ICTlogy

With almost everyone certifying the death of blogs, and while witnessing a massive migration towards the fertile and prosperous lands of social networking sites, emotion tears in my eyes won’t stop me from proudly shouting out loud that this personal research portal just turned six.

No, it does not seem like yesterday. A zillion things have passed since the first post in this blog and since the 5th anniversary:

• 786 blog posts, (), 825 comments () and 106 pages.
• A bibliography with 1404 works and 1094 authors ().
• 467 wiki entries (, ).
• 12 learning materials.

What about the events ()? Well, this part is certainly under revision. On the one hand, there are increasingly more people and more ways to share agendas about congresses, conferences, workshops or any kind of meeting than when I set that section up in early 2006. On the other hand, in the last semester we have been discussing with Christian Kreutz and the ICT4D.at team the possibility to team up and create a Google Calendar on ICT4D Events, but everyone (including me) is so busy… Time will tell.

Of course there still are Twitter, delicious, Google Shared, Google Calendar, Slideshare and YouTube to share content and my Lifestream/aggregator or my FriendFeed to rule them all.

Notwithstanding, the huge discovery this year has definitely been Twitter. From the several ways to use it, my main purposes are sharing links to resources, broadcasting “headlines” when attending events, and network, which despite all criticism, works pretty well for me.

Another thing worth noticing — and I thank Michel Bauwens for the idea — was collecting all the conference reviews (liveblogging) in a common place. It now features 280 articles coming from 52 conferences, which gives an idea of one of the main uses of the blog.

All that said, probably the most important thing during this last year was that I got my PhD. My thesis, Measuring digital development for policy-making: Models, stages, characteristics and causes got an “Excellent” from an international examining committee and will, hopefully, be soon uploaded to this site and join the 98 works that it already features amongst writings and speeches.

I’m writing this sitting at IDRC headquarters in Ottawa, just before meeting about their telecentre.org project. I can hardly find a better framework for “my” anniversary.

I want to end up this personal rant by thanking all the interesting people I constantly meet both online and offline. There is no other way I could have learnt so much — at least I guess I did… — without so many people sharing their ideas, data, information, knowledge and warmth. Thank you so much.

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