In a bid to kick start a summer of writing I spent yesterday reviewing the various services that I use to store references. So I ploughed through connotea, zotero, endnote online and citeulike to determine which works best for me. It took ages but finally citeulike won out. Quicker than endnote online and more of a bibliographic tool than connotea, the only drawback to citeulike is the fact that when I include it as an rss feed in this blog the links point to my account rather than directly to the articles/books. I’ll try and find a work around for that in the future.

Having decided on citeulike and imported/sorted/cleaned-up references and tags I twittered:

This morning I check my email to find:

So I get an email from ‘Fergus’. What for? Why an email? Am I supposed to feel good that citeulike is monitoring me in this way and congratulating me on a tweet? And why didn’t Fergus tweet me? Where did he get my email from?

This is the kind of ‘social marketing’ which is distinctly anti-social and unsettling. It is the digital outreach work of companies who think that having people sit in front of computers congratulating others for congratulating others is, well, productive.