Real-time tools have sparked a new sociological phenomenon where nearly everyone is routinely reporting information. From audience members tweeting about meetings to individuals reporting on an illness, the collective result is a plethora of new possibilities for finding information.
Trend and hyper-local tools have emerged because of this new ability to manipulate, synthesise and distil information very quickly. Whether you are browsing or searching for a piece for information, the extra dimension of time has added a new way to dissect information making the research process itself more dynamic.
The health industry is one research area that has rapidly produced a significant number of real-time tools due to the fast moving nature of contagious diseases. The finance, travel and legal fields are other examples of areas where new tools have emerged to track rapidly-changing information such as stocks, flights and legislation. But perhaps the biggest surge in new technology can be seen from the competition to produce a search engine that's more evolved than the last.
Disease surveillance tools and reports are a type of real-time trend tool that is becoming popular. Promed Health has a product called Promed Email, a programme of the International Society for Infectious Diseases which tracks wire services, blogs and alerts as well as first hand reports. The company searches informal sources of information such as social media and reports from subscribers as well as established authoritative sources. All this information is aggregated and subscribers are mailed a daily compilation report on new and emerging disease threats. ProMed Health views their tool as an early warning system containing information not usually reported under formal networks and is especially important to public health. For example, a contagious disease of a crop could mean economic suffering, or an animal disease could cause a food shortage or an illness that could affect humans.
Google Flu Trends, another surveillance tool, aggregates information and displays flu estimates for 15 countries. The service is touted as authoritative because Google's search queries for 'flu' or 'influenza' correlate with virologic and mortality surveillance data from the US Centers for Disease Control and the European Influenza Surveillance Network. The website updates in near real time with data derived from search queries that are compared to historic base level flu activities in certain areas.
Health Map produces disease reports by scanning thousands of sites per hour. The tool was developed by software developer Clark Freifeld and epidemiologist John Brownstein and is mainly funded by the Google.org foundation. This free website relies on culled and selected personal accounts as well as news and official sources from PromedMail, World Health Organization, GeoSentinel, EuroSurveillance, Google News, Moreover, and Wildlife Disease Information Node at the US Geological Survey.
The finance, travel and legislative fields are also making advancements in real-time tools. Map of the Market from Smart Money uses heat maps to track trends in the stock market, enabling users to examine the whole market in one glance. This macro view of the market is a useful supplement to a watch list. As the stream of information increases, trends form. The tool is an easy way to get market caps, because the size of the box correlates to the company with the highest market cap.
Flight view is just one example of the many airline tracking tools that have sprung up which allow users to tracks flights and flight delays on a geographic map. And for traffic, Waze tracks your location then combines it with other people's locations and allows users to track traffic jams on their mobile phones. Another mobile phone application that could be useful if you are interested in the status of a bill in the US Congress is called Real Time Congress. It was developed by the Sunlight Foundation and is available for the iPhone.
Real-time search competition is racing forward with all the major players trying to keep up and outdo each other. Bing, Microsoft's search engine, pulls in tweets from Twitter in real-time and displays the most popular shared links for a query. While researchers cannot rely on something that is popular as being the most authoritative, this type of filter does offer a byway to locate a possible subject expert. Google has a similar real-time search feature integrated into search results pages. Another tool named Topsy scans Twitter and places more weight to a source's authority and how many times a tweet was shared. There is even an iPad application called Twittelator, which takes selected Twitter content and groups information into single channels.
The growth of this enormous collection of real-time data has also led to the development of ways to preserve it as a new historic public record. Twitter recently partnered with the Library of Congress to archive every public tweet since the birth of tweets in March 2006. Tweets are an easily transferable data collection, since they all come from the Twitter servers. Most tweets are publicly available and now will become part of the public record of information for researchers. What used to be handwritten letters between people are now a dynamic stream that can be dissected and analysed like never before. From historic elections to national disasters, the social commentary is more accessible than ever. Tweets will be on a six month delay. Adding to this, Google has also announced its own version of tweet preservation called Google Replay through the 'Updates' link in the 'Show Options' search results page.
While these tools are a step in the right direction, there is a limit to the level of usefulness and practicality researchers can get out of them by simply browsing and searching. The data sets are large and can lead to information overload when trying to extract useful information. Microsoft addresses this problem with Microsoft Pivot, an application that utilises a zooming in and zooming out approach to navigate from many things to many other things to see patterns. In other words, a typical navigational movement might be glancing at a trend in one database, zooming in on a single data point, pivoting to another database, zooming out on a trend in the other database and so on. A Pivot collection could be designed to help study the history of movies. It could sort by male or female leads, and then sort again to find their most frequently occurring co-star. The user could then 'pivot' the information again to shape the display of the movies themselves, perhaps by decade. The interface is entirely graphical and Microsoft has dubbed the resulting information product an 'infographic'. On the downside, Pivot is a downloadable application and does not yet work on a Mac. But it does represent a huge step forward and illustrate a way to navigate through information that is more like climbing through a web.
Perhaps in the future information professionals will be researching and presenting infographics to clients as well as drawing subjective intelligence from a real-time data set. It will be possible to take disease symptoms and connect them with lifestyle choices and make insights and trends emerge. Edo Segal, who sold his real-time search company Relegence to AOL a few years ago and hold three patents on the subject, perhaps said it best when he was quoted as saying 'Real time taps into consciousness'.
Heather Negley is a consultant for Zing Information Research, a business and legal research discovery company. Previously, Heather was an Information Research Specialist with the Government and Finance Division of the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress where she provided business research for members of Congress and their staff. Before that she was a research reporter for U.S. News and World Report and spent six years in various roles at washingtonpost.com, denverpost.com, and L.E.K Consulting. Heather holds a MS in Library and Information Science from Simmons College in Boston as well as a BA from Virginia Tech.
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Real-time tools have sparked a new sociological phenomenon where nearly everyone is routinely reporting information. From audience members tweeting about meetings to individuals reporting on an illness, the collective result is a plethora of new possibilities for finding information. 
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