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Deep thought on the Internet

Sadly few may know this, but the Internet, and more accurately the World Wide Web was created as a tool for sharing ideas between academics. In an age when the Internet is more likely to help you pay your bills, check out your team’s latest results, and ogle the latest celebrity gossip and pics (as well as feed your narcissistic ego through blogs and social networking sites, as Jarred Cinman would put it), its easy to forget that the net, and hypertext (for those of you who don’t know, its the reason for all those ‘H’-es in web addresses) was all about linking academic documents together, into a cogent web.
The great thing for anyone who wants to look, read and think beyond the commercial and entertainment realms of the web; the Internet remains a pretty exciting place for ideas to flourish, grow and be shared.
One place, is Global Voices Online, a non-commercial aggregator of blogs (although I doubt Cinman would like that: I think he prefers his content managed commercially, God forbid private citizens publish thoughts: no matter how egotistical! :P) which provides a forum for the blog posts to be shared across the world.
University web sites are the real treasure trove of the web, the biggest problem though is the PR and marketing veneer one often has to hack one’s way through on the way to the juicy stuff. Universities are increasingly being run like businesses, and so their web sites tend to follow suit. So my advice would be to poke around for the particular department or faculty. These are often run by the staff themselves, a little badly designed, but often really useful to get info.
The other area thing to do is use a tool like Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.co.za/, which is a great tool for finding academic papers.
Otherwise, Google for notable academics (even the lecturer’s you understood at varsity or who you have heard of), its a great way of separating the...