A fellow blog researcher has provided a handy list of her own favourite Internet and software productivity tools and has invited me (and some colleagues) to respond (one has already given her own list).To be honest though I think of myself as a near-compulsive collector of this kind of stuff, almost everything I use is already on one or the other of the two lists already. To their collection I would add:

• Netvouz, a more feature-packed way to share and store bookmarks than any of the others I have looked at including del.icio.us - my collection now numbers 6540 - the public version is here and my collection of bookmarks tagged “academic” may be worth browsing.
• Scopus from Elsevier is a better journal searching tool than Web of Knowledge with a much easier to use interface (though you need a subscription to be able to use either)
• A9 from Amazon is a handy way to access the ‘read inside the book’ features offered by Amazon with fewer clicks.
• I find Bloglines’ search seems to find links to blogs on a given subject area that other blog search engines miss but in truth I haven’t experimented extensively with the wide range of blog search tools available.
• I did the survey that formed part of my thesis work using QuestionPro which has lots of handy features and offers academics one free unlimited use survey (though eventually your access to the results will expire so don’t forget to download them to SPSS!).
• Go Digital and other “techtalk” podcasts (see the podcast section of the extensive resources along the right side of my personal blog). Primarily because they enable me to keep up with the tech news including blog-related stuff while I am doing the dishes or cycling around town rather than reading until my eyeballs bleed (though actually I do both!).
• On that resources list you will also find a number of free PC software tools like anti-virus software and a link to a blog posting I made, gathering all the useful cheap and free Mac software I use (academic and otherwise).
• Update: If you want to manage your thesis like you would a business project, you could use a web based project management tool like Basecamp or open source software like GanttProject 2
• Not strictly a research tool but something absolutely necessary to the future of my research nonetheless - Synk - a piece of Mac software which helps me back my entire hard drive to a separate drive which I keep at the LSE so if our flat burns to the ground with my laptop in it I will still have a thesis to complete!

I hope this collection of goodies helps someone out there…

The Chronicle alerts me to the work of Joseph R Ferrari, who has co-written a volume, “Counseling the Procrastinator in Academic Settings“. To my astonishment our library doesn’t have it yet (but I’ve put in a request). If you are interested there’s an online discussion with Ferrari starting 14:30 EST today.

I can’t resist a quote from near the bottom of the Chronicle’s article:

Karem Diaz, a professor of psychology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, has studied the behavior among Peruvians, whose expectations of timeliness tend to differ from those of Americans.

"In Peru we talk about the ‘Peruvian time,’" Ms. Diaz writes in an e-mail message. "If we are invited to a party at 7 p.m., it is rude to show on time. … It is even socially punished. Therefore, not presenting a paper on time is expected and forgiven."

Few Peruvians are familiar with the Spanish word "procrastinaci?n," which complicates discussions of the subject. "Some people think it is some sexual behavior when they hear the word," Ms. Diaz says.

How did I come across this? Well, I’m meeting my supervisor this afternoon so naturally I had to check the weblogs I normally read first (in this case Arts and Letters Daily).

Today I finally got down to work on writing up my first sketchy analysis of the interviews with personal webloggers which are at the heart of my thesis. My personal pattern with writing usually follows a fairly predictable path:

Stage 1: Avoidance
Just read one more book, brew one more cup of tea or, if necessary play a few more hours of the latest game before starting.
Stage 2: Paralysis
It’s all in my head - ish - but where do I begin?
Stage 3: Sketchy outline
A vague idea of how the piece might fit together - a few lines of text in outline form in Word.
Stage 4: Paralysis again
Hmm… This writing business is harder than I thought. Maybe I should try a little Stage 1 for a while longer. Eventually I progress to…
Stage 5: Write first draft
This I tend to do in a few long bursts of effort - at this point I become anti-social and absorbed until it is all written out.
Stage 6: Read it over
I’m not good at this - I can’t seem to spot the flaws even though they are obvious to anyone else (like most people…). So therefore…
Stage 7: Circulate to friends and unfortunate wife
A vital stage where they spot all the obvious flaws and infelicities. I really like getting feedback - even negative feedback. I think this is where my journalistic background helps - I’m used to being edited and recognise it normally improves my work.
Sage 8: Incorporate feedback.
Done!

At the moment I am at about stage 4.5 (as the chart below indicates)

177 / 3,000 (5.9%)

Update: Two days (and one bout of gastroenteritis) later

442 / 3,000 (13.0%)

Thanks to Prolurkr for using and thereby telling me about that little graphy-thing. Hopefully I will be driven to write in order to be able to show off my progress on it.

I have to have something put together by Monday. Please cheer me on! And please add yourselves to our world map so we can feel as if the whole world is watching.

Recently, major news networks CBS and News Corporation are expanding digitally. CBS?Digital announced plans for a major expansion of CBSnews.com, creating a 24-hour, multi-platform digital news network, bypassing cable television in favor of broadband, while News Corp bought Intermix for $580m. The latter owns and runs about 40 websites, but is best known for myspace.com, a blogging and networking site. The sites will be included in the newly formed Fox Interactive Media (FIM) that encompasses Fox.com, Foxsports.com, and Foxnews.com. With this acquisition it is hoped to double visitors to these site properties to 45m unique monthly visitors. Last September News Corp also acquired the online gaming company IGN and although IGN has not been profitable thus far, it mainly appeals to game-playing young males as such it is hoped to mesh well with MySpace.com and other FIM sites.

Were digital technologies such as the web previously seen as a direct threat or even competitor to various sectors ? especially media -, these (recent) examples show that the Internet presently is being incorporated into the calculus of major firms ? consolidating multiple platforms and entertainment divisions - that have recognized the potential riches to build or buy itself into an existing community such as Myspace.com.

I am a member of myspace.com and can’t say much has changed (yet), but it does give way to my PhD research that roots in?a community-based approach to knowledge management. I am particularly interested in exploring seeming changes in the relationship between the firm and the media marketplace in the digital era and the way that relationship impacts the firm?s ability to innovate, adapt, and learn.

I’m transcribing interviews with my London-based bloggers at the moment and no matter how many times it happens it still fills me with pleasure to hear the really interesting stuff come out as I listen effectively for the first time (during an interview itself I find I am only about 50% listening and 50% thinking about what to ask next or what I might have missed). But transcribing is also a gruelling discipline. I started transcribing one woman just now and was five minutes in thinking ’she’s interesting but she’s also speaking quite fast - I hope I won’t wear out before I finish’. Then I looked up at the audio track and saw that this interview is two hours long!

Most of them tend to be an hour to an hour and 20 minutes but that’s both the strength and the drawback to semi-structured interviewing. If you are getting good material you can keep it going but at some point you are going to end up having to transcribe and then analyse all that material which you tend to forget is much more time-consuming than the interview itself. This one interview will probably take me about eight solid hours just to transcribe (and since I can’t transcribe like that without copious breaks that probably means a few days’ work). Phew. Better get back to it…

To my mind the scary PhD moment #1 has to be the moment when you think "my research doesn’t add up to anything". I think I am past that - but closely following behind it has to be what I am facing at the moment - "my research was going to show something really interesting… but I just read this article which covers the ground already."

Fortunately, in the social sciences rather than the hard sciences you are unlikely to get a situation where your research has been completely superseded by someone else’s findings, but one of the things that can keep you going through the PhD process is the feeling that you have found some aspect of your field that nobody else has spotted.

In my case, my qualitative examination of weblogging has in part been motivated by a desire to problematise the early essentialist conceptions of weblogging that suggested "weblogs are all…" X, Y or Z. Then I finally got around to reading some of the articles in my ‘to read’ list - particularly Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog - part of the excellent Into the Blogosphere collection - and Composing the Self: Of Diaries and Lifelogs, both written last year and both providing just the kind of nuanced treatment of blogging and its motivations that I had immodestly hoped to pioneer. Oh well - back to standing on the shoulders of giants and pushing the boundaries of knowledge forward a few inches at a time…

“The phrase “It’s absolutely the same with me, I…” seems to be an approving echo, a way of continuing the other’s thought, but that is an illusion: in reality it is a brute revolt against a brutal violence, an effort to free our own ear from bondage and to occupy the enemy’s ear by force. Because all of man’s life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ear of others.

Kundera, Milan and A. Asher (1996) The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Faber and Faber, London.

There’s something about blogging in that aphorism, I’m sure…