Reflecting on pros and cons of various social networks for academics

[vivdunstan]

In a discussion on Facebook just now I was prompted to revisit my old blog post about this. It may be interesting reading for contacts here. Basically I thought Twitter was the most useful social networking tool for me as an academic. Academia.edu very poor, and I've since left that site, very concerned about their moves (albeit understandable) to monetise freely-given research with often dubious copyright status.

The blog post linked to above is a few years old now, and doesn't mention Dreamwidth at all, or even Livejournal. I'm still figuring out how to fit Dreamwidth into my various bloggings. I have my personal academic blog, as well as my genealogy one, and others. I'm thinking of resurrecting my mini book review posts, and starting them afresh here. It would be nice to record my thoughts on what I'm reading in a little more detail than my scores on Goodreads, and here is as good a place as any. I should be able to manage capsule reviews, from time to time. Fingers crossed!

Comments

[sir_guinglain]

Academia.edu is trying to persuade me to take up their offer of a personal homepage, which is really a relaunched profile page with some ideas from Facebook, or so it seems to me at first glance.

[vivdunstan]

I wouldn't touch them with a bargepole now. Also beware that they are increasingly making things only visible to site members. So unless you are wanting to work in academia long term, and the people you may want to employ you are on Academia.edu too, then they may not be able to read all of what you put on there in future.

Far better in your case, I think, would be to make your own personal website, explaining your qualifications, range of work, experience etc. That would be easy to do in e.g. WordPress.

Your choice of course :) But I'm very opposed to Academia.edu now, and they seem to be getting more restrictive - including charging for certain search results now - all the time.

[sir_guinglain]

I already have my own website on Wordpress, but it is hideously underdeveloped. I have not uploaded anything to Academia.edu for some time as I'd read they were farming data in a fashion which wasn't benefiting users.

[vivdunstan]

Just had a look at your website. It probably wouldn't take too much effort to fill it out. Main thing would be to bring it up to date, and remove unnecessary dating things, like on the home page, which says 2012, but probably would be better not having any date shown there at all. And you could have a page listing some of your publication credits more fully, across lots of categories.

I've never uploaded papers to Academia.edu, largely for copyright concerns, but also increasingly worried about what they were doing with the material. And once I left that was it over for me.

[sir_guinglain]

If I could get rid of that date, I would... the article was last updated this year.

[vivdunstan]

I think it's because you've done it as a post, which would be dated, rather than a page.

Change it so it's a fixed front page, and fill the page content directly. I'll try to see if I can find an easy link to show how to do this.

[sir_guinglain]

I've had a glance at the theme guidelines and I think I'll need to undo a few things before going forward with this!

[vivdunstan]

What theme are you using? Normally you can just set a static front page in the Dashboard -> Appearance -> Customize. Though the theme will have to support a static front page. You have to make a brand new page for the front page, and you then fill that with content, before selecting it to be the front page in the customize screen. You can have a separate page if you want for blog posts. Key thing is the front page becomes a page, that's fixed content, rather than a dated blog post.

[sir_guinglain]

I'm using Twenty Twelve, and have now created a new static front page. I'd thought that fixing a blog post to the front (as I'd done) was the most I could do, but no - many thanks. This opens doors.

[vivdunstan]

Excellent! :)

[sir_guinglain]

Except it still isn't working properly - I thought I'd created a static front page and I haven't...

ETA: ...now I have!

[vivdunstan]

I was going to email you some screenshots from my setup, but I see you've got it working now. Excellent! No date on there, which means you can update it as you want, and it won't automatically look dated.

And then you can add more content elsewhere.

You should probably now delete the old blog post that was the front page, so people don't read that + its old date.

But otherwise great!

[sir_guinglain]

Good idea!