BibExcel comes now with a new exciting features: the possibility to export bibliometric data into Pajek. Before this, I had to manually edit the matrices I got from BibExcel to a form Pajek could read, so this new feature is really time saving and it also opens new possibilities for bibliometric research and analysis of large scale networks, wether they are based on bibliometric or webometric data.

That was the first entry, written by WordPress Mu, my new blog-management system. In my teaching I (and the students) have used various blog-hosts. Until now. The reason for managing my own blog-host is to get greater control of the blogs I and my students are writing and to be able to show the students how exactly blogs work and how they are managed. Another reason is simple curiosity. I just wanted to see how it works, and I have to say it works great. The setup was very easy and straight-forward. At a first glance it seemed that WordPress MU didn’t have nearly as many options as WordPress has, but some reading and experimenting revealed that you can add all the features (and maybe more) later if you want. I first thought I’d start this blog on Blogger, where I have my previous blogs (“course-blogs”), but then I ran into WordPress MU (Multi-User) and I wanted to give it a try. So I searched for a nice template, and found one from Jide. Then I got a bit carried away and changed the look of my whole site to resemble that template.

The reason for me to start this blog is to hopefully get some feedback on my research ideas and thoughts. I have also made some small studies that do not quite meet the Least Publishable Quantity. I believe a blog might be a suitable forum to present such results and maybe get some ideas about how to proceed with some of the studies and maybe get them published some day.

The name of this blog, “Oh, what a tangled web we weave…”, is a quote that has been following me for a long time in my presentations, background images and so on. The whole quote reads: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, When we first learn to deceive”. Sometimes the quote is seen as “…practise to deceive”. The quote is by Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) who was a Scottish author and novelist. As a researcher I think it is more suitable to just use the first part of the quote. I hope that my research, teaching and maybe even this blog will help to untangle the tangled web.