NPR's All Things Considered: Today's Episode in the Series, "The Human Edge"

[Kerim Friedman]

Dear List Members,

I'd like to propose that everyone on this list engage in the following
experiment: pick five or six keywords related to your research and try
searching for them on Google. Be sure to use search terms that a
non-specialist would use to find information on this topic. Do you see
your name on any of the top search pages? No? This is easy to fix.

As Alex and Leila already suggested, blogging is one of the best ways
to make sure that people can find you and your work via Google. But
there are other ways as well: Do you have an updated home page which
links to full-text PDF files of your journal articles? Do you have
web-accessible descriptions of the courses you teach with PDFs of your
syllabi? Do you have social media accounts with sites like Twitter (or
Facebook) and Tumblr (or Posterous) where you regularly post
interesting links related to your research? Do you update relevant
Wikipedia pages with anthropological content? (Consider assigning
wikipedia edits on linganth related topics as part of course
homework!)

Google is not magic. If you don't make your work Google-friendly,
people won't find you on Google. That includes journalists. We have
worked hard to set up a framework for linguistic anthropologists to
make their work google-friendly via the SLA website, and there are
many more things that Leila and Alex would like to do (such as a
database of syllabi), but they need your support!

Oh, and by the way, the latest RadioLab is about language and
cognition:  http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2010/09/10

- Kerim