Brian,

As you know, I'm very keen on using social media, and one of the main
areas that I'm going to be working in this year (which is also a CILIP
Presidential theme of mine) is the use of social media by information
professionals to further enhance their presence on the internet, and
particularly within and by search engines. I do not believe that this
is a nice addition, fad or just 'a good thing' to do - it is
absolutely crucial to the long term value of what we do within our
industries and demonstrates our value to colleagues, employers and
users.

Consequently I also make use of news curation tools such as Zite,
Pulse and Flipboard for the iPad, as well as Paper.li and Scoop.it
among others. These all link into my Twitter and Facebook feeds and
keep me up to date with the news that is of particular interest to
colleagues that I follow on those resources.

I understand why people are concerned about the 'social' aspect of
search, but to be honest, Google algorithms are created by Google
employees, so it's essentially swopping one set of results produced by
human beings for another. Furthermore, the Google algorithms are open
to abuse and failure - one only has to do a search for 'Martin Luther
King' to see the highly placed racist site in the results, and I'm
sure that we can all remember the Michelle Obama racist image fiasco a
year or so ago. Putting complete trust into Google results is little
short of stupidity and they should be cross checked against other
search engines as a matter of course. Furthermore, like it or not,
social search is the only way that search can develop in the future.
Search cannot scale. The flood of information onto the internet is
overwhelming search engines (even Google), so utilising a wide variety
of professional and expert contacts is going to become a necessity.
More search engines will have to take this into account if they are to
succeed, and I find it interesting to note that both Bing and Blekko
have options to allow searchers to use social content shared by
personal contacts.

Finally, you may wish to make use of www.gplus.to which allows you to
create a much more user friendly Google Plus address. Mine for example
is gplus.to/philbradley which is far more memorable.

Best,

Phil.

On 17 February 2012 09:44, Brian Kelly <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> In a recent post entitled "My Trusted Social Librarian" available at
> http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2012/02/16/my-trusted-social-librarian/
> I described how I have set up a Twitter list containing the Twitter ID of
> one librarian (Aaron Tay, National Library of Singapore and a Library Mover
> and Shaker in 2011) who I have found shares a steady stream of links to
> valuable resources on Twitter. I now use the Smartr app on my iPod Touch so
> that such links are automatically downloaded to my mobile device.
>
> I went on to describe how increasingly I find Aaron's image in Google
> searches, for pages which he has shared on Friendfeed, +1ed, etc.
>
> I describe Aaron as my trusted social librarian based on an idea described
> in a blog post on Could Librarians Be Influential Friends? (see
> http://blog.ouseful.info/2010/10/27/could-librarians-be-influential-friends-and-who-owns-your-search-persona/)
> and a folow up post on  Invisible Library Support – Now You Can’t Afford Not
> to be Social?
>  (http://blog.ouseful.info/2012/01/13/invisible-tech-support-now-you-cant-afford-not-to-be-social/)
> by Tony Hirst from the Open University.
>
> Some people don't like the social dimension in searching, feeling that
> search should be left to Google's algorithms. However I'm moving to the view
> that it can be useful to see some type of recommendation which is shared
> 'frictionlessly' by trusted colleagues.
>
> Are any librarians consciously doing this in order to ensure that their
> presence extends to Google searchers and developments centred around tools
> such as Twitter?  I would love to follow a librarian (on Twitter and
> Google+) who shares resources about open content, Creative Commons, open
> science and open data.
>
> Note I am @briankelly on Twitter and the rather less memorable
> https://plus.google.com/110503999273000060034/ on Google+
>
> Thanks
>
> Brian
>
> --------------------------------------------------------
> Brian Kelly
> UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, UK, BA2 7AY
> Email: [log in to unmask]
> Blog: http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/
> Twitter: http://twitter.com/briankelly



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