from home, complete with storage lockers. Most employees still have permanent cubicles, but this is a great way to make better use of expensive office space when many increasingly spend little to no time in an assigned corporate space.

Cisco has several products that are designed to make it easier for people to work remotely, so it’s clear the company has an interest in encouraging telecommuting. But Cisco walks the walk in addition to talking the talk, and are seeing tangible benefits from encouraging employees to stay home.

What have you seen companies do to encourage telecommuting and support remote employees?

Image by flickr user Tim Patterson

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According to some new Twitter research published on the Harvard Business Blog, my usage is unusual:

A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.

At the same time there is a small contingent of users who are very active. Specifically, the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production.

To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue — Wikipedia. There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia’s edits. In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool. This implies that Twitter resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.

I suspect than many of us fit into that top 10 percent of users who contribute the majority of the content, but I’m a bit concerned about the conclusion that Twitter might be more of a one-to-many publishing platform rather than a community of peers interacting with each other. I’m not sure that the data shown in the blog post leads to that conclusion. I do worry about all of the brands jumping on Twitter to broadcast their marketing messages and tell people about their products and services without really engaging in the conversation. However, there are also many people and companies who engage effectively in the conversation by becoming a part of the community. @replies and retweets are part of the community-focused culture of sharing content that is also a part of Twitter.

As a freelance consultant, clients often ask me about using Twitter, and it can be difficult to get them to understand the conversational nature of Twitter to shift them from thinking of Twitter as a broadcast medium to Twitter as a community of people holding conversations. It’s also important to remember that most people are not likely to be using Twitter as obsessively as I do, which makes techniques for mining and monitoring Twitter even more important for the average Twitter user.

(As an aside, the Harvard Business blog post also contains some interesting observations about gender and Twitter usage that are outside of the scope of this post, but are definitely worth a read.)

What are your thoughts about Twitter as a conversation vs. a way to broadcast content?

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I love learning new things and sharing them with others, and you can see this trend by looking back across my posts here on WebWorkerDaily and elsewhere. You’ll see many posts focused on finding and consuming information. As I write this blog post, I’m sitting in a coffee shop getting ready for a meeting with someone who has agreed to spend some time demoing Yahoo Query Language (YQL) to help me learn even more techniques to feed my information habit.

I’m also an avid Twitter user, primarily because it is a quick way to consume a variety of information, from keeping up with personal friends to discovering new tools to little nuggets of useful information.

It seems that I am not alone in using Twitter primarily to consume information. A recent acticle on Media Post noted:

Rather than ego fulfillment or networking, what appears to truly motivate Twitter users is learning new things and getting information in a timely manner, according to new data from research firm MarketingProfs.

The study of some 425 Twitter users, conducted in early and mid-April, found that nearly 100 percent respondents agreed with the statements “I value getting information in a timely manner,” and “I find it exciting to learn new things from people,” while about 80 percent “like to be connected to lots of people.”

This is certainly true in my case. As I’m writing this post at 8:30 a.m., Twitter has helped me discover an article about social media statistics, which is where I found the above article and came up with the idea for this blog post; find an embarrassing picture of me from last weekend’s BarCampPortland that I helped to organize; and learn about Google’s standalone contact manager. Not bad for a few hours of posts consumed in just a few minutes.

Are you an information junkie? How do you feed your information habit?

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Algorithmic searches, on the other hand, are great for finding information when you know enough about a topic to formulate a strong query that will return highly relevant results. These searches work best for me when my question has little ambiguity and when I know enough about a topic to formulate a good search query.

One big advantage of using social search is that you can find information when you aren’t quite sure what you need. Social search approaches allow you to describe a problem or ask a question that isn’t formulated well enough to put into a search query. This is useful when you don’t know enough about a topic to know where to start, or when the algorithmic results are returning questionable results. In an earlier post about research tools and techniques, I discussed an example of using my Twitter network to get an answer to a question about event registration systems. While this is great when you have a network of people who might know the answer to your question, it won’t work well when you need to know about a topic that falls outside of the expertise of your personal contacts. However, new social search services like Aardvark are working to fill this gap to include answers from friends of friends.

I’ve found that I get the best information if I start with my social network to get a few suggestions and then take those suggestions to Google or other search engines to get more details and additional information. By getting a good baseline of information from friends and other people in my network, I can refine my algorithmic search approach to get more relevant results. This combination of social and algorithmic search has worked well for me.

How do you search? Do you use both social and algorithmic search methods?

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Yes, I know, you could just do a search using your favorite search engine and get tons of responses to your query. While this is a great first step, it can help to have some more targeted methods of finding information.

I usually start by reaching out to my social networks. A quick question posted to Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed or any other social network where you have a group of peers can help you get started on the right foot. I used this technique on Saturday when I was looking for a good software solution for letting people register for a class that I’m planning to teach. My Google search resulted in a bunch of what looked like questionable solutions, but my Twitter inquiry gave me several great options to choose from.

I also use Google Custom Search Engines for targeted searches where I can control the sites that are searched. While a narrow list of sites to search will not work for every purpose, it can be very useful in certain situations. I have one custom search engine that searches only a defined list of online community thought leaders for when I am looking for previous coverage and quotes on a topic from reliable sources. I also have a custom search engine that only searches the industry analysts that cover online communities and social media for when I am looking for data points to quote in blog posts or in materials for a client. There is even a Google Marker bookmarklet available that makes it very easy to add new sites to any of your custom search engines.

These are my two favorite research tools and techniques to help me quickly and efficiently do research.

What are your favorite research tools and techniques?

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I started using the Filtrbox online monitoring service after reading Aliza’s great review from last year. Like her, I was intrigued by the promise of more easily managing the sheer volume of information I was wading through.

Since then, I have come to rely on the Daily Briefing email they send me. It outlines my results without me needing to visit the web site. While this “set it and forget it” system was providing good value for me, I knew I was missing out on a lot of the flexibility and power of the service.

So, prompted by the recent upgrade to what Filtrbox is calling the “G2″ release, I decided to revisit the site and see what else it could do for me.

Filtrbox is a monitoring service which scours the web to provide you relevant results related to your keyword-based searches, or “filtrs”. It is primarily aimed at companies doing brand monitoring and sales people researching prospects or competition. For the web worker like me, it is also a good choice for article and product research.

The key to Filtrbox is the filtr itself, and setting them up properly can affect search results significantly. You start with a basic keyword and then refine it with the “and”, “or” and “not” modifiers. For example, I might want Apple and iPhone but not AT&T. A drag-and-drop tag cloud helps to create and refine the filtr using the actual results.

What I really like is that Filtrbox acquires everything but then lets me control what I see. Each result is given a ranking based on the popularity of the site and my own personal usage and rating. By adjusting this FiltrRank I can keep the results manageable but then still expand them if I want a bigger picture view.

Content can be pulled from three source categories: Mainstream, Blogs and Social Media. Unfortunately, while you can adjust which category you want to search, this setting is applied at the account level, and not the filtr level where I think it would be much more useful.

There are also options to sort by rank and date, which are helpful.

While not really an aggregator, I can also have my results returned to me in my Google Reader via an RSS feed. Filtrbox they also sugges importing your current OPML feed export files into the application. This will let you use your rankings to tweak results and filter out the noise from what you are currently reading.

Filtrbox has cut the pricing significantly in this G2 release, moving from 25 filters for $20/month to unlimited filters and usage for $10/month. This makes the service much more appealing for a small business or independent worker, and a steal compared to some other monitoring services. The paid accounts also provide additional reporting and export options. There is also a free 14-day trial account.

Filtrbox is a browser-based application that requires Flash 9 or greater. IE7, Firefox 2 or later and Safari 2 or later are all supported.

How do you track your brand online? Would Filtrbox help you manage your searches?

Disclosure: Filtrbox is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True

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