No, we're not kidding. Many info pros, academics, students, and Google groupies have wondered for a long time if Google would ever create a Google Scholar Blog.
Well, as of today, it's now available. You can find it at:
Those of you who read/skim/scan ResourceShelf on a regular basis (thanks!) are slightly ahead of the curve on this topic. Google Scholar Alerts debuted about five weeks ago and we posted an overview of the service on opening day along with a few ideas about other services worth a look.
While compiling our May post we were also very fortunate to have an e-mail chat with Anurag Acharya, Distinguished Engineer at Google and Founding Engineer of Google Scholar. He was invaluable in making sure we were clear on several points.
Today's Google Scholar post also provides a bit of info about something many have wondered about for a long time. How often is the Google Scholar database updated with new material.
We now add new articles to Google Scholar twice a week; we plan to further increase this frequency.
Now, if we could get a catalog of some of what's in the database. While a lot of majority of material is found via web crawls, there are some Google Scholar sources from academic and other publishers. A directory of just these titles would be a great start.
We've been running several Google Scholar Alerts since day one and two things are worth mentioning at this point.
1) You might want to begin with a broad search but BE PREPARED to come back to focus and develop a more precise query to eliminate the many false drops you'll likely receive with a more general query. As the blog post points out, personal names can often be a challenge.
2) It's important if not essential to think "scholar or scholarly" in the broadest sense of the term. In other words, if you or those you're working with are only looking for published peer-reviewed articles, using a database that allows the searcher to limit to only this type of material might be a more effective use of their time.
It's probably a good idea to do some preemptive searching with Google Scholar so you can get an idea of what is and is not in the database.
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Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
