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.

Three years ago I set up ICT4D Courses, a repository where I would be uploading learning materials related to training courses in the field of ICT4D.

After that time, the repository has not grown at all — it was somehow part of my MPhil’s dissertation.

On the other hand, I had recently created ICTlogy Learning Materials Series, a place where to upload the learning materials that I had created.

Now, it does not make sense to be having two different places for the same thing: open educational resources, so I merged them into one. The URLs have not changed, just the respository, that now holds everything concerning open educational resources:

You’ll see it missing from the top menu, but you can always access it at the Bibliography, and then go to Types of Works and Learning Materials.

Some people now and then ask how I do maintain my bibliography and how do I integrate it with the blog and the rest of the site.

My bibliography runs with BibCiter, a PHP+MySQL (like WordPress) bibliographic manager that just some weeks ago had its version 1.0 released.

The new version 1.1 now supports the use of a WordPress plugin that makes it really easy to embed citations in your WordPress blog. See, for instance, the end of this page or this other page to see an example of its applications.

The full integration of WordPress + BibCiter + Mediawiki is not difficult, but it is neither a minor issue, as it requires some coding, as each and every WordPress theme, even if similar, works in different ways.

And seems to be working quite fine has an error as it does not find some deprecated tables (e.g. post2cat) when autosaving. Going to try to fix it.

Tag adding now added to the platform — and not as a plugin.

Please let me know if anything is not working fine. Thank you.

Almost one year ago, I wrote about ICT4D Bibliography, the then new section of my personal research portal. It was published with an application I coded on my own, BibCiter, to replace the MS Access I had been using.

I began coding in Summer 2005 and after Christmas 2005, I could start using it for my own needs, as you could see. A year has passed and now I’m glad to announce that BibCiter has been fixed and enhanced and released as free software under a GPL v2 license. The baby is still too young to be a stable 1.0 version, so keep in mind that there are serious reasons for being 0.9 beta. Nonetheless, BibCiter [babe sitter] is fully functional and “only” lacks a good handbook.

Feel free to write back and send any comments… and, of course, feel free to install it!

More info

• BibCiter site.
• BibCiter blog, with news about releases, bugs, and so.
• BibCiter Codex, the handbook wiki.
• BibCiter Demo, an installation you can log in as administrator and see the “hidden” parts of the creature.
• ICT4D Bibliography, my BibCiter powered bibliographic collection about Information and Communication Technologies for Development

I want to hearty thank …dilluns… for her endless patience during endless PHP-MySQL sessions :*

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