I’ve floated this a couple of times before (eg Could Librarians Be Influential Friends? And Who Owns Your Search Persona? and Integrating Course Related Search and Bookmarking?), but with yet another announcement from Google about how they’re incorporating social signals into search rankings (Hide sites from anywhere in the world: “We’ve … started incorporating data about sites people have blocked into our general search ranking algorithms to help users find more high quality sites.”), I’m going to raise it again…

To what extent are course and subject librarians setting up course/subject personas that engage in recommending and sharing high quality links in an appropriate social content, and encouraging students to follow those accounts in order to benefit from personalisation of search results based on social signals?

Furthermore, to what extent might the development of search personas represent the creation of a “scholarly agent” that can be used to offer “search assist” to followers of that agent/persona?

I don’t find it that hard to imagine myself taking a course, following the course recommender on a social network (an account that might send out course related reminders as well as relevant links), with an icon depicting my university and the associated course, that on occasion appeared to “recommend” links to me when I was searching for topics relating to my course. (In the normal scheme of things, it wouldn’t actively be recommending links to me, of course. For that, I’d need to subscribe to something like Subscribed Links, as mentioned in Integrating Course Related Search and Bookmarking?.)