According to one recent study, 40% of what’s on Twitter is “pointless babble.” After spending some time on Twitter, my response is, “Only 40%?” You can find a lot of junk on Twitter - sales pitches, scams, porn, and those tweets that seem to have no purpose at all. But there’s a lot of good information being passed around on this social networking site. In this month’s ResearchNOTES, I’ll share some great resources I’ve recently come across, courtesy of the people I’m following on Twitter:

From talance, or as I know her, Monique Cuvelier, I found a great post about search engine optimization on the Web Worker Daily Blog (http://is.gd/1BBxa). It’s a nice, simple explanation of a topic that’s frequently made much too complex.

If you’re a history buff, then you want to follow gordonbelt. He recently re-tweeted that the Tennessee Virtual Archive has a new collection online, Civilian Life in the Civil War: http://bit.ly/14cGyu. It’s fascinating stuff.

A colleague of mine, AndreaMeyer, is the person to follow if you’re interested in anything having to do with innovation. Andrea recently tweeted about this great collection of articles, posts, and podcasts on the topic: http://ow.ly/kQwF. Interestingly, the author found everything on his list through Twitter.

You can always learn something from Mary Ellen Bates - or mebs as she’s known on Twitter. That’s how I discovered the latest Beloit Mindset List has been posted at http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2013.php, and that the Class of 2013 has never used a card catalog!

Mary Ellen also tweeted about the release of a new white paper from Dow Jones. It’s about the hidden cost of “free” information and how information professionals add value. You can read this white paper at http://is.gd/2lywq.

What have you learned lately on Twitter? By the way, you can follow me on Twitter, at http://twitter.com/marcyphelps.

Regards - Marcy

Marcy Phelps
Phelps Research
Author, Research on Main Street: Using the Web to Find Local Business and Market Information (Forthcoming)
+1 303.239.0657                        Email: mphelps@phelpsresearch.com
Web: www.phelpsresearch.com     Blog:  www.MarcyPhelps.com