When you get a bad teacher in college, or anywhere else, it can be really hard to learn the information you need to know. Boring lectures, poorly printed books, badly designed homework—all of these things can get in the way of your education. Fortunately, we live in the age of the Internet, and easily understood resources on about anything are readily available.

You probably already know the regular sources—academic journals, podcasts, online textbooks, even wikipedia (we all do it)—but it’s probably never occurred to you to check blogs. And why would you, really? Blogs get a bad name for unreliability, as most of them are just personal chronicles from people who know very little about their subject. But there’s a growing community of academic bloggers on the Internet, and the Academic Blogs Portal is your best bet for finding them.

What Is It

The Academic Blog Portal is based on a quote from Brad DeLong, a professor at the University of California Berkeley, who described the academic blogosphere as an “invisible college”—a place you could learn everything they teach in college, if only you knew where to look. He stressed the importance of having a varying number of opinions in any academic setting, and how the blogosphere allows even those in politically isolated areas to expand their thoughts and see other viewpoints.

But this “invisible college” was hard to come by. You had to know who to ask and where to look, and collect each specimen on its own to add to the list. Finding the proper blog could be quite a challenge. By putting all of those blogs in one place, sorted in a variety of ways, the Academic Blog Portal seeks to eliminate that challenge, making it easy to find information on just about every academic topic.

How does it work?

The archive is fairly intuitive for anyone familiar with the wikipedia setup, as it works like just about any other archive—by sorting the blogs into categories, which you can use to browse or to home in on the specific material you want. What makes this particular site so useful, though, is that it offers several different organizational schemes for the blogs. You can browse them by subject matter, the home university or country of the blogger, and the language the blog is written in. It even marks the difference between blogs focused on a specific topic and blogs with a more personal bent to them, so you know what you’re getting before you click through.

The subject headers are fairly obvious for the most part, with “humanities,” “sciences,” and “social sciences,” but there’s a bit of a humorous twist to it as well. Vocational blogs are labeled “Professions and Useful Arts,” imply that the others aren’t particularly useful, and thus embodying the kind of gentle teasing that goes on in university settings between disciplines. It also includes a section labeled “These Belong to the Emperor,” which features the blogs that don’t belong in any particular category, including those written anonymously, those no longer getting updates and purely personal blogs from academics. Blogs for university museums, libraries and press releases are also included.

Along with each link to a blog, the site also has a link to a wiki page explaining what the blog is about and who it will be useful to. If you’re not sure about a title, just click the wiki page link and see what the portal has to say about it before you click through.

How are the Blogs?

The blogs featured on the website are all fairly high quality, although the actual academic content is a bit light on some of them. For example, iMechanica in the Engineering section features a lot of quite useful information, complete with the newest news, academic commentaries and a community forum so you can compare ideas. Meanwhile, nOnoScience feels much more like a personal blog, with commentary from the blogger on recent events and even some random off-topic discussions about music or whatever else is on his mind. But that doesn’t mean the website is devoid of useful information. There’s several quite interesting posts, both on fun things like the Batman Equation and more serious topics like thermal science or even student etiquette.

Here are a few of the more prestigious blogs listed on the website:

1. Blog.Bioethics.Net: Written by the editor of The American Journal of Bioethics, this blog keeps abreast of the news in the world of biology, quickly stepping in to comment on the moral and ethical implications of the various discoveries and innovations.
2. Abandoned Footnotes: This blog focuses on the classics, particularly those from ancient Rome and Greece. The author is a political science professor, so he is primarily interested in stories relating to politics and political thought, though he also posts links to more modern topics like social networking. His primary MO seems to be providing links to interesting news and posts elsewhere, so this blog is a great way to keep up on new discoveries and thinking in the political and classical worlds.
3. Civil Warriors: This blog is dedicated to the civil war, and the complex and fascinating history that surrounds it. It aims to work its way through the entire war, covering every imaginable aspect of it. It’s written by a community of bloggers, most of whom have their own sites. The bloggers balance links to other academic sources on the topic with personal stories, like visiting gettysburg.
4. Female Computer Scientist: Written by a female Ph.D. in computer science, this blog covers a range of different computer- and academia-related topics, including a number of posts about the pressure to publish in the academic world.
5. Real Climate: This blog is written by a community of earth science academics, and focused on climate change and the issues facing our environment. Topics range from volcanic activity to software reviews, but all are focused on the planet and how to protect it.