Mower MagicWell, here I am at the National Library in Canberra - and the first thing that greeted me is a large peace sign mowed into the lawns across Lake Burley Griffin from Parliament House. Nice work.

I'm heading off to Canberra on Monday, where I'm speaking at a conference on Archiving Web Resources organised by the National Library of Australia. My topic is "Contemporary Culture and the Web" - not an easy area to summarise in 30 minutes! This conference follows on from the IIPC meeting at the British Library which I attended in Septemb

I've spent the weekend updating the site of M/C - Media and Culture, for which I serve as General Editor. Phew - a lot of work, even though the placement students who designed the upgrade have done a fantastic job updating the look and feel of the site. The next step now is to upload the new issue, 'fame'; this should happen tonight, I hope.

Well, that's that, more or less. The update is done and trackback should work now. Still a few minor things to iron out, but things should work OK...

I've added some more information about my book project, Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production, to this Website. A draft of the introduction is also online now. I'll be working on the book throughout this year - have to deliver the final draft to Peter Lang Publishing in New York by the end of November.

Interesting article on Six Limitations to the Current Open Source Development Methodology in Openflows News. I'm doing a lecture on Open Source in a few weeks; this might be useful...

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.