Every semester, there are three weeks that are absolute hell: O-week to the end of week 2. Week 3 is busy, but less stressful. Every year, I make sure I see my friends before O-week starts, and then tell them I’ll see them again in a month.

This blog has had the same problem. It’s not that I haven’t been doing anything, but it’s been out of synch, late, or patchy.

I’ve updated the things I was supposed to have done, or had started but not published, in week 8 only this weekend, as we turn the corner into week 9. I managed a couple of tweets in the tweetorial (and neither of them had space for the hashtag, #fail).

I did have a fascinating conversation with Nicholas and Jeremy earlier:

https://storify.com/katrinafee/foucault-and-algorithms

I had trouble finding an algorithim I could play with, so after a few abortive attempts, I finally worked out I could look at Twitter’s Discovery timeline. I commented on Jin’s and PJ’s bogs.

Posting less often means that some of my posts have been longer. I’ve been continuing to document the places where I study (and increasingly, the food I eat as I study), including my first video:

Anyway, week 3 is coming up. Busy, but no longer crazy. Hopefully that means I’ll have a chance to catch up.

I only read Facebook via Most Recent stories (though that isn’t possible on mobile, and even then various things are promoted for me that aren’t a pure timestream); I usually use Twitter and never the Discovery timeline because I like the crowdsourced flow. I spent years trying to get Amazon’s Recommended for You to actually recommend me books I liked–‘all books by this author’, ‘no books by this author’, ‘I really don’t ever want to read erotica about shapeshifting bears’, ‘I will sometimes read about werewolves though’. I’d think this was easy, but Recommended for You has gone from being sometimes useful to almost useless.

So I had to go back to the drawing board.

I will then carry out the same search logged in on my personal Google account. I rarely use this account, but I do occasionally fail to log out for a few days after I’ve logged in. I would therefore expect a longitudinal series of random snapshots of my search behaviour.

Finally I will carry out the same search using my work account. I am usually logged into this account at work, and most of my search and activity should be stored there. As it is a work account, I expect all my activity to be passively logged by my employer anyway. I also expect to be doing the same searches over and over again to carry out routine professional tasks, and so a  preference ‘bubble’ or ‘me loop’ is actually useful.

I have predictive search turned off on my laptop, but on on my mobile. I may get different answers depending on the research.

I’ve only just noticed, there is no way to Like or Share blogs either here, or on the EDC main site.

I got used to seeing the comforting little series of avatars at the bottom of posts I’ve written, the thing that tells me I’ve said something worthwhile.

From my professional blog, Research Degree Voodoo

Along with the messy ‘lifestream’ model, this just feels like another way to do work in ‘public’ but be sure what we do is safe in the noise.