I’m hooked! I came across the link to Academici a couple of days ago, and went in to have a look. I soon registered an account and went exploring the site – wow!
Academici – “The Vitural Academy” – offers you the chance of extending networks and tapping into the know-how of your peers in and across disciplines, it offers a wide variety of academic services and acts as a key resource base for academic and academic-related work. The virtual academy is aimed specifically at the academic world . The key characteristics of academici are:
– global peer to peer network
– very precise search engine
– sophisticated yet simple to use communication platform
– professional contact management system
– content-driven fora run by experts
– academic -related services on one platform
– secure data protection, no advertising, no direct sales, no spam

The day I became a member I logged on – there was a list of the 5 most recent new members, and to my surprise, 4 of them were from New Zealand! Looks like I’m not the only one from Godzone who has seen this.

What impresses me is the interface – intuitive, and easy to use – provides each member with a personal web page, lots of tools to make managing your participation in the site really straightforward, and a well thought out process of establishing and maintaining forums and interest groups. Within a day of joining I received an invitation to join one of the current discussions – all very personalised.

If you’re working in an academic environment, or if you’re interested in online community architecture, this is definitely worth a look around.