Networking and research

As a sociologist, I'm obligated to tell you we live in a networked world. Most academics might go for academia.edu for an online profile (with papers posted on SSRN), but apparently, linkedin can also become a good source for recruiting interviewees.

For those of you who are students, you might want to start setting up these profiles sooner, rather than later, so you have a professional web presence. This is helpful for when you're on the job market, especially if you are going for non-academic jobs. Not to mention that if you do get an academic position, having another website it useful because you just might be faced with a highly dysfunctional university web server.... not that I'd know anything about that.

Sociogram of my LinkedIn network
(blurred for privacy)

Linkedin also means you can try out one of the coolest things, which is my friend Craig's social network mapping tool: http://socilab.com/. I used it to create the image above, with people clustering into two key interlinked groups, the top from the University of Chicago, and the bottom from prep school, Li Po Chun UWC. (Guess what, I'm a broker: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_networks.)