I've got a Twitter theme going here, so I might as well run with it!
In blogging's early days, blogs weren't recognized as a valuable information source but as time went on, researchers acknowledged that there was some good content out there. Now, perhaps it's Twitter that's underestimated, especially if you're looking for what's being said about a company or product.
That didn't occur to me until I ready this LawyerKM entry, Twitter as a Knowledge Base and Expertise Resources, and I started searching Twitter.
You could be excused for not realizing you can search Twitter. There is no link to the Twitter search that I could find on my Twitter home page. But go to http://search.twitter.com and give it a whirl. I searched for a fairly unique company name, which is how I found out that Bloomberg has a Twitter, as does Singapore News. Since I'm researching rumors about said company, I added an RSS feed to Google Reader so I could continue to monitor new tweets on the subject.
Here's another example for you. I'm was quite enamored with the Roomba I purchased last year. However, after months of diligently cleaning up after my dogs, the little guy just couldn't take it any more and Roomba was retired to the trash bin. I'm in the market for another one, but am hesitating because I don't want to pay $300 for a cleaning device that is just going to choke on dog fur. I searched Twitter to see how others like the cleaning robot and cool, someone mentions a new version of irobot's Pet Series Roomba has just been introduced. Life is good.
There's an advanced Twitter search in addition to the basic if you need more specificity.
If you want to know what web pages Twitterers are talking about, try Twit(URL)y, as recommended by Stephen Cohen in Top Tools for the Twittersphere, (Information Today, June 2008). I'm adding this one to my RSS reader. When I visited, a video of a couple of Repulican pundits talking on MSNBC about Sarah Palin when they thought the mic was off was at the top of the list. Now I'm watching Jon Stewart's take on Sarah Palin. Okay, I could do this all day.
Everybody's talking...
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