Interesting stuff, this social media. Being someone who uses Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Blogger (obviously) and is famed for never being further than 2cm away from his mobile phone (well the football results are important!), i never realised how much more social media could offer for a research students. Aside from this self-reflective blog and my use of Twitter as a 'lurking' mechanism that keeps me in touch with the really clever people and what they're thinking and writing, there is a certain etiquette, or so i thought, about HOW MUCH you should share of your research. I'm not planning to get into a big debate about intellectual property rights and so on, but since 'PhD research' and 'originality' are supposed to be close bed-fellows, it does make you wonder where the boundaries might exist between safeguarding your own research career and sharing with and learning from others.
So anyway, what i learned yesterday thanks to one of those Clever Social Media People, is that this sort of technology can help to define your research identity and build your own research brand. And there are a million other really useful social media tools beyond the well-known multi-national FTSE100/Fortune500/BlueChips, such as Delicious (for creating index tags, useful for keeping track on key areas of the literature), Wordle (for word clouds and seeing prominent research themes) and Hashtags.org that have amazing potential for being useful to researchers.
So anyway, what i learned yesterday thanks to one of those Clever Social Media People, is that this sort of technology can help to define your research identity and build your own research brand. And there are a million other really useful social media tools beyond the well-known multi-national FTSE100/Fortune500/BlueChips, such as Delicious (for creating index tags, useful for keeping track on key areas of the literature), Wordle (for word clouds and seeing prominent research themes) and Hashtags.org that have amazing potential for being useful to researchers.
BUT...and there's always a but, how do we engage with all of this whilst we're supposed to getting on with our research and with those aforementioned IPR issues? I know 'sharing' is the new socialising, but as we know from the music industry's fight with filesharers and how closely guarded academic publishing is, there is money to be made from all this - and yes, potentially, from that very research we are all doing right now. And if not cold hard cash, then at least individual and institutional prestige, reputation and more interesting work awaits those that 'know things'.
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