• http://academicblogs.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Jeffrey R. Young has a brief piece in the Chronicle highlighting some efforts to keep track of academic blogs, noting Academicblogs.org, which grows out of the blogrolls at Crooked Timber and a few other lists. It uses Mediawiki for its platform and, since launching in September, has accumulated a substantial list. Young marvels at the growing number of blogs out there--he counts at least 470 listed for the humanities alone. He quotes Henry Farrell, assistant professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, who maintained the Crooked Timber list until it ported over to Academicblogs. Farrell acknowledges that there is no way to insure quality control: "The only policing is to make sure that anybody who's there is an academic," he said.

BlogScholar, the "academic blogging portal" based in London, notes the new project, complaining that "we always appreciate a nice tribute but surely it's taking it a bit far to launch an 'Academic Blog Portal' without a single reference to our delightful little non-profit enterprise of the same name on the other side of the Atlantic." The editors note that "BlogScholar will be watching the relative success of this venture with great interest as the biggest challenge around here is managing the editing process of submissions to the directory. For every blog that is accepted in the directory ten are declined. Typical examples include face reconstruction treatments entered into 'engineering', viagra salesmen into 'chemistry', and (the cheek of it all) spam marketing tools in 'business'. We have worked very hard to keep the blogs in the directory relevant  to the disciplines but have been exploring options including wikis on how to expand this capability." Point well taken--but the spelling and punctuation mistakes in the post (we corrected three of them in this excerpt) also show how hard it is to keep a site moderated, fresh and well-edited.