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.
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
AREAS OF INTEREST
This symposium focuses on computational approaches to analysis of individual blogs and the blogosphere as a whole:
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:
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.
Bugger. So I was cleaning out some trackback spam from the spam filter, and managed to delete all comments on the site. Apologies to everyone who left a comment - nothing personal... Feel free to add them again.
A good meeting with Jo Jacobs and our research assistant Ian Rogers today, to move forward on the Uses of Blogs book. We've signed the book contract now and it's on its way back to Peter Lang in New York. We'll be sending out an update to our contributors shortly, to work out the deadlines leading up to delivery of the manuscript in early November. The more we work on this, the more this is shaping up to be a great collection. The enthusiasm displayed by our contributors (as well as by Jo and Ian) is great, and we do seem to have managed to collect a stellar cast of bloggers and blog researchers. It's a pleasure to work with such a supportive publisher as well!