Newcastle University

Electronic discussion lists allow you to follow and join in topical discussions in subject areas which interest you. This is a good way to find out what your colleagues are doing around the world and to ensure you are up to date on news and developments. Most of them enable you to configure your list membership so you can receive a digest of messages, rather than each individual message, if you're worried about email overload.

• JISCmail is the UK National Academic Mailing List Service which facilitates discussion, collaboration and communication within the UK academic community and beyond. It is updated daily.
• Topica is an international listing of all kinds of discussion lists and newsletters.
• CataList is the catalog of LISTSERV lists. From this page, you can browse any of the 47,000+ public LISTSERV lists on the Internet. Continually updated.
• H-net focuses on humanities and social sciences discussion lists.

Wikis enable people to edit web pages collaboratively, and have many possible uses in academic research - they are very well-suited to conferences, for example. Here are some examples of wikis in the arts and humanities.

Blogs offer an easy way to publishing regularly updated information on the web, and invite others to post comments. Many researchers now use them to help disseminate and invite discussion of their research, as a contrast to the traditional scholarly publishing and peer review process. Looking for blogs in your subject area? Try Technorati, Google blog search , or search Intute by resource type (i.e 'blog').

Sharing online? You'll know all about Youtube and Flickr, but why not try Slideshare for presentations or Citeulike for references?

Mashups enable people to combine content or functionality from two or more sources to present the information in a different way. Take a look at this directory to see if you can find a mashup which interests you!