Feel like you're not getting the most out of all the information the web has to offer because it's just so overwhelming? I really believe that optimizing our RSS reading practices can go a long way, but Robin Good of MasterNewMedia.org offers a more sophisticated vision in which our organizations have dedicated NewsMasters. These NewsMasters focus on using RSS, search, filtering and more to get us the best information on our area of interest as quickly as possible. We just get the good stuff. I like it.

I just interviewed Robin over at Net Squared. If you'd like to hear him explain the big picture of NewsMastering in his own voice and words - here's a quick sound clip to go allong with the text write up. The full interview has lots of good details and links for online research in general.

Robin Good on NewsMastering (1 minute 30 sec)

This might be totally obnoxious, but I'm going to give it a try. Randy Morin of the RSS Blog began an experiment recently where he gives a free book from Amazon.com to the person who sends him the best link via del.icio.us by tagging it for:randymorin. Similar to Engadget Mobile giveaways, where a new phone is given to one random person who comments after a particular post. Those posts get thousands of comments.

I think that's a pretty cool idea. It's like in SnowCrash where people suck up "intelligence" information freelance about everything, submit it to the Central Information Agency (privitized CIA) and get paid whenever someone pays the CIA to access their intel. Hmmm...maybe that's frightening.

Regardless, let's try it.

If people tag their favorite online productivity product, service or application for Web 2.0 style info-management/research with the tag tools4marshallk - I'll pick my favorite one of the month and the person who submitted it gets one year of premium subscription to any web service of their choice on me, up to fifty bucks. For two runners-up I'll pitch in twenty bucks towards premium subscription to a web service of your choice. High stakes stuff, huh? I think it could prove more than worth it. And fun! At the end of this month I'll profile the winners, their submissions and their selected services. Unless I have less than 20 submissions, at which point I'll extend it to one month from this post. It'll be great, and did I mention fun? Since it won't be a for:marshallkirkpatrick tag, anyone can see the submissions here. Heck, if this works well then we could all vote on which submissions are best. But this whole idea might be really stupid, or at least in need of continual evolution.

Update: the tagging has begun! Check out the first submissions at http://del.icio.us/tag/tools4marshallk
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It's true. Posting regularly, with links in and out, relevant metadata (like tagging your articles) and writing good headlines all contribute to SEO or search engine optimization. Want proof? I really don't like to brag to anyone but my mother (hi mom!) but I watch my traffic logs to see where visitors come from, and most of them these days are coming in through plain old web search - not even blog search.

Check these out-
Google search for: good blogs
Google for: how to use tags
MSN search for: use of tags
MSN search for: Intro to RSS

I don't see much in Yahoo right now. So all of the above search results can and will likely change - but when I visited them they looked pretty darned good. Count search engine optimization as one more reason why blogging is a good idea.

Technorati Tags: blogging, SEO, search,

It's all the rage on Tech.Memeorandum today. Sphere.com. Pretty good. I wrote more about it early in the day at Social Software. Having used it some more and listened to star-maker Mike Arrington interview the founders - I feel even better about it at the end of the afternoon. You might want to check it out too, and if you have an hour you might want to listen to the podcast linked to over there on Social Software.

Here's one for the history books: Clive Thompson published a ten page article on Google in China today on the New York Times site. Long but worth reading. Google's China Problem (And China's Google Problem)

It's true, almost every field of interest has bloggers now! So how can you find blogs about whatever you are interested in? Here are a number of ways I recommend:

• Go to Technorati's Blog Finder and search by author-submitted tag regarding entire blogs as opposed to individual posts. You can view these in order of "most authority" (inbound links) or "most recently updated."
• The other end of the spectrum, methodologically, might be Top Ten Sources. A fairly broad number of topics are covered here, with an expert human editor maintaining what they believe are the top ten blogs in their area of expertise. From Second Life to the Opera. For good times check out photoblogs and MP3 blogs. Since both of these are multimedia, the Top 10 pages themselves are less impressive than the individual blogs and feeds. I just subscribed to the OPML file of the Top Ten Photoblogs and yay am I excited.
• Look at what other people have tagged with the terms blog and your topic of interest in del.icio.us. See, for example: http://del.icio.us/tag/library2.0+blog.
• When you find blogs you like, check if they have blog rolls - a list of their favorite blogs - in the sidebar. Or, check to see who is linking to the blog you found already by searching for their URL in Technorati, Icerocket or another blog search engine.
• If you are looking through a large number of blogs and want to evaluate the quality of them, I like to open the Technorati Mini on my desktop and drop in blog URLs as I find them to see if other people are linking there. This only works when Technorati works, of course, and that's only part of the time.

Well, there's a few tips. Hope they are useful.

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Gary Price points to a nice search engine for citations in the Information Science field: CiteSeer. See, for example, this search for my most recent interviewee at Net Squared, Stuart Weibel. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the page to see all the features included. Nice.

I got to meet Stuart in Seattle after I made a blog post saying I'd be there last week. Thanks for making the connection Stuart!

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Things are nuts after some time on the road, but I want to post some links here for readers interested in helpful research tools I've covered elsewhere, primarily on the Social Software Weblog.

• Del.icio.us to add private bookmarks and more
• AJAXian meta search engine for tags

I'm writing 60 posts a month on that blog, so there's always lots to read, but those are two of the most helpful in terms of research. See also over at NetSquared:

• Social Bookmarking and Vertical Search
• Community Blogs and Power Research: an interview with Lisa Williams

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As promised I've posted an interview with OPML blogger Lisa Williams, though we didn't find much time to talk about OPML! Instead we talked about her community blog project, h2otown, which rocks. And her power use of search and RSS. It was super fun and informative. Hopefully we'll get to catch up and do an interview about OPML soon, which is why I contacted her in the first place!

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Check out Monitor This, a fabulous service that builds an importable OPML file of RSS feeds for any search you input - in 22 search engines at once! It looks great. I've just subscribed to some searches this way and we'll see how it goes.

I was told about this by Lisa Williams, with whom I began an interview this morning. (I love it when people are down for long IM interviews!) It's a real good interview, too. Lisa is awesome. I love her approach to research - and not just because it reminds me of my own but with different tools. We haven't really even begun to talk about OPML either - and that's the reason I asked her for an interview.

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