I have recently (like 2 days back) come to a realization that I am totally unorganized when it comes to doing research on the Web and sharing the fruits of that research with others.

Sourcing Information

My research process starts with a ton of RSS feeds that I have been adding over time on my personal NetVibes page. These RSS feeds being somewhat categorized, but more visually categorized in my head than on my screen. That leads to a total clutter and the impossibility for me to handle more than the current number of feeds I have.

Sharing Information

Given that I can find an article I find interesting, then I have to bookmark it and find a way to share my bookmark with others. For some reason I don’t like services like del.icio.us so I have a range of bookmarks on NetVibes, on my home FireFox, on my work FireFox and on my Yahoo Notes, etc. In the end, when I have time to post something on my blog a very small proportion of these articles I read get posted.

Tools Out There

Although I haven’t spent much time researching yet, I have been thinking about several tools I could use to improve all this content collection and communication process. One interesting tool is Zotero: this allows to bookmark not only webpages but about anything and attach notes, screenshots and more to them. It is a great data gathering tool. The problem for now is that it is not yet a sharing tool (although that should come pretty soon). Then you have readers, like Google Reader. These do a great job at organizing data and getting an RSS feed as an output. The downside is that it is less convenient to add an RSS feed to a reader rather than just bookmarking an article. Somehow the two are kind of complementary. Google Reader allows me to follow feeds and highlight the stuff I find interesting (by sharing specific articles with others for example), but it does not cater for my free browsing around the web (or even pdf files), like Zotero does.

Wordpress.com Limitations

Finally, in terms of sharing, my ideal solution would be to be able to attach to each of my blog post a feed at the end of the post with related stories (based on my personal research) that gets updated over time. Let’s say I posted two days back about Wikia Search, then at the end of that post would be an RSS feed getting information from my Google Reader for example that is related to Search Engines. That feed as I read and “flag” new articles and stories about search engines gets updated. Getting that feed could be done through Yahoo Pipes or Feed Digest. I think that would be great (although nothing really new, as this feature is on many newspaper websites already) if only I could integrate RSS Feed in my blog post on Wordpress.com.

Anyway, all this to say that so far I have not  found one tool that can answer all my needs and I am juggling with many here and there… If somebody ends up reading this post and feels like sharing tips and ideas… please do.