Of hunting and farming - using Refinder as a research tool

 

Online research is a multi-stage process, but from the distance it falls into two main steps: hunting and farming.

 

My information hunting instincts are always-on. Like any hunter, i figure out appropriate hunting districts in the endless arrays of search engines, blogs, tweets and online communities. As i´m grazing through these areas, i´m identifying useful stuff, which i deem valuable enough to preserve. Over time i find out, where the prey usually resides, meaning, i´m subscribing insightful rss feeds, i identify and follow thought leaders through twitter and i set up information traps using Google alerts. What i bag from hunting, goes into farming. My farming approach basically comprises the storage of the info-prey, including  its qualification, annotation, categorization and distribution to all those i believe having a need to know.     

 

 

For the collection of online information i rely heavily on Refinder´s bookmarklet. This tool comes along quite handy while browsing the web. It allows me to capture not just bookmarks, but also paragraphs or entire webpages. The bookmarklet grabs the entire URL of the visited page. Optionally, it adds areas of the page, which I  highlight manually, into Refinder. 

 

 

Certain information resources i am closely monitoring over time. On behalf of doing so, I use Refinder´s capability to connect with external information sources. Refinder than imports all tweets of a particular Twitter name.

Same mechanism works for RSS feeds.  

I  utilize Refinder collections as aggregation containers for the imported tweets and feeds. As Refinder catches these information items autonomously when they appear online, i only need to call up these collections from time to time to find, what´s been added. 

 

Over time, my Refinder account has evolved into a hunting ground of its own. It holds results from previous researches, a ton of auto-imported stuff, material shared by others, comments, notes and files added manually. Using Refinders search and the versatile information filters are my preferred tools for hunting within Refinder. 

 

 

Info-prey needs cultivation. When capturing a useful piece of information, I tag it immediately. Refinder knows all my previously created tags, which makes it easy to assign them, with no worries about consistency of spelling. I typically assign three or four topics. Topic assignment in Refinder is linking of one piece information to another one. I link them up to all available information types. So if appropriate, I relate information not just to keywords or phrases, but as well to contacts, events, tasks, organizations, places or articles.

By the way, auto-imported tweets tag themselves - Refinder recognizes the hashtags in the tweet, extracts them and uses them as tags.

Putting information into collections is another farming task. Refinders concept of collaborative sharing is applied to collections. Whatever i assign into a collection, gets visible to all people, I shared the collection with (or who shared one of their collections with me).  I don´t need to care about notifying somebody about shared stuff, Refinder takes care of that.

 

There´s a couple of joys for the information cultivator. One of these joys stems from the experience, that my information repository holds valuable assets, which bear fruit in expected and unexpected ways. This is the case, when people comment on stuff i shared, start a discussion or express agreement through a "like". It´s even more satisfying, when Refinder suggests me potentially relevant information from the depths of the overall information reservoir. It is perfect, when information finds me instead of me having to find information. 

 

 

Extracting value from the Refinder information farm is effortless. Pulling together search results in a new collection. Filtering off the noise. Publishing a collection on the web. Finding answers. Exporting things. Sharing of findings. Receiving a "Like".
This is then the best part of farming, the harvesting ....