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The second of Microsoft’s Ignite Your Career Webcasts focused on “Discovering Your Trusted Resources,” which involved a great discussion on blogs, Twitter and crowdsourcing. If you listened carefully, though, we were really talking about highly reputable people whose opinions matter.

As I said in my closing remarks, I think the technologies and tools just provide ways to connect to those people. It was only afterwards that I realize we don’t really use trust around resources in IT that much. Look at your browser’s toolbar. When you find a Web site you like, you organize it under something called “Favourites.” If we used the word “Trusted” instead, how would that change what we put under there?

I think “trusted” to an IT professional means that the resource in question will be honest. I think it means that the information conveyed by that resource will be based on fact, and has a proven track record of solving problems or clarifying important issues. It also means that something about that resource sets it apart from all the other resources out that focusing on the same topic or issue, whether it be online, at an event or someone in the office down the hall. A trusted resource is often discovered by accident but validated with careful, time-consuming evaluation.

We focused a lot on the online tools in the Webcast, but I realized later that no one mentioned their staff as a trusted resource. This is the one we actually have the power to influence, develop and turn into the kind of resources trusted by others as well. No one mentioned their boss, but ideally our managers should be trusted resources that inspire us and guide us, particularly during these difficult economic times. No one mentioned their customers – the people who not only buy things but give us valuable feedback about what works and what doesn’t, and shape so much of our strategies.

It says something about the age we live in that no one mentioned the media, which may not have the self-interest of bloggers or Twitterati but who strive to make sense of our world in whatever vehicle an audience chooses – broadcasting, print, online or multimedia. This is something our media brands try to do, I guarantee you.

The ultimate trusted resource? Our memories. Every project we worked on, every client we meet, every mistake we make is stored in the one repository that never gets upgraded but is configured exactly as it should be. More than anything we bookmark, set up a feed for or attend, we tap into our memories and often use them as the basis for the most important decisions. Using your memory effectively – as a real resource – is what separates successful people from the failures. Trust me.

Like many entrepreneurs conducting business over the Web, Sara Puls has fallen into a social networking sinkhole.

Puls help non-profits and government agencies create their own online communities through her Milwaukee Web development company, Involvenet. She also oversees an online community for pet lovers through a second online business, BrewCityTails.com.

To make her businesses work, Puls participates in social networking.

She uses Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, the most popular social networking sites for business; chats regularly on Gmail; and uses MySpace to stay in touch with a niece in Oklahoma.

“Some of the relationships I’ve made have led to real opportunities to make money,” Puls said.

The trouble is her social networking endeavors were causing Puls to be less productive and took away time from family, friends and her own interests.

“Eight hours would go by and I would only end up doing two hours of work. I said, ‘Wow, I’ve got to figure out a way to manage this,’ ” Puls said.

To remedy the problem, she sets a timer for 30 to 60 minutes, at which time she breaks from her work to tend to her social networks. After 15 minutes, she resumes working.

Social networking is gradually taking over our lives. This is supported by a recent survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that shows the number of adult Internet users who have a profile on a social networking site has quadrupled in the last four years, from 8% in 2005 to 35% today. Not surprisingly, a Nielsen Online study shows that social networking is more popular than e-mail.

Time management is becoming a huge problem for Americans consumed by social networking, e-mail, blogs, RSS feeds, and other tools in the expanding Internet world.

“You can’t escape it,” says Rieva Lesonsky, a national small-business expert and former editor of Entrepreneur Magazine. “We now have all this info available that we used to have to go out and pay a consultant for.”

While social networking can be a useful tool for building your brand and making business connections, it’s easy to lose sight of the business reasons for social networking, said David Allen, author of “Getting Things Done,” “Ready for Anything” and “Making It All Work.”

An expert on personal and organizational productivity, Allen recommends that you define your commitments and manage your time accordingly.

The average person has 30 to 100 projects going at one time, he says. With time spent on social networks, researching on the Web, reading blogs and checking e-mail, it’s becoming more difficult to tend to real-life responsibilities.

“Once a week, step back and look at the commitments in your life,” Allen says. “If you find yourself too distracted, you have to decide how important is this, and how much of my life and attention does it deserve?”

Even veteran entrepreneurs, like Nancy Cavanaugh of Wauwatosa, struggle to stay on task in the age of social media.

Cavanaugh is president of Cavanaugh Interactive, a Web and print design firm she launched in 1982.

She enlisted the help of a business coach to help her better manage her time online. One important lesson she learned: develop a strategy and categorize each of your social networks in terms of their importance and what you want to accomplish.

“If you don’t sit down and think about your priorities and how you’re going to handle your social networking, it can be very quickly overwhelming and seemingly unmanageable,” said Cavanaugh, who is on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Users of social networking site Twitter met at the New Continental Bar, South Meadow Lane, with wi-fi enabled laptops and mobile phones to muse over a set topic.

The question on everyone’s lips for the Preston tweet-up on Wednesday evening was ‘How can the web can be used in Preston Guild 2012?’.

Ideas included big screens around the city for twitter feeds to be screened on, live feedback during Guild events and free Internet access.

Ruby gem said: “Utilise the radio and LEP to get the older folk involved in web.” And Phpcodemonkey suggested: “Intro taster sessions from the ‘twitterati’ for the uninitiated.”

Another idea was to set up a councillor on the Guild committee with a Twitter account.

Twitter has an estimated 55 million monthly users around the world and famous tweeters include Barack Obama, Britney Spears, Jonathan Ross and Stephen Fry.

For over two months, President Barack Obama’s Twitter account had laid dormant. After election day, and especially after Jan. 19, the Tweets petered out as he (presumably) became occupied with other things (unlike other leaders). But yesterday Obama tweeted once more.

Yesterday’s Tweet was an invitation for the American people to submit questions, either via text or video, for his online townhall meeting today, or vote on which ones they think should be asked. By the time voting closed today at 9:30 a.m., 91,795 people had submitted 103,221 questions, and 3,575,622 votes had been cast.

Obama, who is the third most popular member of the “Twitterati” — trailing only CNN and Britney Spears in number of Twitter Followers (but, thankfully, ahead of Ashton Kutcher) — will answer the most popular questions at the conference, which will be streamed live at 11:30 a.m. EST on the White House Website.

“It’s a way for the president to do what he enjoys doing out on the road, but saves on gas,” press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters yesterday.

“Does thou love life? Then do not squander time; for that’s the stuff life is made of.” Benjamin Franklin wrote those words some 250 years before we were faced with the distraction and demands of a sinking economy, the Internet, e-mail, and and social networking, yet they have greater resonance than ever. BusinessWeek.com’s John Byrne, Patricia O’Connell and Shirley Brady asked their followers on Twitter for their best time management tips, and we’re re-tweeting the best of the bunch. Thanks to everyone who contributed, and if you’re on Twitter please keep sharing tips to #timetips.

Back in the 1980s, when I worked in Silicon Valley, I hung out with a lot of brilliant people, people who went on to become millionaires, whose companies became household names. And one of the things I found out is that brilliant people tend to be brilliant in a lot of things at once. The guy who wrote the software that lets PCs link to the Internet was also an inventive cook (I particularly fondly remember his hot and sour matzoh ball soup). The woman who wrote a seminal series of books explaining the new technology, it turned out, could explain everything. The woman who helped design Microsoft Office is now a circus aerialist. And so on.

An evening that can best be described as “geek performance art” demonstrated just how many people there are like that in Idaho.

A guy I quote a lot, Richard Florida, described in 2002 what he called the ”creative class.” “If you are a scientist or engineer, an architect or designer, a writer, artist, or musician, or if you use your creativity as a key factor in your work in business, education, health care, law or some other profession, you are a member.” About 30 percent of people these days fall into that category, he said.

Members of the creative class traffic in ideas, and they don’t operate in functional silos, meaning they can’t necessarily be described as programmers, writers, web designers, marketers, or state employees. They fit multiple categories, or transcend them.

This is where Ignite comes in.

Ignite is sort of a syndicated performance-art-in-a-box group. It captures the “Hey, my mom’s got a barn!” inside a lot of people and helps provide a way to focus it and use it. It’s like a company team-building exercise for people who don’t work in the same company—at least, not yet.

“Ignite captures the best of geek culture in a series of five-minute speed presentations on topics ranging from The Best Way to Buy a Car to Hacking Chocolate,” explains the website. “Imagine that you’re on stage in front of an audience of hundreds of people, doing a five-minute presentation using a slide deck that auto-forwards every 15 seconds, whether you’re ready or not. What would you do? What would you say?”

Ignite started in Seattle in 2006, and since then has been held in a number of cities worldwide. Shows are currently being held in Reno, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Bloomington, Orlando, Denver, Salt Lake City, and a variety of Australian cities.

Tonight was Boise‘s turn, bringing together presenters from “business, art, technology, government and academia.” Twitter (#igniteboise) and Facebook have been burning up for weeks talking about it, and 600 (free) tickets were snapped up in no time. While newspaper articles this week urged people to attend tonight, they were definitely, and literally, an afterthought, admitted half an hour after people who’d already obtained tickets online.

I suspect a lot of attendees didn’t know their intellectual property attorney was also an expert on the history of bicycles, nor that their state government administrator was an expert on the business lessons to be drawn from Star Wars.  I also expect most attendees will never again use “hey” as the subject line of an email message, ask a young woman when she’s planning to get married or have a baby, or think about Paul Revere in quite the same way again. (They’re not up yet, but videos of the presentations are supposed to be available.)

But the most important part of the evening wasn’t the scheduled events, but simply the effect of throwing approximately 750 brilliant people into a room together and letting them interact. A number of the presentations, including the concluding one, talked about entrepreneurship and making ideas reality, and the event was an orgy of networking and elevator presentations as people introduced themselves to their neighbors and tried to figure out how their specialties could work together.

What is the gestation period of an idea?  In a few months we’ll know.

John Mayer has distanced himself from the twitterati.

Despite, being a twitterer himself, the former boyfriend of Jennifer Aniston described the medium as “inherently silly”.

It has been reported that John’s constant twittering was a contributing factor to the couple’s break up.