One of the worst possible, most horrific thing that can happen to an academic is that someone else independently comes to the same conclusions as you do, but publishes them more quickly. It's actually not a terrible thing, because the important thing should be that the good idea comes to life, but there are big egos involved here and my ego really needs its own house.

I'm watching Eszter Hargittai's fantastic talk on internet skills at the Berkman Center at Harvard. Small vomit in my mouth at first, because it seemed she wrote my paper and did a much better job, but we're different enough to complement each other, rather than compete. Whew.