Enthralled by the power of online social networking and search engines to advance my research projects and feed my insatiable appetite for information, I was under the impression that things were more or less under control. I was wrong.

It began innocently, with tentative explorations into Twitter feeds and Facebook pages from professional organizations, then expanded into LinkedIn. Whenever I find a new article of interest to my friends and colleagues, my instinct is to share with them, in the hope that they will learn from it and possibly use it in their work.

As a scientist doing research in the “pre-internet” era, I adapted to reading typically 20 to 40 different journals per week. But this is a bit much.

The question is, what’s the best way to share? Obvious choices are Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit – you see where this is going. How can one person possibly monitor all of these sites? I know that sites such as Tumblr and FourSquare are emerging as “aggregator” sites.

Then, I stumbled onto “AddThis,” finding that I had 334 choices of how to share information. So, dear readers, I need help. Really.