Dear Mom,
You are probably wondering why you keep seeing:
on the homepage and then finding that when you click through there is nothing new in my correspondance.
‘sites’ was one of my unpublished posts and actually it was just a place where I was dumping information that I meant to come back to later!!
While I did not actually plan to write anything about ‘sites’, let me use this excuse to list the sites that I visit most during the day:
Essential Work-related
The manuscript tracking system
Nature Protocols homepage
PubMed
Scopus
eTBlast Search
Essential for everything
Google
Wikipedia
Semi-intellectual diversions
The Nature Network
The Chemical Forums
...I am sure that there are more…will update when I find myself going to a website that I forgot to add.
Yours etc,
Bronwen
Update (7 April)
I seem to visit photobucket and neevia pdf converter all the time now that I have started working more on the Network Protocols. The latter is really useful if you want to save webpages as pdfs (i.e. when a screen shot is just simply not long enough…).
My essential work-related are:
Nature www.nature.com/nature
Authors and referees (A&R) www.nature.com/authors
NPG site index page www.nature.com/siteindex
NPG search engine ;-) (any nature.com page)
Nature archive www.nature.com/nature/archive
Editing tool for A&R (private site)
Darwin (company intranet)
Google reader (RSS)
Google scholar
Google
Nautilus http://blogs.nature.com/nautilus (author blog)
Peer to Peer http://blogs.nature.com/peer-to-peer
(peer review blog)
dashboards for same
Obviously I look at a lot of other websites as well, but I would say that every working day I visit the above.
When I am not at work, I also look at quite a few websites, as I do all my shopping (food, books, clothes) on the internet; in fact I pretty much live on the internet these days. I’m a victim of the “information revolution”.
I’m a very poor surfer, although eager to try anything once … so after a presentation in the Nature office by a founder of Second Life, I logged on. It was very confusing at first, but just as I was getting used to the idea, it occurred to me that there’s a Real Life out there, too, inhabited by Real People, including one’s Real Spouse and one’s Real Children, and therefore that it is probably too easy to spend too much time in front of the computer and not enough time cementing interactions of the more old-fashioned variety. Cyberspace is addicitive (I’m here, aren’t I?) and it’s all I can do, sometimes, to switch off and go to the beach instead.
I am quite interested in the amount of time that I spend checking things (email, blogs/forums where I leave comments, wikipedia….) rather than actively looking for information, making contact with people or developing my own ideas.
I think, however, that the interactions that we have with people over the internet ARE real, and in both the Chemical Forums and here on the Nature Network, there is a sense of community, which I would not be experiencing if I were not participating in it.