Three Useful Research Tactics I Learned Last Week

I’m always trying to figure out how to get more out of the tools I find online. I spend a lot of time figuring out new ways to discover good sources of information on a wide variety of topics; setting up systems for our writing staff at ReadWriteWeb and for consulting clients through my personal blog. Some of the things I’ve discovered lately I can’t disclose publicly, but here are three I can share. I hope you find them useful.

Use other peoples’ lists before building your own.

A few weeks ago I wrote a giant post titled How to Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet on Any Topic. It was a big hit and if you haven’t seen it yet, I’d recommend checking it out. It’s all about how to discover the top online blogs writing about any topic, how to find their most popular posts (according to their readers), how to search against their archives as a reference source and how to connect with the authors elsewhere around the web, on Twitter for example.

Jason Falls wrote a similar post a few days later that offered some more good advice, though. One of the biggest things I took from Jason’s post was that there’s no reason to start building a list from scratch, as I showed readers how to do in my post, when you can find existing lists of resources already created. Jason used Alltop as one of his sources of sources, and though the interface there is not good for regular use, someone has done a whole lot of work finding good blogs on a variety of topics. There’s no need to reproduce that work if you’re interested in one of those topics.

Additionally, Googling for the terms list of blogs about topic X will often lead you to existing lists. I’ve also begun exploring Delicious pages like http://delicious.com/tag/list+blogs+eco, where you’ll find links people have tagged with the words list, blogs and eco. Shazam!

You don’t have to search against static lists

Google Custom Search engines are really simple but are one of the most powerful tools I started working with last year. I’ve got probably 30 of them that let me search top blogs on a wide variety of different topics.

Whenever I find or make a list, I always consider turning it into a CSE. Did you know, though, that you can make a CSE that’s automatically populated using an OPML URL? Check out http://www.google.com/cse?cref=http://www.google.com/cse/tools/makecse%3Furl%3Dwww.readwriteweb.com/topeducationblogsgreatposts.opml&loading=1.

You can switch out the OPML URL in that link and search against any OPML file you’ve posted or found online. That way if you update the OPML file, you’ll automatically update the sources included in your Custom Search Engine.

Big thanks is due to Marjolein Hoekstra of Clever Clogs for teaching me that, as she has so many things about RSS.

Finding industry people on Twitter is easy.

I’m hesitant to share this one publicly, but what the heck. Have you looked at Twellow? It’s a search engine that searches the user bio fields of peoples’ Twitter profiles. That’s cool, but there’s an advanced search feature that’s even cooler.

I then scanned through those search results for people who appear to work at those companies, opened their Twitter profiles up in new tabs, added them as friends, then captured all the tabs as a slideshow I could share with the rest of the team. Just like that we were all following a bunch of people who worked at top semweb companies. You could do the same thing to jump in quickly to any industry’s community on Twitter.

Those are some of the most useful research tactics I’ve discovered lately – how about you? Feel free to post useful stuff right below in comments!

Lego maze photo CC from Flickr user Anvilon