Blogs

Leeds.
I'm really quite happy with the way that my first real attempts to use the IssueCrawler tool to map the Australian blogosphere have turned out. As I've mentioned here previously, I'm currently exploring this tool as a means of tracing how particularly topics are discussed across the distributed and ad hoc networks of blog-based conversation, and I used the case of Australian-born Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks as a case study - with renewed calls for the Australian federal government to urge the Bush administration to finally bring Hicks to trial or release him (he was captured in December 2001, but has not been charged yet), there was increased discussion about Hicks's fate over the last couple of months, and I've been interested to see how this has played out in the blogosphere.

So, my work on this was meant both as an exploration of the methodology for and proof of concept of using IssueCrawler in this context. Overall, I think this has worked pretty well, and I've begun drafting a paper to discuss my approach in detail (most of this was written while waiting around airport lounges during my rather circuitous trip to Ibiza and back last week, incidentally). This first research project is part of my wider work with the Citizen Journalism ARC Linkage project at QUT (for which Terry Flew, Stuart Cunningham, and I are chief investigators), and will also feed into a chapter which QUT PhD student Debra Adams and I have just successfully proposed for the upcoming collection Accented Blogging. I'm not going to post all of my current thoughts on this research work right now, but here's a first overview of what I've found, with a few graphs of the resultant networks:

There's a nice piece by Rosemary Sorensen in the Media section of today's Weekend Australian newspaper, called "Time You Turned On the Tube", discussing the implications of the recent rise to prominence of YouTube and other user-led content sites. Rosemary spoke to me at length for this article, and I'm very happy with the way it's turned out - sometimes such articles end up being little more than mainstream media hacks' attempts to denigrate what they don't understand, but this article balances an enthusiasm for the changes being brought about by such sites with the legitimate questions of intellectual property rights, quality, and economic sustainability which can be asked of them.

...the first thing that pops into your your head when you see this picture is 'hey, a smiley!' (Seen during my visit to Ibiza last week.)

And I guess you're a geek if you're aware of, or even celebrating, the fact that today, 14 March, is international π day (that is, if for the moment we adopt the utterly counterintuitive American month/date/year system of writing the date). Yes, on 3/14 at 1.59:26 there'll be (or there were, depending on your time zone) a lot of mathematicians quietly celebrating that mysterious little number, and perhaps even tucking into one while doing so. Bless 'em. And by means of marking this momentous date, here are the first four million or so digits of π for your entertainment. The last one is zero.

Jean has posted a YouTube video of a recent interview with philosopher Jürgen Habermas, and also links to my recent comments on Habermas's continued refusal to engage meaningfully with the Internet and other networked, decentralised, public many-to-many media and with what they may mean for the future of the public sphere. There's also the start of a little further discussion about how to situate such media within Habermas's theories. I meant to reply directly there, but my response turned out a little lengthy for a blog comment, so I'm posting it here instead.

Leeds.
The past few days have been nothing but productive, even if I've taken some time off my research for the book. Instead, I've completed and/or revised a number of conference papers and other articles that are due over the next few months - clearing the decks, or indeed the desk, before I fully descend into book mode.

2007 is going to be a very productive year for me, as far as papers, articles, and other publications are concerned. I've managed to combine my stays here at Leeds University and later on at MIT in Boston with a few conferences in the UK and the U.S., respectively, and there are a number of further conferences in Australia and elsewhere as well. There's also a couple of book chapters and at least another journal article, but most those I can't say that much about yet. I have now posted some of the completed conference papers on this Website, though, so please feel free to have a look (and to comment, of course!).

Leeds.
Towards the end of March, I'll be attending the ICE 3 conference (Ideas, Cyberspace, Education) at Ross Priory on the shores of Loch Lomond, Scotland (hopefully the conference acronym won't reflect the weather there). My own paper deals with issues around teaching produsage, but in the lead-up to this small but apparently high-powered conference (Gunther Kress is a keynote speaker), one of the presenter teams has set up a blog to discuss the challenges of social software and other online publishing models for the traditional academic publishing environment. Reading one of the position statements, by Bruce Ingraham, led me to post a somewhat un-bloggy, lengthy response, which I'm also reposting here:

Leeds.
After my guest lecture at the University of Lincoln the other day, one of the students, David Lawson, sent me an email with a couple of very thoughtful questions. I thought I might as well answer them publicly - further comments are, as always, invited...

After thinking about your lecture and how it may relate to the work that I'm doing, I saw the connection. The new publishing mode that you propose, 'produsage', throws up the question of Does this model better fit today's society, with relation to people's attraction to media that has no set narrative trajectory? If users are finding, contributing to and distributing the news then where is the narrative structure of this medium?

Jean and Catherine (nice to hear from you again!) have both tagged me. It's taken me some time to reply to this challenge, but here we go - five things you didn't know about me:

1. I once served in an electronic warfare unit in the West German army, and had to learn some basic Russian - our task was to listen in to Red Army transmissions in then-East Germany, presumably to work out if and when the Soviets were going to attack. Of course they didn't, and in fact during my time in the army the wall came down and the whole exercise became fairly pointless. (Well, you probably did know that one if you've read "The Redundant Spy"...)