I’m off for my summer vacation after a very poor decision to work 8 months straight without a break.I was just reviewing with a colleague all of the various research and overview presentations I assembled during this period. Essentially my hard drive now is a giant cache of research content including many presentations on the digital media and social media landscape across various verticals like music, movies, sports, television, branded entertainment, etc. A lot of friends ask me what I do with my time at Cisco, and that’s a big part ; assembling presentations that inform our Cisco Media Solutions Group on how media and entertainment industry is evolving given new digital and social media platforms. Obviously these platforms are more popular with consumers than ever before ; For instance regarding social media platforms, I saw this week a chart which illustrates Facebook now topping email as a content sharing tool. Then my friends go on to ask me if I can share what I have learned about digital media / social media trends with them and maybe even a wider audience. Unfortunately, I usually can not -- the presentations I create for our team are not meant for public consumption. Also I get to access reports like PriceWaterhouseCoopers excellent Media and Entertainment forecast, which is over 600 pages and is certainly not publicly available without purchase.So I’m glad to see though over at our page for Cisco Eos, that there is a growing public library of content related to digital media / social media trends and best practices which you can access by clicking this link. For instance, I just finished reading the white paper available at the Cisco Eos page on collaborative filtering (definition here) ; the paper reviews how collaborative filtering plays an important role in allowing media and entertainment companies to recommend relevant content to you -- click here for that report. There is another white paper on the Cisco Eos site titled ‘Identity versus Reputation’. I haven’t read it just yet -- but it talks about how users reveal and describe themselves on social networks, and how to maintain a relative level of user privacy on social media sites. For my friends and colleagues who are interested in keeping up with the digital media industry and reading presentations and reports, there are still a lot of different directions I can point them in.One site for trend research I recommend highly is the ‘Center for Media Research’ which you can reach by clicking this link.Sometimes, I just stumble across interesting reports and presentations, and I will try and share them on this blog as I come across them. A report from the digital marketing agency Razorfish out this week details the importance of social media in marketing campaigns. The Razorfish report on social media and marketing can be accessed here. The report is displayed in an interesting online format -- it even makes page turning sounds when you click to the next page.Slideshare.net is an amazing site I try to check in on weekly. I usually visit the link that says ‘Top Presentations’ to see what’s popular that week. The Slideshare.net site allows for users to upload their powerpoint, PDF and other presentation formats and then share them with a large audience. I find in the ‘Top Presentations’ area of Slideshare.net you can often find one or two new digital / social media presentations a week. Then what is cool is you can embed the content on your own page or site and share. For instance, I searched “social media” on Slideshare.net and found some good generic overview presentations like the following ones I embedded below.Know of any good trend pieces we should be checking out? Please let us know in the comments section following.