When was the last time you had the joy of discovering an island community somewhere on the web of a community of intellectuals? The vibrant communities we talk about in our corner of the technology echo chamber are well known to us – FriendFeed, Twitter, parts of Facebook, a number of assundrous blogging communities that generally show up on Techmeme.

Intel pinged us yesterday with news announcing their Intel Academic Community. The news is that they’ve now joined up with their 1000th university (Jordan University of Science and Technology in Irbid, Jordan). None the less, I’m still astonished that such a colorful community could have emerged so completely under the radar.

The network has been around since 2007, and is a self contained website that plays host to dozens of active forums and hundreds of bloggers who consistently submitting posts. The ideas covered range from the broad, like “How mature is Computer Science,” to the very much over my head like ‘Optical I/O Technology to prevent Multi / Many-Core Bottlenecks’.

By and large, though, if you’ve any experience with programming at all, you’ll find some interesting topics and curriculum to whet your whistle, as well as interesting concepts.

How social is it, though? If you define it’s social quotient by how integrated it is with the rest of the web, it gets a marginally passing grade.  The building blocks are there, thankfully. Every blog post is part of a number of different RSS feeds (the most useful of which are the category feeds). Comments are enabled, and the community will often self-select various Intel educational materials that are relevant to the post.

In terms of playing well with the rest of the web, there is room for improvement. I mainly say this only because I’m in the technology field and have been blogging tech for over a decade, and have only just now heard of the community. There is literally a wealth of expertise contained here under the banner of Intel.

Reaching outward into the ecosphere of technology bloggers, integrating with outside tools such as FriendFeed or Twitter and generally just flaunting what they have would be solid moves for Intel in a marketing sense.  The community seems solid, but like well groomed and city park only used by the caretakers, it isn’t quite living up to it’s potential.

Take a gander.  Am I right? Is Intel’s community ready for a 2.0 upgrade and visitors from the Techmeme commons, or are they better served as a gated community?