Search-within-Web 2.0

Here is an example I provide when giving a presentation on ways to find information:

For some consulting project we've been involved lately, I needed to find some information concerning Communities of Practice (CoP).

When starting with a topic such as CoP, it is a good idea to use sites such as answers.com or ask.com that give you a first insight as well as a query in Google : "define:community of practice" I also googled and started saving some relevant sites using my del.icio.us: my social bookmarking service. In parallel, I was able to check the popularity of these sites in the community of del.icio.us users: it is possible to see the number of people who saved a specific site.

I was able to see all the sites (hundreds) of the community that were saved with the same tag: Communityofpractice (in one word) as well as the most popular ones

A good thing is that it is possible to look at the comments/notes that people have made on this site. When seeing an interesting comment, I was then able to see the list of sites saved by this person. Actually, if this person has saved it and made some interesting comments, this makes it an interesting person to know, maybe an expert?

Today, I used for the first time lijit.com as you can see with the example of CoP. It looks promising.