ICTlogy

This personal research portal just turned five. Five years that turned it from a simple blog to the platform per excellence where to write out thoughts, take down notes, collect lists of places and things, gather people and their works, keep track of some events and, of course, maintain a live CV, becoming, the whole thing, part of my virtual identity or part of my presence on the Net.

Some numbers:

• 663 blog posts () and 570 comments ().
• A bibliography with 1172 works and 924 authors ().
• 394 wiki entries (, ).
• 88 events (), a list/calendar of events (congresses, conferences, symposia, etc.).
• 11 learning materials.

In these last times of web 2.0 fever, I’ve been using some other external services, with variable intensity:

• Slideshare, which now features 19 slideshows
• Delicious, collecting now 183 bookmarks and yet to find its specific use. So far, two main uses: collections of bookmarks to prepare speeches; way to send bookmarks to other websites, by tagging them with an agreed tag (e.g. everything I tag with “IDP” — standing for Internet, Dret and Politics — goes to my department’s intrablog)
• Twitter, with 83 updates, and turning itself into a sort of mix between a linkblog and a nanoblog (i.e. a place to put the links I want to let other people know, but that, for any reason, will not be on the blog, bibliography, wiki or whatever)
• Dopplr, to show where in the World I am (and see where other friends and colleagues are)
• Sweetcron, to gather all this mess in a common place

Last, but not least, two upgrades I’m specially proud of are:

• Being able to present all my works () — speeches, seminars, articles, book chapters, etc. — independently from the rest of the bibliography, but using the same database, so to keep everything up-to-date with minimum effort.
• Put up the website in Catalan and in Spanish, even if some more dynamic places (e.g. the blog) keep English as a main language

Lotta work? Not really. Or, actually, yes, a lot of work, but the work had to be done anyway: impart seminars whose presentations I had to prepare anyway, write articles whose bibliographies I had to collect anyway, take down notes which I would have anyway… It’s actually a hell of reporting, not a lot of work, the key being to make it mainstream in your daily workflow:

• I blog, edit the wiki, twit, bookmark, instead of using notebooks, sticky notes or napkins that I will loose or won’t be able to easily search and retrieve: everything in the same place and digitized
• I use a bibliography manager, not a folder in my hard drive, or a spreadsheet, or just a text document: i.e. I use a database and one that works online
• I keep the interesting events in another blog, so I can realize the ones that have several editions and prepare my attendance to them or to be aware of upcoming calls for papers
• I take really seriously my presence on the Net: I absolutely believe that you and what you do have to be digitized and online to matter, specially if you’re a knowledge worker. Any effort to do so will always pay back.

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