Copenhagen.
The third speaker in this session at COST298 is Funda Başaran Özdemir. Her interest is in the use of alternative news Websites in Turkey - in particular, of the labour movement site Sendika.org. Traditionally, monopolies of knowledge have determined what qualifies as knowledge and how it it disseminated; they derive their power from mastery of complexity, the control of raw media materials, and their performativity, speed, and the ability to afford high costs. Opposed to such strategic interests are tactical initiatives which insert themselves into the cracks and exploit temporary opportunities.

Athens.
The politics session at WebSci '09 continues with Elias Athanasiadis. Following Dan Gillmor, he notes the promise of new media for (political communication), and describes this as a transition from a top-down broadcasting model which has engendered politica apathy, mistrust, and citizen disengagement - or what he describes as 'skin-deep politics' - to a bottom-up netcasting in which interactivity, interconnectedness, the compression of time and space, and the disintermediation through phenomena such as citizen journalism creates the potential for citizen empowerment and (re)engagement.

Time to catch up with a few publications - my recent work is featured in a number of new collections:

Mobile Technologies: From Telecommunications to Media, edited by Gerard Goggin and Larissa Hjorth, collects some of the best papers from the Mobile Media 2007 conference (which I blogged about at the time) in Sydney. Looks like a fabulous collection, and I'm delighted that an article by former QUT Visiting Scholar Liu Cheng and me about SMS news in China has been included. We're looking especially at the experience at Yunnan Daily Press, where Cheng led the roll-out of SMS news functionality, and we're including some staggering statistics about the growth of Internet and mobile use in China as well (I wonder how they'll be affected by the global financial crisis...).

Just a quick announcement (more blogging to come soon, promise!) - one of the research teams at the Smart Services CRC that I'm participating in is currently running a survey about Australians' use of online news. Please participate, and pass on the link: http://tinyurl.com/digitalnews. One lucky respondent will win an iPod!

There's more to come from the CRC soon, incidentally - the first few major reports from the Audience and Market Foresight and Social Media research streams will be released shortly...

Never go on holidays... Looks like a few days into my holiday on the Sunshine Coast, one of the electrical storms sweeping through Brisbane these days knocked out the server, even in spite of various forms of surge protection. Ah well - a motherboard replacement and some serious fiddling with Linux later (massive thanks to Nic Suzor for pointing me to the tip that enabled my successful necromancy), here we are again.

And while we're here, I might as well note that the audio and Powerpoint from my Interactive Minds presentation on 27 November are now online. I'm afraid the audio quality is, shall we say, 'for collectors only', but here it is, for what it's worth. This end-of-year IM event aimed to highlight trends in 2008 and predictions for 2009, and regular readers of this blog will recognise a few of my recurring obsessions. Many thanks to Jen Storey for the invite.

Sydney.
The final Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress panel for today shifts our focus from broadcasting to (print as well as online) publishing. Hugh Martin, General Manager of APN Online, opens the discussion by noting the long history of developing online counterparts to print newspapers (and the slightly shorter history of doing the same for magazines). He points to the recent announcement that the Christian Science Monitor is soon to cease its print version, moving entirely to an online newspaper, while magazine publisher Condé Nast has a very hard time working out how to make money online.