My mind's just blanking out. There's no way I'm going to finish a
credible draft of this paper within the next 20 minutes. I've been
thinking about it all day, but… this just isn't what I had done my
initial reading for, and the lack of background is really biting me.

My technology diffusion visualizations were born out of an afternoon
of play, a direction I took during a random walk. For some reason,
Mark liked it. Now I find myself scrambling madly to learn about
innovation diffusion theory. (Hooray, Everett Rogers!)

My reading notes are all about bookmarking and its personal and social
benefits. Maybe I can still work that in somewhere, but bookmarking
isn't the main focus of the paper, and I need to fill in a lot more
back story.

Should I have skipped all the afterparties and focused on this? My
sense is that in the long run, that networking will be of much use.
(Although perhaps I could've skipped mush…) Now if only it didn't
take me so long to get back on track.

If Mark was looking over my shoulder, he'd probably tell me to stop
blogging and concentrate on writing my paper instead. Unless I manage
to unblock my mind, though, it's going to be pretty hard for me to
make sense of the papers and write a coherent submission.

My problem is that I've been giving him all of these half-papers:
teams, personal benefits for social bookmarking, etc. – but we keep
changing my topic after I pass them. I'm sure all of these paper
fragments lying around the place will be useful someday, but it's
incredibly frustrating having to keep branching out.

I feel like such a research failure…