Tomorrow I head for DeFrag 2008. I'm using my personal funds and some of my remaining vacation to attend this conference. While you might find the fact that a corporate kind of guy is using personal time and money to attend this kind of conference … consider this fact. Where do social media / networking tools start and stop? My wife and I often comment to each other that the boundary between work and leisure for someone like myself gets very fuzzy. I do not consider the uncertain boundary a negative situation; I like the intersection of the two worlds (work and leisure).

Even before the conference starts I will meet with Microsoft on collaboration tools for Outlook. It's hard to believe that my own efforts in this arena started only 30 months ago with MediaWiki and Moveable Type … a clandestine skunk works on some old Dell desktops running mySQL. Today my company has a large Web 2.0 environment which includes blogs, wikis, discussion boards and social search … which will be the focus of my presentation named social search in the corporate environment (day 1 – 2:30 pm). Stay tuned … I'll blog my DeFrag impressions.

Last night I hit the jackpot in terms of discovering new resources. The key was understanding how to follow up on useful information … to expand it to become even more new valuable knowledge for me. Here is how the process went … and what I discovered.

Really Simple Sidi posted on Microsoft's new data visualization tool, DataDepot. Many of you may remember I already have an interest in data visualization, and I was even featured in an interview by the NY Times on the same subject. I subscribe to Sidi's blog via RSS (learn more).

As I was convinced that Microsoft's DataDepot was a somewhat new service, I immediately decided to Google the service, but not in the manner you might expect. In this instance, I wanted to learn whom might be the netizens who already had posted about DataDepot.  In other words, this was my chance to learn about people who are both smart, linked and well informed. Thus, I did a Google linked search. See the screenshots at the bottom of this post, but the concept is easy. I browse over to Advanced Google Search, and paste the DataDepot web address into bottom window … "find pages that link to a page". If you are truly exploring something rather new, the web sites which come up in your results should represent services / blogs / etc. which represent sites "in the know".

I now spend time researching my Google results, but not just from the vantage point of my original query (DataDepot), but in terms of whether the resulting sites have expanded value. In my case, I only turned up 32 sites that linked to DataDepot. This confirmed my original hypothesis that Microsoft's DataDepot was either rather knew, or still at least unknown. Time to take a look at the resulting sites.

Those results ultimately led me to this content (some via a link):

• eScience at Microsoft– a blog of research and science out on the edge.
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• Seed Magazine – defines itself as "science is culture" … fascinating stuff
  • Cribsheet - great downloadable pdf's of science concepts / areas.
  • Mind2008 - video presentations by revolutionary science thought leaders

I could go on, but the end result if I have a huge new amount of data to explore … some for work (data visualization and DataDepot) … and some for just the sake of science (Seed). 

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