January can be a drag. The days are short and the temperatures are cold.

Things generally get better in February. After a busy autumn and pre-Christmas - complete with trips to the Middle East, Bangladesh and a couple of hops to Canada - 2010 has settled in quite nicely.

On the news front, it's been interesting: we've had a very anticlimactic sailing race (overshadowed by those pesky Olympics), a surprise escalation in Switzerland's spat with Libya and I took a closer look at whether Twitter is a useful tool for journalists.

Swiss billionaire Ernesto Bertarelli lost the America's Cup after years of legal wrangling. Bertarelli, a biotech scion, had matched his team, Alinghi, against Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison. Both teams probably spent hundreds of millions on massive multi-hull yachts, that as I wrote a couple of weeks ago "look like insects and are the size of apartment buildings". Really. They had 50-metre sails.

Bertarelli, unfortunately, sailed with a traditional sail. Ellison built a carbon fibre wing 80 percent longer than the one attached to a Boeing 747. It allowed BMW Oracle to decisively win two races in a row.

Switzerland has annoyed Italy by blocking certain Libyan citizens from obtaining Schengen visas. They've taken advantage of a solidarity clause, which allows them to essentially block people from travelling within the 26-nation bloc. Libyans can still enter Schengen countries but need individual visas.

The Italians are upset and say Switzerland has dragged them into a bilateral dispute. The Swiss aren't saying much at the moment.

I spoke with a Swiss journalist a week ago who took part in an experiment. She and four other journalists holed themselves up in a French farmhouse and tried to report the news using Facebook and Twitter. The results were less than successful.

Part of the problem, and I'm hardly the first to point this out, is that Twitter is saturated with useless information. Useful things do pop up but are buried under mountains of repetition and less-than-insightful commentary. One of the blogs I read likened the situation to pre-Google search, in that there's a lot out there but no means of sorting through everything.

I'm still undecided about how Twitter can help me. Breaking news, perhaps. And trends. But there's no clear indication to me that there's a lot of value, at least easily-accessible value, for people who want to find out useful things about the world.

One of the experts I spoke with suggested I take off my journalist hat when thinking about the value of information- think of it as a tool for people to keep track of what's important to the people who are important to them.

I'm reminded of the fact that I personally know few people I follow, or that follow me.