I just got a message from a service called that this website has been included in a directory of education and research resources. It’s got a .ac.uk domain, so it has to be somewhat legit, but I have never heard of it. It seems like it is kind of like the journal search engines in academic libraries, but for web content. That sounds like the kind of thing that should start happening.

There are now so many ways of publishing, and the academic world is largely stuck on the old publishing papers on expensive dead tree journals. The all-important CV is supposed to list a person’s publishing activities, but yet it seems no one seems to know how to deal with adding websites, blogging, etc. to a CV. On some level, the distinct role of academia should be changing because there are many people doing real research on their own, without any affiliation to any academic institution, and often without any graduate degree.

A great example of this is bittorrent, it was created and written by Bram Cohen while he couched surfed for 2 or so years. He was just a hacker figuring out things largely on his own. Now there are hordes of academics discussing bittorrent, following its example, wishing they had created something anywhere close to as influential as bittorrent.