Blogs

Following on from my recent email conversation with King Crimson biographer Sid Smith, he's asked me to help pass on this alert to fans:

Inside King Crimson DVD and CD

A statement from Robert Fripp and DGM

The Inside The Music series is a "pot of gold" for Bob Carruthers & classic rock productions. It addresses a valuable & useful area of popular music studies; but in a cheap, nasty & cynical fashion that exploits everyone & scams the artists, the music & the fans.

Kairosnews has posted an extensive bibliography of blog research, including papers by many of the usual suspects. Thanks to Jill Walker for pointing this out.

I spent most of yesterday working on the final draft of my book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production. The proofread manuscript arrived back from Peter Lang in New York earlier this week, and so I went through the thing one last time to apply the requested changes - nothing too serious (a few last remnants of Australian spelling and a few minor formatting issues), but a fairly tedious and time-consuming process nonetheless. Had to change printers at the last minute as well as the one in my office developed an annoying smudging problem, but finally now the whole lot is printed (and Peter Lang will scan these pages for printing the book) and the completed package has started the return journey around the world. According to Fedex it should arrive there in ten hours, and if all goes well this would mean the book can go to the printers this coming week!

Suddenly conferences are popping up all over the place - and I'm particularly sorry I didn't hear about this one earlier (the call for papers is closed now):

The 14th AMIC Annual Conference

"Media and Society in Asia: Transformations and Transitions"

18 - 21 July 2005, Beijing, People's Republic of China.

AMIC is the Asian Media Information and Communication Centre, based in Singapore. Conference topics include:

• Role of

I received an invitation to participate in a proposed symposium at Stanford today. Looks very promising, even though I don't have a strong computational bent in my own research. The last couple of topics in particular have piqued my interest. (Note that the symposium is only proposed so far, not confirmed.)

AAAI 2006 SPRING SYMPOSIUM SERIES
COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES TO ANALYZING WEBLOGS

March 27-29, 2006 - Stanford University, California, USA

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AREAS OF INTEREST

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This symposium focuses on computational approaches to analysis of individual blogs and the blogosphere as a whole:

Following on from his recent interview series, Trebor Scholz at the Institute for Distributed Creativity is now hosting a one-day conference. The title is drawn from the interview he did with me, which is kinda nice - wish I could be there! (Incidentally, the conference is being podcast as well...)

Share, Share Widely
A Conference on New-Media Art Education

Friday, May 6th, 11am - 8pm

The folks at Peter Lang sent me the proof for the cover of my book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production today. This is based on a design by QUT student Gordon Grace, who also led the team that redesigned M/C - Media and Culture last year. So, look out for it in the bookshop - it should go to print in a month or so...

A few days ago, I received some nice email feedback for a review of King Crimson's 2003 album The Power to Believe, which I'd published in M/C Reviews at the time. Michael Cussen wrote to me:

Very good review of Power to Believe. Did you send it to DGM?

I hadn't, but I've now sent off a quick message to Sid Smith, Crimso biographer and currently helping to build the upcoming new Website for their record label Discipline Global Mobile. I'm also including pointers to two earlier pieces for PopMatters:

I posted the call for papers for the upcoming 'copy' issue of M/C Journal today:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - 18 April 2005

M/C - Media and Culture
http://www.media-culture.org.au/
is calling for contributors to the 'copy' issue of

M/C Journal
http://journal.media-culture.org.au/

M/C Journal is looking for new contributors. M/C is a crossover journal between the popular and the academic, and a blind- and peer-reviewed journal.

Don't know why this is suddenly all happening now, but I've been contacted by a good cross-section of the Australian media over the last couple of days. In addition to the Online Opinion piece which is now up, at first Jennifer Dudley from Brisbane's Courier-Mail approached me as an expert commentator on blogging; she's published an article about information addiction in today's issue (which itself is based on a posting by blogger Om Malik who points to a kind of 'Internet Anxiety Disorder' that results from the vastness of information now available to everyone). Then I was approached by Peter Gooch from ABC radio to do a live interview on the same topic, sparked by that article. I was on air around 1.30 p.m. today.