This got me to thinking about the types of people I connect to on each of these social media networking sites. In my eyes this blog serves a different purpose and has a separate target audience to my Linkedin or Facebook profiles.

In light of this I’m giving a rundown of the groups and categories of people I connect to via each of these sites and their envisioned usage in my eyes.

Blog

The hub of this particular Chris Miller on the web. It’s where you’ll be able to find out about who I am and what I’m up to. From here you can branch out onto each of the social media sites I’m to be found on where more information in each of their specific focuses can be found.

Although technically not a social site it does mark the start of a web of profiles on various other sites as well as providing a blogroll (which is terminally out of date) of other people and sites I follow on the web.

• My blog is for: me to post random nonsense and technical articles to.
• My blog connects me to: other sites I syndicate.

Delicious

I’m terrible at using Delicious for bookmarking as well as bookmarking things locally. I tend to read an article that’s relevant to the thoughts running around my head at a particular moment then move on, forever forgetting said article (much trolling of web history ensues at a later date).

Although this site allows connections to other people I’ve shunned away from doing so. Feeds from the likes of Reddit and the BBC combined with Twitter tends to keep me up to date with any relevant articles flying around.

• Delicious is for: posting links to interesting/relevant/funny articles and categorising/tagging them.
• Delicious connects me to: nobody at the moment.

Facebook

Facebook is the only site in this list that I’d truly describe as a social media site. By this I mean that it serves no other purpose than to be a platform to connect and keep-in-touch with people I know socially. All the other sites in this list are quite focused in their purpose.

In light of this, Facebook is where most of the connecting comes into play for me. I have friends on Facebook from various facets of my life: school, university, work and other social situations. The one thing that sets Facebook apart from most of these other sites is that anyone I am friends with I have actually met, interacted with and have subsequently added as a friend.

The site itself is easy to use, little or no expertise is required to set up an account and start connecting with friends. There are various ‘applications’ to be added, groups to be joined, photos to be looked at… essentially it’s a procrastinators wet dream. This of course means it has no real focus or goal for me other than being stayintouchwithpeople.com.

• Facebook is for: everyone! Staying in contact with people I know socially.
• Facebook connects me to: pretty much everyone I know personally.

Flickr

Flickr, certainly for me, started out as a tool for online photo storage and organisation. I jumped on Flickr not long after it started up, before those pesky Yahoo! logins, and a tool was certainly what I was using it solely for.

Over time as the site developed and the whole social media thing took off Flickr added some nice functionality for discovering other people and building a photography community.

Connections I have via Flickr tend to be people I know with a smattering of people who have some interesting photos up. For the most part I find Flickr a useful tool for distributing photos onto other social media sites and it serves as an online repository of all my photos. That said however, it does make it very easy to keep up-to-date with photos of peers and colleagues who have a ton more photography skill than I (particularly Chris Hannah, Jim Moore, Steve Strowes and Dean Wright being of note).

• Flickr is for: hosting, organising and sharing my photos online.
• Flickr connects me to: people I know and other Flickr users with interesting posts.

Last.fm

I think I initially signed up to Last.fm just to see what it was, what it offered and to see if it’d be useful. Since then I’ve been off and on using the service to capture the tracks I’ve been listening to with iTunes. That is until recently with the switch for most of my music listening to Spotify which offers integrated Last.fm scrobbling.

The stats over time from tracks you’ve listened to are interesting and the music recommendations can be good especially if, like me, you generally don’t listen to music that’s very recent. I tend to view this more like I did Flickr initially, as a tool to draw information into other social media sites. That being said, I do have friends added on the site. The friends I have added tend to be actual friends I know and have somewhat similar music tastes to.

• Last.fm is for: collecting information about my music listening trends and sharing them on other sites.
• Last.fm connects me to: friends I know with similar music tastes.

Linkedin

By far the most professionally oriented of any of the sites listed here and again on my part initially used as a tool rather than a networking site. Linkedin for me initially was a convenient way of creating an online, plain and simple CV which could be easily updated and seed any full written CVs I’d need to write.

The focus of this site has shifted quite dramatically for me over time, I view this site as more of a networking site than I did previously. Now it provides a forum for me to stay contacted with people I’ve worked and studied with, without as many social faux pas such like drunken photographs or questionable music tastes. Ok they’re not hard to find, but the site does provide a professional front for me.

As I’ve said above, the people I connect with on Linkedin are those I’ve previously worked and studied with, aside from a few recruitment agencies who try and cram job offers down your throat (can’t hurt can it?).

• Linkedin is for: providing a professional front.
• Linkedin connects me to: those people who have had the privilege of working or studying with me.

Twitter

Twitter in my eyes is by far the most loosely defined group of people I follow. I view Twitter as a pick-it-up put-it-down source of random pieces of information, friend status updates and broadcasts from various companies.

My follow list generally reflects this. I follow people I know as a means of staying up-to-date with them; companies whose services I use as well as updates on various pieces of software I utilise on a daily basis; and pretty much anyone who posts something interesting or funny. So the list of Twitter updates I see in my client varies between lunch orders, company/software bulletins, 160 character quips and interesting links.

Twitter is by far the social media service that I read and post to most often, though I tend to skim over a lot of tweets to find those that are relevant or interesting to me.

• Twitter is for: quickly posting interesting links, thoughts, lazy discussions, product updates… disseminating information.
• Twitter connects me to: absolutely anyone, friends are a given but other than that, anything that interests me.

So that’s my rundown of the social media sites you’ll see me on and my usage of and connectivity on them. I’d assume most people use each of these sites in a similar manner (barring Twitter which has various marketing and advertising uses that I’m not really clued up on). Any other uses or different perspectives are welcomed.
- Chris

After hours of painful searching this evening I managed to decided upon using the Plainscape theme. I may well configure it slightly for this blog, I may even go as far as to add a header image, but let’s not get too adventurous!

So for the foreseeable future this blog will look nice, plain and simple (it’ll probably change when I get bored but it gives me something to blog about!).
- Chris

A lot has happened in this time, I’ve finished my exams. Most of which went relatively well, barring of course the Grid Computing exam which was always going to be a wildcard. I’m now officially finished University as well after handing in my research dissertation last Monday. All-in-all it went well, however running out of time towards the end, my personal calling card, did mean that the report tends to tapper off in quality towards the final sections – but at least it’s finished.

Since finishing I’ve been looking after the pub at home as my parents were on holiday and returned yesterday. Other than that I’ve been sitting here at my computer playing World of Warcraft a hell of a lot, watching the majority of the Friends seasons on DVD and over the past two days watching Supernatural season one on DVD as well.

After only a week and a half of freedom from University I’m starting to feel lost as there’s no paticular direction to my life just now. I’m hoping to start a PhD next year but that all depends upon a funding grant from the EPSRC, so I’m currently caught in limbo between either finding a real job or a filler one until I hear for sure about the funding.

Procrastinating isn’t half as fun as it is when you’re meant to be doing something else. Sitting playing WoW doesn’t appeal as much now as it did when I had work which I was supposed to be doing at the time. Doing things you do to “take a break” from something doesn’t appeal when the thing you’re doing is actually the thing you’re taking a break from [some punctuation was harmed in the making of this sentance].

Other than playing world of warcraft and starting to keep a World of Warcraft blog to track your progress in the game (killer of a good few hours that could’ve been used for work), watching DVDs and playing cards I’ve not done anything. It sounds great but not doing anything when there’s nothing to do is pretty damn boring.

Other than doing nothing I’ve also managed to break my new XDA Exec which is currently en-route to O2 who will be replacing it with a new unit. Somehow whilst trying to flash the new WM5 version onto the device it seems to have deleted the original version, as expected, but not written the new version, not as expected. This means that when I did a hard reset on the device to update the OS there was nothing there to install and the device would just hang at an O2 splash screen. After some searching on the web and trying some wierd fixes nothing worked so it was on to O2 who asked me to send the device to them.

There’s nothing much left to add really, suppose I’d best start looking for a job to fill in the time between watching DVDs, playing World of Warcraft and sleeping; but I’ll get around to that later as it’s Friday night and I can hear a game of cards a-calling me from the pub…
- Chris

Research Journal

On the MSc course at Glasgow we have all been asked to buy a hardback ledger in which we are to keep a diary of what we are doing in our research. That’s fine, but I’m a computing scientist, writing things down goes against the grain – I want a computing related solution to this problem.

After a while contemplating I concluded that alternatives to having a hardback book would be:

1. blogging software (i.e. WordPress)
2. wiki software (i.e. MediaWiki)

Blogs

Blogs lend themselves to chronological recording of data, after-all they are in necessity online diaries. Blogs can be a simple way to record ideas, dates of events and so on.

Wikis

Wikis, although not strictly ordering entries by time and date, allow for very easy addition and formatting of new content. Most wikis will allow you to create categorised or special pages. For example in MediaWiki pages can be prefixed when naming them, this can be used to categorise the pages.

Combinations

Both blogging software and wikis can be used in combination of course, blogs giving the chronological progression between different research papers and wikis showing the resulting thoughts, summaries and so on that you generate.

Why do it?

Keeping a digital version of this information means we don’t have any issue with loosing the research journal or spilling coffee over it (note: don’t spill coffee over your computer either).

Project co-ordinators can see how you are progressing, comment on what they think of your research via comment mechanisms in a blog and talk/discuss pages on a wiki.

Collaborations

Online versions of research journals can help in collaborative projects – the research journal becomes a platform for collective reasoning, interaction, and the sharing of ideas.

If you don’t want to do it electronically

The real lesson to take away from this post is that a research journal is a good thing to have, be it a bound book, wiki, blog or whatever combination.

My Wiki usage

I am currently doing research on my project for the year, which is what sparked this article, SonG. For the project I use a wiki to manage my research, post ideas, and transcribe meeting minutes to mention a few things. I thought it may be useful to share the page title formats I use for doing so.

Meetings:

• Index: Meetings
• Meeting: Meeting:[YYYY][MM][DD]
• YYYY = year, MM = month and DD = day

Papers:

• Index: Papers
• Paper: Paper:[KEY]
• KEY = the bibliography key for the paper

Project specific:

• Title: [Project]:[Title]
• I.e. SonG:Links

I hope this is useful to anyone doing a project involving any type of research, although this type of journal is not restricted to only research based projects.

- Chris