On Tuesday I'm heading off to Europe again, for a whirlwind tour of three conference in three countries within ten days. In combination, they provide a pretty good overview of my current research interests - I'll be presenting what is more or less an English-language version of my paper on prosumption and produsage from the Prosumer Revisited conference in March at a conference called Transforming Audiences in London; from there I'm heading to Vienna for the 2009 Conference on Electronic Democracy to present a paper co-authored with Gatewatching.org's Jason Wilson which discusses various developments in e-government and e-democracy in Australia (including the DBCDE government consultation blog trial and GetUp!'s Project Democracy); and finally I'm off to Cardiff for the Future of Journalism conference where I'm presenting the outcomes of my interviews with some of the principals behind Germany's successful community news platform myHeimat.de. (This Future of Journalism conference is not to be confused with the MEAA's somewhat lacklustre series of 'Future of Journalism' talkfests in Australia last year, incidentally...) Along the way, I guess I'll also take a little time off to celebrate my recent promotion to Associate Professor...

It's nice to see that we're getting some good press on the recent Social Media: State of the Art report for the Smart Services CRC - QUT has put out a press release for it now, and it's also been featured on Australian Policy Online. Mark Bahnisch and I are currently working on Volume Two of the report, which should be delivered to the CRC in a couple of weeks and will hopefully be released publicly not too long after that.

Brisbane.
The next session at ANZCA 2009 starts with a paper by my colleague Terry Flew, who is also the chair of the conference. He begins by noting the old trope of the journalist as hero (as embodied for example by Messrs. Woodward and Bernstein in the Watergate affair), and its decline (Glenn Milne is the anti-hero in this context). There are substantial impacts of Web 2.0 technologies on contemporary journalism, of course, and there are serious questions about the future role of journalism. News organisations have most trouble, in fact, not in coming to terms with new technologies but with this new lack of deference to their once powerful position.

Brisbane.
Bugger: the ANZCA 2009 programme incorrectly listed Brian McNair's keynote for 10 a.m. rather than 9 a.m., so I missed almost all of it - very, very frustrating. Hope someone else blogged it...

So, I'm now in the first panel session of this last conference day, and the first speaker in this session is Nazanin Ghanavizi, whose interest is in blogging in Iran - a very timely topic at this point, of course. She begins by noting that one of the most important factors of social life is being able to give voice to one's ideas. Iranian society is already highly active online, especially by blogging - Persian is a major blog language, with some one million blogs in Persian, even in spite of the comparatively small population of Persian-speakers worldwide.

Hamburg.
The next speaker at Alcatel-Lucent Foundation / HBI 2009 is Holger Schmidt, from the conservative daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (but he is quick to point out that he does not speak on the paper's behalf here). He asks what business models exist online, and notes the suggestions (by Rupert Murdoch and others) to implement paid content models - not least since free content models online are supposed to undermine paid models for print newspapers (but, he notes, the audiences for online and offline news content are hardly identical).

Hamburg.
We move on now to the economic perspective on quality content at Alcatel-Lucent Foundation / HBI 2009, and begin with Klaus Goldhammer from Goldmedia. He notes the current financial crisis; Germany's economy is expected to shrink by 6%, for example, and this has led not least also to the demise of a number of major magazine publications in the country. There has been a 20% decline in the circulation of German newspapers over the past ten years (leading some to increase their sales price); there was a 82% decrease in the stock price of leading commercial television company ProSiebenSat.1; while at the same time proceeds from television licences to the public broadcasters have increased substantially.

Copenhagen.
Finally we move on to Aylin Aydogan here at COST298. She, too, points to the changes associated with the rise of Web 2.0, and especially the emergence of user-generated content. Views of these changes as positive developments are hardly new, however - earlier Web-related developments were similarly seen as progress. Today, however, changes are very clearly driven by users and their motivations, and this is shifting the relationship between users and media organisations.

Past research in this context has focussed especially on the impact of citizen journalism and news blogging on news organisations; Aylin's study adds to this in the Turkish context. (She's taking a long time to take us through the existing work in this field, though - I wish she'd get to her work!)

Copenhagen.
I've made the trip to Ballerup again for the second day of COST298 (my last - tomorrow I've got to travel back to Germany). We begin with Ike Picone, whose interest is in user motivations for participation in produsing the news. Ike begins by extending the produsage model to a two-dimensional structure (from production to usage, and from passive to active; 'old media' are therefore largely passive and comsumptive, while many Web media forms also remain consumptive, but are more active (passive and active could also be translated here into 'lean back' and 'lean forward', then).