Twitter

Am I going to regret this? I have singed up for Twitter. As if there weren't enough online services to keep updating...
Find me at @arjibarj

Construction Management and Economics

There are so many networking tools to choose from these days, it is bewildering. I have been in Facebook for a long time, since very early in its life, and it is best for keeping up with family and friends, I have decided. I tried to set up a Facebook page for the journal, Construction Management and Economics, but the nature of FB interaction seemed to trivialize everything. Too many people simply clicked that they "Liked" it, and moved on. There was no sense of engagement. So now I am trying to disengage gracefully without losing those people who liked that kind of connection.

Episode 2 in trying to get a Social Networking is to set up a WordPress blog kind of forum. This looks very nice and was relatively easy to configure so that it looks professional and enables the kind of content that I had in mind - forthcoming events (including those that do not get published in the list in the journal), free download papers (one per issue), ideas and suggestions for improving the quality of submitted papers and of reviews, and so on. Much of this material has already appeared here in Blogspot, so there is a danger of recycling old stuff. On the other hand, there is a danger that the material is too dissipated across different sites, so I need to collect it in a more focused way.

One interesting thing that worries me is how little people really engage with these things. After a couple of weeks of the WordPress site being live, only a handful of people have signed up to receive updates from the site, despite the number of people looking at the site being in the hundreds. I have received encouraging emails from colleagues who have browsed it and see it as valuable, but they have not signed up to have current content pushed to their email boxes. WordPress will compile a weekly digest, but few people seem to want to make this tiny level of commitment. Also, there is only one post, so far, from someone other than me. What is holding people back? Why so shy?

If you are interested in encouraging sites like the new WordPress site, I think you should take part. Think about it; have a look and see what you can contribute. Even if you simply sign up for email updates, it will make it seem more worthwhile.

I guess, though, that if you are already connected to me through LinkedIn or Facebook, you will already get notifications every time anything is posted there, so perhaps I am worrying too much! LinkedIn, particularly, should help to garner a lot more interest in the journal. Yesterday I passed the threshold of being connected to 1000 contacts in LinkedIn, so that means that everything I post in WordPress is immediately notified to all of those people. Managing these things requires a bit of attention, but hopefully not too much. It is very telling that I could only set all this up in August, when things in the day-job are slightly quieter.

And what are we to make of Google+? Yet another social networking opportunity. Do we really need another one?

Networking on the web

There is a growing number of tools for networking on the web. Facebook is great for social networking, but it can be very distracting and difficult to manage. There are so many facets to it that it is probably inappropriate for direct communication focused on scientific exchanges. Indeed, there is a group in Facebook for construction management researchers. But it may make you despair of the human condition, because it is filled with trivial requests from people who are not researchers asking questions of an entirely random nature and with no sense of who their questions are directed at. It is pretty hopeless and probably needs to be closed down, yet there are more than 500 members on it from all over the world. Most of them just seem desperate to find someone to talk to, or seek a forum for advertising their wares. It fails where other tools succeed.

In our field, probably the most successful tool to date is the Co-operative Network for Building Researchers (CNBR). This has been going for 21 years and has more than 2500 members globally. It is only an email network, but it is really successful and enables some very useful discussions. It also enables unavoidable chit-chat and distractions, but not too much.

There are plenty of other places where we can develop networks, if we wish to. Academia.edu, for example. I have a profile there at http://reading.academia.edu/WillHughes and this enables me to connect with people who share my research interests. There is not the opportunity for chit-chat like there is on CNBR, and it is less intrusive in the daily diet of emails (if you set it it up right). You can upload papers and books, presentations, CVs, all sorts of academic outputs, and by tagging them with keywords, you become visible to like-minded people around the globe. This is a good way of finding new research contacts.

A new service is Mendeley. This looks like an excellent tool. Primarily it is useful for managing bibliographies. But it also enables the setting up of groups, whether for your own research team, for a department, for a global group of people who share similar interests. One really useful thing about this service is that unlike academia.edu, you don’t need to type in your publications from scratch, because it connects to many bibliographical databases and imports the details of papers that you identify as yours. It is quite quick to set up a profile and although I have only been looking at it for a day, it appears to have some really useful functions.

If networking with a mixture of practitioners and academics, I would recommend LinkedIn, because it has quite a good reach and does not involve all the distracting “fun stuff” that you get in facebook. It is a good way to get connected to all sorts of people, but if you are only looking for academic contacts, it is probably not for you.

Finally, if all you want to do is let off steam every so often and have a rant about something, get yourself a BLOG! I have found this to be useful for more than just the occasional rant. I can use it to collect advice and guidance that I give to students and to authors of papers in the journal. Over the months and years, a collection of guidance notes is accumulating here, and it is very easy to point people to short things that I have already written, which saves me from writing them again. I can return to edit old posts, and also place here contributions that I may have developed for other reasons (this post, for example, started out life as a contribution to an email discussion).

There is a lot to be said for using the appropriate tool for the job. It is highly unlikely that we will find one service that fulfils all aspirations. We need different tools for different tasks. Join me in some of these services, and we can explore these things together and see what we can achieve!

Corporate Christmas Cards

I have always found corporate Christmas cards to be something of an irritation, especially when the signatures are printed into the card, and from a range of people some of whom are known to me, but most of whom are not. It seems a particularly meaningless gesture. What is happening this year, as firms cut back on their expenditure, is that all sorts of people are sending electronic greetings cards instead. Often to "Dear All". All sorts of twee images and animations, often with sickeningly trite Christmas music. What compels this kind of corporate behaviour? It would be much nicer not to get these things cluttering up the inbox and in-tray. Bah, humbug.

Where are all the ugly people?

A while ago, I was playing in facebook one weekend, and I found that the interactive games worked best if you could engage someone else frequently to do whatever it was that earned points. The trouble was, many of my friends were just too slow to make the points accumulate quickly enough. So I started another account under a pseudonym, in order to have someone a bit more interactive in these games, so that I could accumulate points and then play against my friends. The first thing was that a new person needed at least five friends in order to take part, probably to prevent this kind of cheating, so I had to set up four more accounts! As soon as I was able to get these accumulation games to work, I discovered that glamorous looking women seemed to accumulate friends and rewards far quicker than dull-looking men, so I changed the gender of some of my accounts, and gave them beautiful faces. It is easy enough to find beautiful and glamorous women on the web. All went well, until I got bored of the ease with which I could accumulate these points and use them. Soon enough, I lost interest in this, but the beautiful and fictional women were still visible, and gradually some lonely, sad men started asking to be friends, and telling these non-existent women how lovely they were, and how they would like to get to know them better. This was just too creepy. Initially, I tried telling one or two of these sad men that these were fake accounts and not real people, but their desire to meet these fancy women was so strong, they refused to accept the truth and assumed that my girls were just playing hard to get. Even more creepy! So then I thought that I would change their faces to ugly ones. And this is where things got very interesting. I tried to find some ugly faces through Google images, where I had originally found the pretty faces. It was really tough! There were plenty of people pretending to be ugly, but they weren't really. There were plenty of people pulling faces, or who were flagged as ugly, but they did not have the kind of face that would make you recoil in horror. Anyone who really had a genuinely ugly face never appeared in these searches, because most people are not so insensitive as to flag their acquaintances as just pig-ugly. What a surprise! Most of the so-called ugly people on the internet are actually quite ordinary-looking people who have been snapped while pulling a strange face, or people posing as ugly who aren't really. So this is my question - where are all the ugly people? I then started to think that perhaps most of the glamorous-looking people are really quite ordinary, too, and just happened to be pulling a particularly attractive expression or pose. Hmmm.