academia.edu

Comes now a novelty in search of a purpose.

Academia.edu does two things:

* It displays academics around the world in a tree format, according to what university/department they are affiliated with.

* It enables an academic to have an easy-to-maintain academic webpage. A sample page on Academia.edu is here:

http://oxford.academia.edu/RichardPrice

Some very exciting research in the field of social networks psychology, could revolutionize the way academics approach their work. A recent study, by Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School, and James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, reports on the social network effect factors involved with behavior change. The social network effect is at work not just in the halting of negative behaviors, such as smoking or unhealthy weight gain, but also in the spreading of positive life changes, as well. Remains to be seen what the objective of academia.edu is besides generating page views, metadata, and the advertising and marketing value that that metadata will comprise.