Online researching

I've been discovering the new ways of making "doing research" a both fun and efficient thing these days, and in this web 2.0 era (or should I say "SNS era"?), there're plenty of interesting stuffs on Internet that we can use for research. It seems that everyone could think about something under the category of "online research resources" such as online database, ebooks, and academic forums. While these could be very useful when I need to find some resources, I'm more interested in the question of how to find the latest news, findings and "voices" in my study field. 

Besides subscribing to Google Scholar or the university's library, what else I've found? Twitter and Facebook!

Thanks to LSE Impact Blog, for providing the idea of "using Twitter in university research", and after creating my own research list, I've turned Twitter into a platform for getting updates, voices, ideas, and inspiration that related to my research area. Similar things have also happened to my Facebook news feed, after clicking the "Like" button on the pages of some research institutions or networks, now there're always something interesting to read when I check the feeds. More importantly, through this way, I've found some great institutions and research centers that I was not quite familiar with before, and now I can subscribe either to their regular updates in Google Reader or to their newsletter for more information.

Turning the guilty SNS into a "research tool" is really a great step for me. Now academia becomes funner than ever, and relaxing is more than "wasting time".

The next step is to share and store. Several ways that I usually take include: sharing and starring on Google Reader, sharing on Facebook, retweeting and favoring on Twitter, and starring in my gmail inbox.  But I also need to put everything I found in different sources together and group them based on topics, so I use Delicious.com and Evernote, both of them can store and group web resources, and are capable of sharing with others. After creating several stacks on Delicious, I can group all the online information and sources I found accordingly, while keeping my Chrome bookmark bar tidy. It's also a great way to reach everything I need no matter which computer I'm using. 

Finally, something interesting I found on Twitter today: Istambul traffic visualization