Back in November, member of my social network Alan Cann asked me to participate in a project he was doing with the International Centre for Guidance Studies for the Research Information Network on Social Media for researchers.

A few days later, I met online in Skype Chat with researcher Konstantia Dimitrou and we discussed my attitudes to social networking and its use in my teaching and scholarship. The report Social Media: A Guide for Researchers has now been released and you can read part of what I had to say on page 38 and in full on the Web at http://www.rin.ac.uk/node/1015.

The report itself is well worth a look, particularly if you think research should be done the way it has always been done. Social media may be a way to raise your REF impact numbers if nothing else.