I've been doing a small research project pulling together a list of conferences that people who work with nonprofits and technology and social change might be attenders or presenters. To challenge my set ways of doing traditional Internet research (are ya laughing now Gavin?), I decided to do an action learning experiment on these questions:
- What are some useful techniques social search techniques that might yield richer leads than traditional techniques?
- What social networking tools are the best ones to integrate?
- What thinking shifts are needed to make your social search more successful?
- Is it worth it to integrate social search into practice?
My thinking outloud about this was in a post here. I wrote about the results I got from more traditional ways of doing Internet research and my experience with ChaCha - search engine with human guide. After reading the Pew Internet Report, I decided to experiment with using tags for a social search on delicious.
Gavin left a witty comment, chucked with some excellent advice. The key for me was:
I’d still say that a sociographic approach would work, but try it solely with social networks of people. In this case, you want to know [first] not what conferences people would recommend, but rather who everybody would cite as the expert, who exact would folks recommend as the “person in the know” so to speak. It’s not so much “what’s the answer to my question” but “who should I ask.” Then, once you collect up the experts; you ask them.
So, I'm going through my LinkedIn contacts and looking at sending this out as a question.
Meanwhile, maybe Gavin might write up some more thoughts on social search or maybe all the stuff he posted some place on a listserv about RSS search techniques over at Digital Dinner.
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