From the panel, Marshall and Louis had new sources and gathering tips, Gabe and Melanie weighed in heavily on how to manage information and Micah had some great suggestions on discovery of new information sources.

Marshall Kirkpatrick

Twitter - FriendFeed

• Marshall focused on using tools like FriendFeed, combined RSS feeds and Google Custom Search Engines (CSEs) to find the news he needs.
• He highlighted a post he wrote entitled How to Find the Weirdest Stuff on the Internet that describes how to use free tools to create a mashup that finds unique content.  It uses tag clouds in Delicious, finds culture blogs, filters that output through PostRank, then finally pushes it through Feedburner.
• Finally, Marshall returned to how CSEs can work in conjunction with drag and drop zones to quickly search for content online.

Louis Gray

Twitter - FriendFeed

• He uses Google Reader as his primary info-gathering tool. 
• He shares his content from Google Reader to other resource sites such as Delicious, Friendfeed, and Twitter.
• Louis uses FriendFeed to find trusted sources for news and content.
• He pointed out the DailyRadar network of sites like MacBlips and GadgetBlips that aggregate more niche content for discovery.
• Finally, Louis mentioned that in order to blog about new content, often the top priority is good old fashioned networking.

Gabe Rivera

Twitter - FriendFeed

• Gabe Rivera uses Techmeme for selecting the best of what is out there.
• He described that Techmeme is based on an automated system that relies primarily on links between clustered stories to determine how much a story should be ranked, but has recently introduced a 'human element' in the form of Megan McCarthy, the new editor for the site.
• Marshall added that Gabe has some non-tech Techeme-style link blogs, like Memeorandum and Ballbug.
• Gabe says entering new content areas is often difficult because an aggregator needs both fresh content and good metadata to be able to aggregate effectively.

Micah Baldwin

Twitter - FriendFeed

• Micah says he often starts searching for new content by going to one of his favorite, most trusted bloggers, and then searching outward from there. He mentioned that there are a lot of tools to help with this, and Lijit is just one of them.
• As an example, he highlighted a Lijit-powered blog aggregator called Securitybloggers, but he also stresses that influence of a blogger is important. Take recommendation + expertise and you will find new content.
• He said that the I Can Has Cheezburger (ICHC) folks are always looking for the next big meme. A natural place to find new memes is applications like Friendfeed.
• Micah mentioned that ICHC just acquired Twittypic to create Son of a Tweet, a tool that leverages Twitter for finding funny pictures.

Melanie Baker

Work Twitter - Personal Twitter - FriendFeed

• Melanie, in her role as community manager, gets her information from many sources but uses her company's product PostRank to filter stories by buzz and popularity.
• PostRank (formerly called AideRSS) is a system that measures engagement surrounding blog posts by tracking references on over 15 different social media sites, including site comments, Digg, FriendFeed, Furl, Twitter and more.
• Melanie says there are plenty of communities out there to draw from, from her perspective of blogs that use PostRank and Lijit.

Wrap Up

The audience asked what this process of discovering and collecting new sources of content online might be called. After a bit of discussion, the panelists decided the term curation works well, followed by trusted discovery and trusted recommendations.

Overall, we thought the panel exposed those listening to tips and techniques that, while part of a seasoned social media worker's toolkit, may not be leveraged as effectively by newcomers or light social media users.

The enhancement is visible once you log in to your Lijit account. Just click on the 'search widget' button in the navigation bar and the new option will be obvious in the upper-right corner. Once you fill out the form with your (second) blog's details, the new widget can be customized and deployed.

Lijit warns that the widgets are still walled off in different accounts. This means you won't be able to see combined search results or statistics. However, this is still bound to be a big time-saver, since it means you don't have to remember and re-enter two sets of credentials.

In case you have more than one account already created, Lijit recommends you contact them via their Feedback page and they can help you merge them.

Currently, Lijit displays Google AdSense ads in its search results, but its advertising network would allow publishers to sell their own search ad inventory. As many bloggers and publishers are looking for ways to monetize their blogs through services other than AdSense, chances are that there are quite a few people who would like to at least give Lijit's ad network a chance.

Communication works better when you have a good idea who it is you're talking to. How can new online services get users to describe themselves, though?

LinkedIn = Boring but Effective

One of the most well known ways to get people to fill out their profiles is the way LinkedIn does it. Users are shown a progress bar and told that their profile is "X% completed." This is probably effective but some people tell us it makes them feel guilty.

It's much better than nothing, but let's look at some more creative and fun solutions.

What's Your Most Common Username Elsewhere?

Personal search engine Lijit does a great job of making it easy to associate your account with them with all kinds of other accounts you own around the web. It's simple: they just ask what your most common username is and then they check for public profiles with that username on a long list of different services. In just moments, with a handful of keystrokes, all kinds of info about you can be gathered together.

It's the first step new users take when they click the button to register on the site. You can exclude certain accounts, add particular usernames for accounts where you use a different one. It's incredibly elegant and a great model that others would do well to emulate.

We suspect that social media ping server Gnip will make this kind of approach all the more powerful and easy for application developers to implement soon.

Once you've got usernames from these services, why not display recent activity feeds on their profile pages? That's kind of how Jive Software's ClearSpace does it (see image on the left) and we think that looks great.

Did You Know...?

Another interesting approach is to offer users information about the activities of other people in aggregate and use this as an opportunity to prompt them to provide more information about themselves.

Social recommendation service (and, disclosure, RWW sponsor) Strands, for example, presents customers of Spanish bank BBVA with messages like the following: "Grocery spending: A married person spends 103% more on groceries than a single person. By the way, are you married or single?" That's interesting to know and would motivate me to answer the question with a click.

How else could this be done? Check out categorized Twitter directory Twellow, where Twitter user bios are categorized by interest and occupation. It's a great way to find like minded Twitter users, but imagine if Twello (or another app) said something like this to users: "We see that you are an accountant - did you know that Twitter users who are accountants tend to post more photos to Flickr than Doctors do, but fewer than people in Defense related fields do? If you'd like to tell us what your Flickr username is, we'll connect it to your Twitter account here."

Maybe it could be done more elegantly than that, but you get the idea.

Similarly, eco-credit card company Brighter Planet tracks your personal ecological impact but starts each user out with the median numbers for people in their geographic area and works backwards.

Messages like the following greet users when they login to their Brighter Planet account: "You live with one other person and you use 15% green electricity. Improve your profile by telling us about the car you drive and your flights."

You Look Like George Bush

Brand spanking new social news site SocialMedian assigns a big picture of a famous (or infamous) person as each new user's avatar. My default profile was graced with a photo of Bill Gates, but other people start out with George Bush - something that must get a lot of new users to click the "change my photo" link. It's a witty idea and we wonder just how far it could be taken.

"You are 15 years old, clean up after circus animals for a living and love Britney Spears videos on TV. (unverified - not true? click here to edit your profile.)" Oh yeah, that could work.

I Heard About You On Twitter

If you've used red hot social lifestreaming app type thing FriendFeed, you've probably wondered why, with everything the service knows about you, there's no place to see bio info about other users on their FriendFeed user pages. Enter Hao Chen's FriendFeed Profile script for Greasemonkey. Every time you visit a the user page on FriendFeed of someone who has associated their Twitter account with their FF account (everyone) - this script grabs their bio info from Twitter and slaps it up on their FriendFeed page. It's fantastic!

Why not let users of your app opt-in to populate their profiles with publicly available profiles from other accounts? (I'm here on FriendFeed by the way, if you'd like me to feed you like a friend.)

Still More Ways to Do It

OpenID accounts usually have some profile info associated with them. Some apps pull that info. The OpenID community is working hard, if slow, on "attribute exchange" - a protocol that would flesh this out all the more.

MyBlogLog is a widely used social network for blog readers where you can find headshots of millions of people, their demographic info, interests and many associated accounts from other social networks. Have you tried out the BlogJuice bookmarklet to see the job titles or your blog's most recent visitors, via LinkedIn? It's SO much fun!

If you don't mind renting users from Facebook, the new Facebook Connect login and profile system looks pretty hot too. For some reason people don't appear to put as much fake info about themselves into Facebook as they do other places - it's a rich source of user profile data and comes with the added comfort of extensive privacy controls. The downside is that putting this much control in the hands of Facebook is pretty creepy.

Conclusion: It Doesn't Have to Be Hard Anymore

There's not a whole lot of excuses any more for asking users of your brand new website to fill in a whole lot of information about themselves. Nor is there for having super anemic user profiles, which leave new users totally uninspired to connect with each other. You need users connecting as quickly as possible in your apps and rich profiles really help.

What other ways have you seen apps solve this problem? We're sure there are many more creative examples and we'd love to find out about them!

The handsome devil at the top of this post is Flickr user thomas pix.

When visitors arrive on your blog via a search result, the widget also prepares a menu of additional content from your network based on the keywords they used to find your page. (For example, check out this Google search and click on the first result from the "false precision" blog, which is written by Lijit's CEO. The Lijit widget is in the top left corner of the blog.)

"BigSwerve’s technology helps Lijit further discover the implicit and explicit expertise surrounding a publisher," said Lijit CEO Todd Vernon in a press release. "To date, blog comments have represented a huge amount of user-generated content that has gone largely undiscovered and underutilized."

Lijit plans to integrate BigSwerve's IP in two ways. "Where a publisher leaves comments is an indication of the network of publishers he influences and is influenced by," Todd Vernon told me by email. Currently, Lijit uses information such as blogroll and MyBlogLog to figure out how publishers are connected, but adding comments to the mix will let the company see where its users hang out passively.

The company also plans to use BigSwerve's IP to expand their knowledge of publishers in general, and how they influence one another. "The community of people that leaves comments on a blog or publication often includes others that are not publishers themselves. Think of them as light weight publishers," Vernon said. "This extends our knowledge of these people and what metrics of influence they have on the publishers in our network."

One of the selling points for Lijit to publishers is that the widget provides a bevy of useful statistics about your readers: where they're from, what they're looking for, which of your content they found most useful. (Example stats.) Adding comments to the mix should help Lijit mine more useful metrics for publishers about their readers and how they interact with their blog.

According to Vernon, the average publisher in the Lijit network is connected to 17 other publishers through 1 hop, and 325 via two hops, giving them an amazing overview of how interconnected the blogosphere is and who weilds the most influence (obviously, their data gets stronger as the sample size goes up -- or in this case, as more people use the service). Further, the average publisher has 5 other sources of information, with the most popular being del.icio.us, Flickr, and YouTube, which gives Lijit insight into how publishers are splitting their time. Further, Lijit can also determine on which sources people are putting out the most useful information based on user response.

Clearly, in addition to utility offered to bloggers in the form of a rather helpful personal search product, Lijit is also a very clever data mining project (or at least, has the potential to be).

Via the BigSwerve acquisition, BigSwerve investor First Round Capital will become a shareholder in Lijit.