One of the things I think the AAA does very poorly is to promote interesting academic work in our discipline. Blogs are out there, but to be honest, it is a lot of work writing up a blog post about academic research and so even on a site like Savage Minds, we don't do as much of that as we would like to. I notice that the other anthro blogs don't fare much better. So what I'd like to see in the way of social network tools for anthropologists is something like Digg for academic research… Continue

It occurred to me that many of the people joining OAC may be unaware of the work we have been doing over at Open Access Anthropology. There is also a Google Group for OAA. This is more narrowly focused than OAC, encouraging anthropologists to publish in Open Access journals and to practice self archiving.



See… Continue

I mentioned these over on Keith Hart's page, but I think they deserve a repost:



One of the goals I see for OAC is to facilitate organizing of peer reviewed journals and academic conferences outside of, or in addition to, those official ones which happen within various associations, such as the AAA. For this I see two great resources:



1. Open Journal Systems

2. Open Conference… Continue

There are two geolocation services I think would do a lot to help anthropologists: 1. Information about existing research which pertains to the current region, and 2. data on the presence of researchers currently in a particular location.



The second one already exists, in a way, in Google Latitude, which will tell you where your friends are at a given moment. But my idea would be to be able to see on a map the presence of any member of OAC on a map, so that we could better facilitate… Continue

I'm amazed at the number of people who have joined and added content to OAC here on ning. Truly awe-inspiring. However, I have to say that I worry a lot about the platform. I never liked Facebook much and Ning seems like a poor imitation of Facebook. Will OAC devolve into people answering quizzes: "Which anthropology network am I?" I personally prefer Google Groups because of its simplicity, and the fact that people can use it as they like: via e-mail, via RSS, or via the web. I find that… Continue