Twirrific!

Some days the interconnectedness of the internet is mind-blowing.

A blog post at ResearchBuzz led me to an online Venn diagram (which illustrates the overlap in various sets of items) created by Jeff Clark called Twitter Venn.

Before I continue on my experience a bit of history is needed. I’ve been “using” Twitter for the last couple of months to evaluate whether or not it should be included in our Internet Information Retrieval and Personal Information Management course.

To continue, Twitter showed promise as an information retrieval tool – but it is too inconsistent. The good links posted by people I’m following seemed to drown in the more frequent and personal posts. I’m aware that there are many ways in which to find relevant information outside your twitter network, but Twitter Venn is by far the most entertaining.

Twitter Venn allows you to enter two to three search terms of which the results (from Twitter) are displayed graphically in three circles. These circles overlap with each other – creating areas to click on – each presenting the search terms in comparison. It also gives you the statistics of the results (tweets per day for each search term and overlapping terms) and the source of the results – the tweets or “tweeter”. Clicking on a source takes you to the specific tweet.

The search terms I used were “Web2.0″, “Knowledge Management” and “Information Management”. The results were interesting – for Web2.0 there are about 131 tweets a day, Knowledge Management 16 and Information management 28. Skipping to the end – the only result on Twitter containing all three the search terms was a comment and a link about a presentation posted on Slideshare. This presentation was by none other than David Gurteen! In my books – a sound result (although IM did not feature in its true form).

Bottom line, if you don’t intend to be on Twitter 24/7 or search for terms every so often – use tools like Twitter Venn to find interesting connections and good results on Twitter.