The pressure has been building. At the last count, I was doing stuff online (i.e. sharing content) at 10 different places. And they all seem to require feeding. That’s fine; after all, an online social relationship is no different from one in wetspace. They all need regular grooming. What I find hard to understand, as these various networks have proliferated, is what each of them is for; automatic duplication — so that everything is everywhere — has made that even harder to resolve.

It isn’t as simple as fun versus work, though at one point I did think Facebook would be more for fun and LinkedIn more for work. Truth is, LinkedIn has done absolutely nothing for me. One or two people found me there, because they could, but I’m pretty sure they would have found me somewhere else had they looked. And beyond the initial thrill of “Golly, you’re here, after all these years” there hasn’t been a huge regrowth of the relationship. I don’t actually do anything active on LinkedIn, although I do litter it from elsewhere. Would I lose anything by leaving? No. Well, maybe one or two contacts unique to that space; perhaps a week before I leave I’ll send out a change of address notice and leave it up to them to follow me if they choose. Of course, to do that I need to know where I’m going to end up.

OK, then; Facebook or Google plus? Tricky. Both can be fun, and both are reasonably easy to leave for a while and then come back. Do I need both? Maybe I do, but I also need to be a lot more ruthless and make quicker decisions on what to pursue, and that seems kind of disrespectful to the people who are sharing. Do unto others, and all that. I’ll keep both for now, but only because I really cannot decide which I prefer. Would anyone miss me in either place? Would I miss either of them?

Photos and videos are kind of easy. I like Flickr and Vimeo, and I can’t see going anywhere else just yet. But not everyone knows about them. So I sometimes advertise new stuff on FB. (But not G+; why not?) And I do put occasional photos directly onto FB if they are probably of no wider interest.

The short-form stuff is no problem. I have a Twitter account, but I don’t really use it much. I do find things on Twitter that aren’t elsewhere and it is very easy to skim, so that stays.

Then there are the blogs, three at the last count. Sharing automatically to FB seemed like a good idea at first, because it exposed things to an audience that wasn’t reading directly, sometimes eliciting good and useful comments. Which then stayed where they were, making for at least two separate discussions. Sure, there are ways of bringing FB comments to the blog, and maybe vice versa, but that’s yet another layer of complexity and meaningless duplication for at least some people. Maybe tweeting blogposts is the best way to broadcast their availability. Problem with that is that the half-life of a shared link is of the order of a couple of hours. How valuable a broadcast signal is that, in a 24-hour world? And retweeting every three hours, which some places seem to do, makes me gag.

More recently I’ve been playing with a site that makes content curation easier, and while it offers good content to select and results in a reasonably attractive page, it is very proprietorial about the links I selected and to which I added value, making it harder for me to share them in those other spaces I inhabit. Sure, I found ways round that, but I don’t feel I should have to.

All of which leads to the big questions. Why do I bother? What do I really want?

I bother because I like finding things myself and it pleases me to think someone else might get some pleasure out of the things I find. I could (and do) email single links to a couple of people. But I also regard sharing my finds as a form of potlatch, given that I benefit from the stuff that other people find and share. So I’m going to continue looking, and sharing, somehow.

What I want is a single place where I gather my finds together and where others can see if there’s anything there they like. I also want it to be simpler and less time-consuming than at present. And I think I know where to go with that. It is easy enough to display the contents of an RSS feed on a blog. Where to source the feeds? I already use Pinboard to store the links I find and many of the ones I share. I’m leaning towards building specific Pinboard feeds — there’s already one on the right, to replace one that Google discontinued — and creating my own version of the walled garden, a series of raised beds, each (perhaps) dedicated to a specific kind of stuff.

Either that or an entirely new micro-blog dedicated to stuff from elsewhere.

It’s no picnic. Or is it?

I’m impressed with Mendeley’s response to blog posts about it, but I’m not just trolling for comments. Rather, I want help understanding what seems to me to very odd behaviour. So odd, that I took a bunch of screenshots that might help me tell the story.

One of the things I like about Mendeley is the social aspect of being able to share papers with a group, and of course that’s much easier with an RSS feed of the group’s papers, which Mendeley duly supplies, so the information comes to me, rather than me having to remember to go to it.

When I see something interesting in my RSS reader, I click on it, and it takes me to the paper in the group’s collection in Mendeley. At least, that’s the plan. But sometimes, it doesn’t. So, I see this item in Reader.

I click on the link at the top, and it takes me … here

WTF?

So I use the search facility in Mendeley and it finds the paper — but with a slightly different title. See that. Landscaping, rather than Landscape, which was the version in the group’s feed.

And that is indeed the correct paper, which links through to the original PDF at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

At this point, I’m wondering; what’s the problem? Could it be a picnic? And if so, where is the chair; in the group, or at Mendeley HQ?

To see if I could find out, I created a feed for our own group, the one that offers readers at the other place easy access to the papers we select as Brainfood. The first week, that didn’t seem to have the same issues, which suggested perhaps the problem’s chair was at IFPRI. But this morning, after updating our group, I discovered from the RSS feed that Mendeley simply had no knowledge of a couple of the links. Faulty metadata seemed to be the problem. Instead of sucking the metadata correctly from the publisher’s website, as I believe it had done every time before, Mendeley had appended the DOI and journal name to the title, and somehow the RSS feed got mangled. I suppose I should have noticed, but I didn’t see anything wrong with the titles at the time. And I did later discover a quick work-around; hover over the link in Reader and look at the URL; if it looks odd, it is almost certainly bust.

Anyway, when I noticed the problem, I rushed back to My Library and corrected the metadata by hand. (Did I mention that I care about this sort of thing?) Blow me if the old versions didn’t hang around in the group’s library. I had to re-add the correct versions from my library. And then, of course, I had two versions of each in the group library. Can you simply select one and delete? Can you buggery!

I had to open the desktop application, sync, find the errant papers, delete them, and resync. That did it.

The big question I am asking myself (quite apart from whether anyone cares) is whether all this faff is worth the effort. There are other places that allow me to save and share papers. I’m not going to maintain more systems than I really need to. Perhaps I should just draw a veil over Mendeley …

My take on the battle of bibliographic software

Time was when managing a reference bibliography required a stack of cards, either plain 3 x 5s or, if you were very technologically advanced, bigger ones with holes punched around the edge, and a secretary or, if you were technologically advanced but lower than pond-scum on the hierarchy, a knitting needle, a typewriter and a big bottle of correction fluid.

Time was when the worst part about having a paper rejected by Nature, and considering resubmission to Science, was the thought of having to reformat both the citations and the references themselves.

Today, though, these nightmares are all but forgotten.

There are several packages that will manage your sources and help you to create citations and references in the papers you are churning out. I’ve used one of them, Bookends, a paid-for option for the Mac, for a few years now, and would not be without it. Recently, though, I had need to corral a bunch of authors and their disparate systems into a smooth-reading whole. So I turned to Mendeley, which offers onlineness and social tools. With Mendeley, you can create groups (open or closed) and use them to gather references from the several authors. If they’ve heard of Mendeley. And if they know vaguely how to use it. It seemed, at first, like an ideal solution.

Problems

In theory, one of the great things about Mendeley is that you can search the papers others have inserted to find one you need, and then copy that to your own library. Unfortunately, there are often duplicates. Furthermore, the differences between two instances of what must be the same original source are not trivial; if you actually care about this sort of thing, Mendeley may add work, as it forces you to go elsewhere to get the “correct” details. These are my qualitative impressions — I have not backed them up with analysis as an old chum did a while back — but they are enough to make me wary of relying on Mendeley as a source of sources, ITSWIM.

An even bigger problem, for me, came when I tried to use Mendeley to insert citations into a Word document and then produce the bibliography. In a nutshell, it was hopeless. There did not seem to be any kind of fine-grained control over the output, with author names, for example, being all over the shop and some of the formatting impossible to alter.

Bookends is completely different, offering extremely fine-grained control of output (You’ld like to use § as a delimiter? Certainly.) and formatting for citations and references. It also inserts no unwanted cruft into the document itself, something I noted only after switching from Mendeley to Bookends and wondering why Bookends kept barfing about non-existent citations that weren’t citations at all; they were Mendeley’s undigested pearls.

In the end, I used Mendeley to gather material from some of the other authors, and exported from there into Bookends for the final runs. And that showed up yet another weakness of Mendeley, the way it handles utf-8 stuff, including diacriticals. Øȟ ẙȅṩ indeed.

Solutions

With the document in question done and dusted, at least for now, I thought it might be worthwhile thinking about future efforts of the same kind. As I said, one of Mendeley’s great strengths is that it shares bibliographic information. The downside is the quality of that information, about which, to be fair, Mendeley makes no claims. Its other great weakness, at least in the free version I used, is that it offers almost no formatting abilities. Bookends has great and almost infinitely flexible formatting. Ironically, the one “social” aspect of Bookends is that users can share their formatting templates for specific publications and for importing from specific databases. That is a tremendous benefit.

What if Bookends allowed users to share bibliographic information?

Not the PDFs themselves because there would be rights issues. But the actual metadata. One advantage I can see is that because I do care about accuracy, I know the details I have are mostly correct. I could share with confidence. And I could hope that other people who have actually paid for the software might be similarly diligent. It would also be possible to do something better than Mendeley about disputed items. Mendeley currently flags some things as needing attention, but doesn’t actually tell me where to look. Anyway, that’s just a thought. A second thought is that maybe Bookends already allows this, and I have not discovered how. Given its many complexities, most of which I have not yet discovered, this is not beyond the realms of possibility.

I suppose another solution might be for Mendeley to start doing a better job of curating the accuracy of its entries, but somehow that doesn’t seem nearly as likely.

Finally

There are, of course, other solutions that allow sharing for the discovery of sources. Citeulike still has a lot going for it, although I have neglected it of late. It certainly offers an alternative for collecting references from a group of authors. I’ve no idea how it performs in generating citations and bibliographies, but it could easily replace Mendeley as the corral, with an easy export to Bookends. Others I haven’t used at all. For now, I’m sticking with Bookends. And paying for it. Happily.

This does not look good.

Not aesthetically, and especially not technically. It is a screenshot of my Mac at 13.36 yesterday. We’ve had some display issues in the past, mostly fixed, at least temporarily, by installing a little gizmo-app that speeds up the fans and keeps things cool. But this is different. The machine froze up completely. I got it back, but it is only a matter of time before it needs replacing. Why not repair? Because, for the first time I can remember, a Mac is obsolete before it is broken, at least if I want to run Lion, which I quite do.

Later … It died again. Later just became sooner, as I await delivery.

All hail Fastweb!

I know this is going to annoy some people, and I never thought I’d write the following sentence. Today, Fastweb, purveyors of internet access and telephonic services to the patient, delivered more than they promised.

This morning our modem went pfft. With it died the telephone. All connections worked perfectly; power left the plug and entered the modem, but got no further. In a slight panic, I called Fastweb. (With the cellphone, obviously.) After the usual long delays, compounded by appalling hold music, I got through to a guy who told me a technician would arrive at around 3. I tried, in vain, to get some additional phone numbers, names etc, just in case, by some remote chance, this technician did not arrive. No point, said my man on the phone, he will.

After rejigging my day a bit to ensure I would be here at 3, I went down to the bar to steal some wifi. While there, the cellphone rang. It was the technician. My heart sank.

“Do you mind if I come a little earlier,” he said. “At about 1.30?”

“No, no, no,” I managed, trying to regain my composure. “That would actually be better.”

“OK.”

Nervous Nellie that I am, I asked him whether he had the correct address. He sighed and confirmed.

Forty minutes later he was here. Fifteen minutes after that, he was gone. And in his wake, a shiny new modem, excellent access, and a promise that, because it is a new model, a call to customer service would enable me to connect more than three devices.

I’m almost inclined to believe him, but I’m not going to push my luck today.