www.Academia.edu is a somewhat successful site that operates as an academic family tree of sorts. Where it's filled in, there can be useful in finding students of a particular advisor or topic. I think if people really got into it, the site could be a useful repository for academic lineages. It also seems to have a good bit of international participation already.
On 11/19/09 5:45 AM, "William Silvert" <[email protected]> wrote: > I've joined a few of the various social networks and find them of little > professional value, although I have met up with some old friends and > schoolmates. However it strikes me that this kind of networking could be of > considerable value to scientists, and I am posting to enquire whether any > suitable networks exist. It may of course be that I simply don't know how to > use the networks I belong to. > > It would be handy to be able to classify one's friends/colleagues by interest > and to be able to post messages to various specific interest groups. This > seems similar to the idea of lists on Facebook, but I have not yet found any > way to send messages specifically to one or more of these lists. > > Some of these interest groups already exist as formal groups of course, I am > sure that there must be several organised groups dealing with climate change. > On the other hand I doubt that there are groups specifically interested in > vibrio or in ctenophores, so it would have to be an ad hoc group. I envisage a > system where individual scientists would define their own interest areas and > be able to communicate easily with colleagues with overlapping interests. For > example, if I am working on the possibility that pollution is depressing > oxygen levels in some region and this is encouraging the dominance of > jellyfish, I could send it to people I know whom I have classified as > interested in pollution, in hypoxia and in gelatinous zooplankton, and perhaps > to others working in the same region. > > Of course some of the existing networks are ideal for a few scientists. I find > Twitter absolutely useless, but for astronomers searching for comets it must > be a fantastic tool. > > Anyway, I would welcome any comments and advice on ways in which these modern > networking tools can be used for science. Email lists have certainly been > useful, but I find that in some areas they are too narrowly defined and > structured to work well. > > Bill Silvert
