

Academia.edu Raises $1.6 Million - crescendo
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/28/academia-edu-raises-1-6-million-to-help-researchers-connect-with-each-other/

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snewe
This could be very helpful, so long as academics maintain their profiles. I
currently use an ad-hoc system of Google Reader's "check if webpage changed"
functionality to check for new papers in my fields of interest. For economics,
these are listed on pages like:

<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/JELJOUR_Results.cfm?code=M13>

<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/JELJOUR_Results.cfm?code=G24>

which gives an ugly summary of updates to non-RSS friendly websites.
Academia.edu appears to require that

1\. Authors sign up

2\. Authors also update their profiles with their new research

My experience suggests this will be difficult for econ: I repeated the Google
readers process for the active authors in my field. Google tracks their
"Working Papers" pages for updates and lets me know when they add a paper (or
change a font!) For the two dozen authors I track, only one has updated their
page in the last two months.

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jplewicke
I'm not sure about field-wide RSS feeds, but SSRN does have author-specific
RSS feeds like <http://www.ssrn.com/rss/authors/1997/0701/998.rss> for Eugene
Fama.

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benl
And we're hiring: <http://www.academia.edu/jobs>

We're based in downtown SF and we're looking for engineers to help us build a
great product for researchers.

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paulfang
They have Hawking, Dawkins, Chomsky, Krugman on board already as scientists.
Wow.

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mhartl
I'm pretty sure that list sums to zero, though.

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sketerpot
I just signed up, and the web site is remarkably slick. Anybody who's made web
apps knows how hard it is to make something that just does what it's supposed
to as well as this. I especially like the easy integration with GMail,
Facebook, and so on.

The signup process is a bit long, but I'm not sure if that's a bad thing.

Edit: When I selected "Electrical & Computer Engineering" from the drop-down
menu of departments, the ampersand got turned into "&amp;". I'm pretty sure
this is a bug.

~~~
iskander
I disagree. I found the interface clunky and the research interest categories
were really sloppy (typos, duplicates, inconsistent granularities, etc...).
Also, the inability to click on section names during sign up was very
frustrating.

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lanstein
Excuse my ignorance, but how did they get a .edu?

~~~
halo
It was almost certainly registered before they tightened the restrictions on
registration, and the current owners bought it from them.

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uggedal
How did they manage to get the domain name? From
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.edu>:

 _Starting on October 29, 2001, only post-secondary institutions and
organizations that are accredited by an agency on the U.S. Department of
Education's list of nationally recognized accrediting agencies are eligible to
apply for a edu domain._

