Yesterday I received an automated email telling me that “Christina would like to connect with [me] on Goodreads.” I had to think: is this spam? (apparently not). Do I know "Christina?" (yes). Do I know what Goodreads is? (kind of...it's coming back to me now...).

I went to college with this person, so we’re friends in “real life.” We’re Facebook friends. I read her blog every once in a while since she’s doing some sort of Americorps project in Texas and I haven’t seen her for a year. Now we’re “friends” on Goodreads.com. Yet another online social network. I had forgotten all about Goodreads—a quick glance at my profile shows the last time I added books was in July of last year--probably because another friend sent an email "inviting" me to join, and I was compelled to fill out a half-assed profile and promptly forget about it.
I had to create a LibraryThing account last fall for a class, which I haven’t updated since I was required to do so. Pretty much the same thing as Goodreads--maybe each has a unique feature or two, but the idea is the same.

It made me wonder how many profiles and accounts I have floating around out there in the void, with various amounts of personal (or fake personal) information attached to them. That thought prompted me to type my name into Google (come on, you've done it too) to see what else I might have signed up for and forgotten about.

I wonder about the people who create new online social networks. Do they think can offer something that’s not already out there?

When can we say, “enough is enough?”

Monday night our wiki team held our initial meeting via Breeze. At this point, we haven’t heard from our client (we thought she was going to email us with a list of topics she wanted us to cover on the wiki) so I felt like we still had a lot of uncertainties re: the project.
I’m not new to web meetings—at work we use AT&T Webmeeting a few times a week to meet with telecommuters.

There were some points, thought, that I just didn’t get what someone was talking about. When you’re meeting in person and you don’t understand something, you can say “Wait a minute—what do you mean?” When you’re meeting via electronic communication, you have to 1. type your problem, 2. wait for that person to read your question, 3. let them think of how to better explain themselves, and 4. type a response. With written communication, something will always be lost—the person’s tone of voice, facial expression, etc. It’s just something you deal with when communicating this way.

While we were on Breeze for a little over an hour, I doubt that we would have needed that much time to go over what we did if we met in person.

It also reminds me of communication issues I’ve experienced at work due to the availability of technology. We use Microsoft Communicator (a more professional version of MSN Messenger) quite often—since most people have it set to sign in automatically when they log in to their computers, it’s a quick way to tell if someone is in the office yet, if they are away from their desk, or if they are available to talk. However, I think some people use it as a crutch.

One of my co-workers had an issue a few months ago when she was working on an informed consent form for a drug study and had questions about how to format the footer (I know, it kind of seems nit-picky, doesn’t it? It was an issue involving version control of several amendments, so it actually was a legit problem). She needed to talk to an associate in the Regulatory division. She called and left a voicemail for this person, even though her Communicator status was “online.” Not even a minute later, this person instant-messages my co-worker and proceeds to type out WHOLE PARAGRAPHS explaining the solution to her problem. Now, this is only my opinion, but I don’t think IM is very supportive of long strings of text—like paragraph-length text. It’s harder to read and comprehend, especially because, depending on the size of the window of the IM system, you might have to scroll down to read the entire message, take time to think about it, and then form your response. I think it’s much easier to read and respond to short messages.
I understand that there may be times when, for some reason, you can’t use the phone, but for complex questions, I think it's more effective to discuss the problem over the phone and then, if necessary, follow up with an email. In my co-worker’s case, the IM conversation did not solve the problem—it took several phone calls (when the other person eventually did pick up the phone) and emails. Meeting in person was an option, but not a good choice, since this other person works in another office complex about 30 min away.

Looking back over my last few entries, I probably seem like a big technology-hater. Not true. I just get irritated when certain applications are used inappropriately.

This week I'm going to share a little bit of my job. Last week, my team leader asked me if I had time to find a document for one of the physicians in our division. Since that's what they pay me to do around here, I said of course. Now here's the deal:

We produce a lot of documents: we run drug studies, write manuscripts and abstracts, present posters, make presentation slides, etc etc etc. The document I need to find is a "note to file" from the central lab we contracted to analyze samples for a particular study.

The physician, C, wanted me to look through her file cabinets, our department's file cabinets, another physician's file cabinets, and check with the archives division at headquarters. The thing is, the study was a local Canadian study that ran from 1997-2002, and she knows ("I can see it in my head...it's on *labcompany* letterhead, their logo looks like this...") that it's from 2001 and it has to do with how the lab changed the methodology for analyzing a particular sample mid-study. Whenever something like that happens, a "note to file" goes, well, in the file. The "file" that it is most likely in is a specific protocol binder in Canada--I've asked several people and they're convinced that's not the sort of thing our global archives would keep--it would stay with the study site. So after I dug through a mountain of decade-old papers, I learned that I probably wasn't going to find what I needed anyway.

Now, after that long-winded backstory, here's the technology part: wouldn't it be sooooooo much easier if all these records were digitized so that I could do a keyword search--by study ID, by date, by lab company name? That would make my day.


When a company has several sites all over the world and you need to share documents, these documents need to be in some kind of system where people can access them quickly and easily. Hunting down a piece of paper in a binder in Canada is not ideal. I'm actually surprised that in 2008, that's what we still have to do sometimes.

I'm kind of at a loss to choose something to write about this week. This is why my blogs tend to die if I'm not forced to keep them up.