Bono’s ditty in the New York Times has raised some heckles because of his seemingly absurd stance on the need for ISPs to police copyright. It makes one wonder how he can at once argue that:

Increasingly, the masses are sitting at the top, and their weight, via cellphones, the Web and the civil society and democracy these technologies can promote, is being felt by those who have traditionally held power. Today, the weight bears down harder when the few are corrupt or fail to deliver on the promises that earned them authority in the first place.

and then…

We’re the post office, they tell us; who knows what’s in the brown-paper packages? But we know from America’s noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China’s ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it’s perfectly possible to track content.

So it is ignoble to control people’s use of and access to information in order to control dissent, but fine so long as it secures corporate profits.

Note to self: When arguing for more corporate control over the flow of information on the internet, ensure to mention child pornography and poor singer-songwriters on the cafe circuit.

Oh how I wish that I had a personal research secretary! I’ve been spending this weekend going through transcripts, untranscribed interviews, research notes, photos, and clippings for my research and the result is increasingly looking like a big mess. I’ve been planning to use some sort of QDA package for all of this when it comes time to coding and analysing—I am nowhere near there yet!—and would ideally like to begin to ‘park’ all of my stuff in one place and begin to work on it as I go along.

For my last couple of projects, including the work that I did with my supervisor on Business Improvement Associations, I used a wonderful open source Mac program called TAMS Analyser. It has a built-in transcribing tool, uses a transparent coding language (which seems to turn some people off) and is generally rock solid. But I fear that my reliance on PDFs, photos and other data will end of pushing me to use it and other software (Tinderbox….I’ve tried…I really have!). So I am now trying out Atlas Ti. It looks like it will do all that I need, though it may be a little too structured to use as a parking lot. But I do like the Google Earth integration! Will report back on this as I go.

Facebook have updated their Terms of Use.

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content. Facebook does not assert any ownership over your User Content; rather, as between us and you, subject to the rights granted to us in these Terms, you retain full ownership of all of your User Content and any intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights associated with your User Content.

Copyright has at once gotten more muddled but perhaps better for users. My reading is that I still own my content, but offer them a license to do whatever I want with it (which would include selling it!). Better, I guess….but still looking for other options.

From [Facebook's Terms of Service](http://utoronto.facebook.com/terms.php “Terms of Service”)

–SNIP–

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

–SNIP–

There is more to this that bothers me other than the silliness of the prose. If I read correctly, by posting photos of my two year old daughter on Facebook, I give them a full and transferable license to use such content. This goes for other content as well. I doubt that they would, but they *could* sell anything on my profile on Ebay.

Strangely, I have never been concerned about copyright or ownership over content, and avoid publishing in places that restrict access. But to give Facebook this leverage just feels…dirty.

I have become quite accustomed to using Facebook, mainly as a realtime address-book of sorts, but this is too much. Photos going down as we speak, and perhaps the rest will go soon.

Part of getting through a Ph.D. is deciding what you will use to get through the program. For some, all that they need are index cards and Microsoft Word. Others are more demanding: a glance at Kieran Healy’s beautiful but daunting list
is either inspiring or frightening. I spent most of my first year on my Mac, working with a combination of LaTex, Bookends, Mellel and Pages and Tinderbox with OmniOutliner for notes. Along with Mail.app, iCal and Safari, but workflow was pretty much set, with the occasional foray into Excel and Word. Now, there were two major problems that quickly became evident as the year went on. First was the sheer number of apps. I was always switching between them; and frankly, they did not play well with each other much of the time. Second, communicating with others–including collaborating on papers, commenting, etc.–forced a lot of exporting in and out of Word. My hard drive became cluttered with different file formats for different projects, including different formats for different stages of the same project. A mess indeed!

Second, I became increasingly nervous about the Mac-centric way of doing things. I have only one computer, and the labs at school all us Windows. Even processing LaTex is a no-go on most of the closed computers at the library. So in the case of a computer disaster, I would be left up the creek.

Well, a disaster hit yesterday when a certain little girl pulled my laptop onto the floor which seems to have wrecked the hard drive. Luckily, just a week earlier, I had 1) backed up everything onto CDs and 2) simplified my workflow to the use of Zotero, Microsoft Word, Excel and various Google Apps, which allows me to work away in the computer lab from a USB.

Now, I know that Microsoft Word is a kludge, but it works. I can work with others, do reasonable long papers, and newsletters as well. Zotero may be the best thing that ever happened to Firefox. While as a reference manager and notetaker, its not as flexible as my previous combos, its good enough and getting better. And it will work from a USB on any computer that can run Firefox. More on that in another post.

So the lesson learned is that the choice of workflow applications should not only take into account what the best at your given tasks, but also what will reduce risk and allow you to work smoothly in unexpected situations. I think that simplifying the number of applications used and the ways that they are used is key. Of course, the next step may be move wholly to plain text.