archives

Ooh, some very interesting new releases listed in the latest Cuneiform/Wayside announcement. Michael Giles's long-lost Progress is finally available, and there'll be a DVD from Van der Graaf Generator ! Also Robert Wyatt's Solar Flares Burn for You, a new band with Frédéric L'Épée, Happy the Man's new The Muse Awakens and a new CD from Djam Karet.

Dr Axel Bruns is an Associate Professor in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. He is a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi), and a Senior Researcher in the Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre.

Someone on Slashdot pointed to this article on "Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality" by Clay Shirky. Very interesting stuff, and another indication (as if one were needed) of how blogs and similar interactive technologies are coming of age. I'm listing it here for further reference.

Doing more work on my M/C Journal article for the 'fight' issue today. It was accepted for publication with some requests of further changes by the refeerees. One referee wondered about the impact of CD burning and filesharing on CD sales, so I did a bit more research and rediscovered a nice article at The Register which questions the RIAA's claims using its own figures.

No, this isn't about whether you'd rather be obliterated by the weapons of mass destruction of Dubya's evil empire or Kim's evil minnow. Rather, there's the start of an interesting series of articles about content management systems at the All-American Web Portals site (what a name).

Haven't written for a while, but (because) much is going on. I'm currently preparing the 2003 fibreculture conference here in Brisbane, with a host of colleagues, and am also hoping to get in a grant proposal for a project I'm developing with my colleague Liz Ferrier at UQ.

Backing up from an equally annoying and upsetting week - I lost a harddrive just after Easter. Luckily I had backed up most of my work-related files just before, but much other data seems gone, including all of my emails, my calendar, and my address book. You don't realise how much you depend on Outlook until it's gone... Data recovery services charge through the nose and I can't justify spending a cool $6000 for a 70% chance of getting my data back.

Definites:

• KCCC
• Yes Remasters: Box; more
• VdGG - Present
• Banco - Live 1975
• White Willow - Storm Season
• Magma - Ka
• Genesis Box II ?
• AMY CD (http://www.cdbaby.com/amycd)
• SBB
• GY!BE
• Anekdoten - Gravity
• Cowboy Junkies - Radio One Sessions
• David Sylvian - Blemish
• echolyn - A Little Nonsense CD Box
• Trey Gunn - Road Journals
• 21CSB CD/DVD / CD
• La Maschera di Cera - Il Grande Labirinto
• Grobschnitt

Maybes:

Resource Centre Sites: The New Gatekeepers of the Web?

This thesis introduces and analyses the emerging Website genre of Resource Centre Sites. RCSs are sites which combine news, rumours and background information as well as community discussion and commentary on their chosen topic, and frequently serve as a first point of entry for readers interested in learning more about the field. They also offer spaces for virtual communities of specialists orenthusiasts to emerge, who in the process and as a product of their interaction on these sites collate detailed resource collections and hyperlink directories for their fields of interest. Therefore, Resource Centre Sites significantly involve their users as content contributors and producers, turning them into what is here termed 'produsers' of the site. Aiming to evaluate all the content relevant to their field that is becoming available online, and to coopt or at least link to this information from the news and resources collection that is a central part of the RCS, Resource Centre Site produsers engage in an adaptation of both traditional journalistic gatekeeping methodologies and librarianly resource collection approaches to the Web environment: in the absence of gates to keep online, they have become 'gatewatchers', observing the publication of news and information in other sources and publicising its existence through their own sites. Their operation is studied here through a number of case studies of major existing Resource Centre Sites from various fields of interest. These sites are analysed both based on their available Web content, and using backgroundinformation obtained in a series of email interviews with RCS creators. In combination, this offers insights into the operating philosophies of sites and site editors, and provides an opportunity to assess to what extent these ideas have been translated into everyday practice.

It's taken a while, but finally this site is directly accessible to outside users - so if you're reading this, welcome ! There have been any number of delays, and I would have liked to get this online earlier - but the lack of content for the general information pages meant that I didn't want to launch yet, and the delayed launch meant I didn't blog as regularly as I wanted to. Now I'll try and provide more frequent blog entries as the year progresses.

OK, I've grabbed a new version of import.module from the Drupal CVS, which means that the newsfeeds should be fixed now - recently the Kuro5hin.org feed just wouldn't update any more. Let's hope that this didn't break the other feeds.

This also brought home the fact that Drupal is now up to version 4.3.x, while I'm still running on 4.1.