Briefly back in Australia, yesterday I went down to Sydney to speak at the Australian Society of Archivists’ 2011 Symposium [10] (staged at the fabulous Luna Park venue). My paper was meant as an urgent call to action on the question of archiving public activities in social media spaces – so much material which will be of immense value to future researchers is being lost every day if we don’t get our act together very soon; we can’t wait for the lumbering beast that is the U.S. Library of Congress to do the job for us, however fulsomely they’ve promised to archive the full public Twitter firehose [11]. The truth is, here in Australia we already have the technologies for capturing and archiving large datasets of public communication on Twitter and elsewhere – but someone with the necessary public standing and archivist expertise (the National Library, the National Archives, …) must now take the initiative; the sooner, the better.

My paper (with audio) is below:

Having safely returned from Sydney, on Sunday I’m off again; this time to Berlin for the inaugural symposium [15] of the new Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society [16], sponsored by Google and supported inter alia by my dear friends from the Hans-Bredow-Institut [17], Hamburg. The symposium, which should be a very exciting event, will help determine the future research agenda of the new Institute.

After that, I go on to Rio de Janeiro to deliver a keynote on “Gatekeeping, Gatewatching, and Real-Time Feedback” at the annual conference of the Brazilian Society of Journalism Researchers [18] (full paper and slides already online here); and I return to Australia just in time – I hope – to participate in the CCI’s own symposium [19], held mid-November in Sydney. And that should be my travel done for a while, hopefully…