Is there anybody out there? Searching the social space for signs of intelligence

For much of the the last century, our only measurement of the impact of scholarly research has been through the counting and analysis of citation: one authoring researcher acknowledging the contribution of another authoring researcher.

Significant, certainly, given these caveats, but in a wider social context citation analysis begins to look like an edge case. Can the measurement of sharing on social networks provide a wider view of how research is consumed in society, or is it all chatter and noise – and how do we detect the conversations of true significance?