I’ve spent the last year trying to find a way of organising and making sense of the information that comes through Twitter, Facebook and Google+

TweetDeck is useful to organise things by category, keyword or people despite being prone to crashing on the iPad, as is Paper.li (here’s my version) although the choice of content isn’t as customisable as I would like. I quite like Flipboard for the iPad as unlike most Twitter clients it reveals the content behind the link which makes browsing so much easier and efficient .

Recently David Bradley (@Sciencebase) altered me to a new solution, Twylah. What I like about this is the ability to sort tweets by category, which means that I can separate out different subjects rather than having them all muddled up in one stream. It’s also a great way to catch up on things you missed while you were doing other things.

You can find my feed by clicking on the ‘Trending Tweets” button on the top right, or by clicking here. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best so far.

After a World Economic Forum meeting in Vienna I was at dinner with a number of senior executives of well known European companies this week when the subject of social media was raised as a discussion point. The WEF was wondering how companies use social media and what was their attitude to it?

As the majority of senior execs tend to be 40+ the were few active Facebook or Twitter users around the table However many of their companies now have mandatory social media training, which seems to mainly involve making employees aware that they shouldn’t use it to criticise the company as they may be monitored and subsequenty fired! Most organisations also have strict rules on who is allowed to Tweet. But the disconnect between large companies and social media seemed almost as pronounced as in the governments affected by the ‘Arab Spring’ – while they are aware of its existence, nobody quite knows how ornwhat to use it for. Some of us will recall simlilar remarks being made about the PC and the Inernet.

The biggest fear among corporations is of damage to their reputation, as a slur with no factual basis may spread through social media and influence public perception. In some cases, all people may know about a particular industry can come from social media in the form of a viral video produced by someone with an axe to grind.

So what should the response be, to live with it or to be more proactive? For a large number of companies there is a growing pressure to use social media even though the end result may be just shouting into the wind. What can a large chemical company, or in fact any other B2B company tweet about? They already have channels of comunication to their customers in the form of web sites, mailing lists and catalogues, so the benefits of tweeting are less clear. But the number of investors and board members asking what the company’s social media strategy is has led to a plethora of company twitter accounts broadcasting nothing but bland corporate speak.

All of this perhaps misses the point of social media, where the key element is people not organisations. The most followed social media users have always been individuals, whether Belle du Jour or @2020science, and as any journalist will testify, it’s the human angle that makes a story interesting.

Real CEOs don’t tweet (although some have a corporate communications person to do it on their behalf) simply because it is too risky. An ill guarded comment after too much Moutai or Wuliangye at a Chinese banquet might get an employee fired, but if it came from a senior executive it could wipe millions off a company’s value (and get them fired).

The big opportunity for social media isn’t in pumping out bland corporate statements, its biggest effect will be inside corporations, allowing discussions around the water cooler to be expanded to include relevant people across the whole organisation, tapping existing knowledge and reducing duplication of effort. The beauty of social media compared with other collaborative platforms from Lotus Notes through Microsoft Sharepoint to Dropbox is the lack of user intervention required. Social media platforms push information rather than relying on users to remember to check for the updated information.

As a tool for collaboration, whether company wide or in the academic world, we are at the beginning of a shift just as profound as that caused by the World Wide Web. But with all new platforms, it takes a few years of use and misuse before the really useful applications emerge that companies can really make use of to improve competitiveness.

The Most Powerful Man in British Science?

As British Politics seems to be mainly concerned with lies & deceit these days it was refreshing to to see Science Minister Lord Drayson popping up on Twitter yesterday to address the concerns of the scientific community. Most of the science community were as shocked to be tweeting with a government minister as they would be to wake up next to Britney Spears/ Tom Cruise.

Drayson’s message echoed that of his boss, that the science budget is safe, and has been ‘ring fenced’ despite the recent government reshuffle having removed the full time post of a minister for science, and merged the Department of Innovation Universities and Skills into Peter Mandelson’s new super ministry of Business, Innovation and Skills.

There are still worries though. The science budget has been raided before to bail out Rover and British Energy, and the currently over optimistic forecasts for UK growth will punch ever bigger holes in the UK budget.

OK that’s the science tweeps pacified, but now lets get down to business. While scientists are happy just to be funded, my major focus is doing something with that science. In Austria, for example, we have deployed over sixty million euros since 2005 across a variety of nanotechnology projects, and managed to nudge them inexorably in the direction of commercial applications. Can we do that in the UK?

Drayson tweeted to me that “We absolutely recognise the strategic value of science. The global challenges we face demand it” and set himself a challenge with “I really believe science agenda is stronger now in govt than ever. It’s up to me to prove it though in the future.”

While we agreed that future prosperity will be built on the combination of science and entrepreneurship (and occasionally scientific entrepreneurs) there are still a number of pieces of the puzzle missing – bridging the early stage funding gap for instance.

The conclusion of all of this tweeting is that we have a part time science minister who recognises the value of science and entrepreneurship, and will be fighting his corner. Whether anything will come out of this is a different matter.

The FT reveals that the latest government relaunch will be branded “Building Britain’s Future.” It will be interesting to see what part science plays in the that future.

There is a complex interplay between the various sorts of media available at the moment that seems to baffle more people than it excites, a bit like Cricket!  Here’s an example where Howard Lovy takes a look at the use of Twitter in the nanotech community.

Allow me to explain.  An online newspaper article gets tweeted by me, then blogged and the blog post is converted into a tweet. Howard reads the tweet then tweets that he has written a blog post about the tweeting of the article which I then retweet and blog about which then gets tweeted and retweeted?

Still with me? Then let’s consider something important like the rules of Cricket?

You have two sides, one out in the field and one in.

Each man that’s in the side that’s in goes out, and when he’s out he comes in and the next man goes in until he’s out.

When they are all out, the side that’s out comes in and the side that’s been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out.

When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in.

There are two men called umpires who stay all out all the time and they decide when the men who are in are out.

When both sides have been in and all the men have been out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game!

Both explanations make perfect sense if you already understand both Twitter & Cricket. If you don’t, well, in the same way that the best way to understand cricket is to play it, you just have to start tweeting.