We regularly connect with people online. We keep in touch. We make new friends. But can we actually learn anything that’s professionally useful? Is it possible for our online networks, professional or personal, to help us become smarter people and more effective professionals with some level of certain regularity? Instead of stumbling across the occasional jewel, is there a way to come close to a guarantee?

Consider this. Subject matter experts around the world are already using social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious to gather, screen, categorize and share relevant, insightful content. Prominent bloggers and Twitterers, like Guy Kawasaki, spend hours each day scouring the internet and linking to remarkably valuable content on their blogs and twitter feeds. And some companies are using Yammer to stream relevant news and other materials to employees on their closed internal networks. And let’s not forget powerful news aggregators like Google Reader that can put thousands of information sources at our fingertips and let us search all that content for even the most obscure word or phrase.

So can a company leverage all the knowledge of employees and the content a global workforce consumes each and every day, not to mention derive value from the time they spend doing so while on the clock, to build massive, searchable, real-time resource libraries? We think the answer is yes.

To give a bit of context, consider these statistics from a handful of our staff here at PulsePoint Group. Over a recent 30-day period, a sampling of five employees read nearly 14k pieces of content online in their Google Readers alone. They then shared 122 pieces with their colleagues inside the company. This information discovery and sharing (and especially the filtering that culled a massive amount of data into a manageable 122 pieces of content) has immense value for each individual, but that’s only a piece of the story. Perhaps the bigger (and more elusive) payoff is in leveraging the time spent culling, categorizing and prioritizing all that information, which is likely happening already in one form or another, for the advancement of the entire group.

And if the results are profound for a sample of five, imagine the exponential growth in awareness, knowledge and professional development you might see at an organization of 100 or 1,000, or 100,000. And there’s an obvious next step here: transition from the passive consumption of knowledge to the active (or interactive) creation of it through informed co-creation, crowdsourcing and the like (but that’s a post for another day).

And if you’re worried about cost (and who isn’t right now) there are free tools (Google Reader is a favorite) practically everywhere you turn that you can try within your organization either wide or in a small, pilot program. And since communications and marketing folks are notoriously voracious when it comes to news anyway, why not try to capitalize on the time they’re already spending? For free.