Advocate's Studio

Real-time, social or what have you, even the Federal Government is getting in on the Web 2.0 action! Want your government social media aggregated? Check out govfresh.com – government 2.0. The site collects official government web content streamed from the various social media outlets, including Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and the White House blog. The information is not limited to the White House: there are sources from various federal agencies, the military, political parties and even federal contractors and labs. The information is rounded out with relevant news stories.

The site is clean, with minimal distraction. There are the obligatory sharing icons and buttons for more social media goodness. What a great idea from our tech-forward governing body!

Hat tip to Research Buzz.

Connie Crosby, a tech-savvy librarian from our neighbor to the north, mentioned on her blog today that the Online University Lowdown has created a list of the 50 best blogs for law librarians to follow. Why do I mention this? Anyone interested in research, writing, technology and reference management should make a point of finding web-friendly library scientists and reading their offerings religiously. I have several of these blogs in my reader and I never fail to pull interesting and enlightening information from them. My first exposure to many of the resources that I have adopted was from a blog entry authored by a researcher or librarian. My first exposure to Twitter came from blog posts by Connie and another professional mentioned in her blog above, Steve Matthews.

Time is definitely precious, with all of the possible venues for information and engagement cropping up in our real and virtual worlds. If you have to budget time for information gathering, I recommend offering a little shelf-space to some of the fine resources mentioned in this list
.

Just released into public beta on May 8, 2009, Scoopler is a search engine that aggregates and organizes content on various social media and sharing sites across the internet in real-time updates responsive to your search inquiry. Services include Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, etc.  Scoopler accomplishes its purpose by indexing live updates. It ranks the popularity of links within the updates and shows trending memes. Scoopler also allows you to “reshare” or return a link back to Twitter or Facebook or the other services it supports.

With its real-time aspect and easy sharing feature, Scoopler seems another worthy tool to include in your investigative and information-sharing arsenal.

Hat tip to Pandia Search Engine News.

Often viewed as somewhat ponderous and not very agile, the Fortune 500 and the proverbial tortoise have much in common. However, it pays to keep an eye on that tortoise. Nora Ganim Barnes, PhD and Eric Mattson of Financial Insite have published a study indicating that,while progress has been somewhat slow, the Fortune 500′s social media journey is further along than expected. The study measured progress primarily by the number of companies maintaining “public-facing” blogs.

The data for the study was collected in February and March, 2008, so it is already a year old and pre-dates the mainstream Twitter boom.

According to the report, 16% of the primary corporations listed had a public-facing blog with a post within the last 12 months, including three of the top five.

Although the percentage was somewhat surprising to me, the breakdown by industry was not. Blogging corporations are more readily found in tech and related industries. However I was heartened to see social media adoption among some decidedly non-tech industries, such as insurance and banks, with Progressive Insurance and New York Life among them.

And these blogs are interactive! Over 90% take comments and have RSS and subscription. Over 80% linked to a corporate Twitter account. Others had unconnected Twitter accounts. A sizeable percentage are using podcasting and video to enhance their content.

While the results pale in comparison to soc med activities at schools and the Inc. 500, it is heartening to see the big corporations make the leap into Twenty-first century marketing. This is good news for lawyers seeking to connect with clients on-line. There clearly is someone listening on the other end of the line!

As with any good fable, there is a moral. Slow and steady certainly fits here, but for rainmakers, the better moral might be “if you build it (your on-line presence) they (your corporate clients) will come.”

Read the report here

Hat tip to the Resource Shelf.

It has been quite some time since I talked about Twitter for research in the Studio. This article by Ben Parr at Mashable reminded me that I should revisit the research value amid the scores of 140 or less blips marching through the firehose at Star Wars-speed (couldn’t resist the “May” the “4th” be with you reference).

Why Twitter for research? Part of our thirst for knowledge is to get the goods faster and there is no place like the real-time Web to quench that thirst. However, there is a downside: you have to wade through quite a bit of muck to find the pearls and unless you trust your source, it is difficult to gauge the veracity of the information. And because there is so much information, it is nearly impossible to synthesize it without some help.

That is where the Mashable article fits in. Mashable lists five tools for aiding this process and organizing vast quantities of information. Tweetstats allows you to graph data about different users’ tweeting and Twitter use. While the Twitter web interface now shows trending topics in the sidebar, Trendrr allows for comparisons between topics with graphing features. Tweetmeme offers the ability to compile research on retweeting and link-sharing behavior stats. WeFollow and Twellow are twitter directories that break down by categories, hashtags and location. I use WeFollow and like it a lot. Finally, Xefer Twitter Charts uses Yahoo Pipes and Google charts to offer up to the hour graphs of tweets and replies.

These are all great tools for mining the marketing potential of Twitter. As far as Twitter as a news source or replacement for RSS, I am not convinced. I would rather have my news delayed by a few seconds and filtered for value, a/k/a Sky Grid or a trusted blog writer or news source. But as the Twitterverse grows, tools like these will become indispensible for anyone looking to connect, share and promote via Twitter.