AoIR 2009

Milwaukee.
The second keynote here at AoIR 2009 is by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. She begins by noting the theme of this conference, Internet: Critical, which she says brilliantly captures the trajectory of the Internet thus far. If television is intimately linked to catastrophe, then the Net finds its justification, temporality, and crisis in crisis itself, in the critical - it is a crisis / critical machine. But the Net has not ended theory, or the need for theory, if we see theory as a way to resolve crisis, but spread theory everywhere. It has made ubiquitous (and thus banal) networks, which themselves depend on how they are imagined.

Milwaukee.
The next presentation at AoIR 2009 is by Hallvard Moe, who begins by noting that the public sphere is still a useful concept It exposes us to expressions, opinions, and perspective we would not otherwise have chosen in advance, and provides a range of common experiences for citizens. But how do online media impinge on this - do they segment and polarise the public sphere (as suggested by people like Cass Sunstein), or provide more connections between and access to different ideas (as per Yochai Benkler's networked public sphere)?

Milwaukee.
The final speaker this morning at AoIR 2009 is my PhD student Tim Highfield, who focusses on the French blogosphere and uses much the same methodology as in our joint paper. His work focusses on a dataset of French blog and mainstream news media posts from some 450 sites throughout 2009, and out of this identifies what events and topics are driving discussion. Sites in his sample were identified through searches on relevant search engines as well as on specialist blog aggregators such as the French Linkfluence.

Overall, this particular study, which focusses on blogs, now takes in some 23000 posts from 148 active blogs over 221 days, out of some 165,000 posts when you also include the mainstream news media. Because the French political environment is multi-party, these blogs cluster into a number of groupings, rather than just a broad 'left' and 'right' category.

Milwaukee.
The next speakers in the blogging session at AoIR 2009 are Muhammad Abdul-Mageed and Priscilla Ringrose, whose focus is on war blogging. Such blogging addresses the exceptional communication demands during war situations, and war bloggers in warzones can meet these needs speedily and with authority. This also reflects a continuing shift in the media overall. The focus of this paper is on the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon, where western media profiled (English-language) Israeli and Lebanese blogs.

So, the bloggers here belonged to two oppossing, warring nations,and espoused different ideological positions; how were they chosen and what positions do they reflect? What demographics, structural features, thematic, regional, and political positioning do they exhibit? According to which parameters were they selected? The study analysed all posts from 40 blogs (20 Israeli, 20 Lebanese) during the 34-day war in June and August 2006, which were found using search engines, media outlets, and blogs. Blogs had to be based in Lebanon or Israel, had to have at least five posts during the 34 days, had to be in English, had to have at least one hit in the global media, and had to be single- or group-authored rather than blog fora.

Milwaukee.
Relief: my stomach seems to be the right way up again, and the horrible headache from yesterday is gone, too. Just in time for the second day at AoIR 2009, which begins with the blogs session that has both my paper (with Tim Highfield, Lars Kirchhoff, and Thomas Nicolai) and Tim's paper in it. More on those soon, but we begin the morning with Anders Larsson, who provides a review of current research on blogs and blogging. Technorati has now indexed some 133 million blogs since 2002, and there has been wide research interest in blogs as well - from a focus on politics in blogs to communication processes among individuals and more recently an interest in the organisational and professional uses of blogs.

Milwaukee.
The final speaker for this session at AoIR 2009 is Michael Dick, who focusses on the idea of Web science as political economy. This builds on Tim Berners-Lee's idea of Web Science, which applies especially computer science approaches to the study of the Web's evolution, design, and operation, with an aim of understanding and 'managing' the Web. The majority of these ideas, however, are the Semantic Web in disguise, Michael says.

This assumes a continual evolution of the Web, from a Web of documents to the interactive Web 2.0 and on to the 'deep Web' which further mines the vast amount of data generated through Web 2.0 services. The next steps from here are the Semantic Web and the Web of data, which describe and utilise this material using universal ontology languages. Essentially, this converts loose Web 2.0 folksonomies to manageable taxonomies.

Milwaukee.
OK, I'm soldiering on for the last of today's sessions at AoIR 2009 - can't wait to get back to my room and sleep off this illness, though. Hopefully I'll feel better for my session tomorrow! This session is on theorising Web 2.0, and we begin with Jacob Thomas Matthews. he begins by questioning Web 2.0 as a term, and suggests the collaboative Web as an alternative way of describing this phenomenon. Either way, this is often described as a substantial cultural shift which may lead to the emergence of a new participatory culture which empowers the user.

Milwaukee.
The next speaker in this last.fm panel at AoIR 2009 is Adriana Amaral, who shifts our focus to Brazilian users of last.fm, and points especially to the role of online profiles here. Profiles are often related to a specific scene, subculture, or musical genre, and musical taste is a convergent process involving mass media, word of mouth, friends, community, family, and other social spaces. There are a number of site types here - classification, musical data visualisation, and online radio stations (based on listening data); each of these are important features of last.fm. The way the site deals with tagging intensifies the individual and collective relations of recommendations; its folksonomy can be understood as a narrow typology.

Milwaukee.
Up next in this panel at AoIR 2009 is Simone Pereira de Sá, whose focus is on music recommendation systems; such systems are mediators or translators to which we delegate the task of recommendation. They promise something else for the different actors in the process: artists are presented to the right people, while listeners find new music they should enjoy, and this is further enhanced through social networking tools and tagging functionalities.

Labelling systems deal with the complex issue of music classifications, choices, and tastes, and this ties into the question of musical genres - so, how do recommendation systems work on this basis, and strain, support, or overcome the idea of musical generes? As Simon Frith has suggested, one of the greatest pleasures of entertainment culture is the discussion of different values and tastes; different opinions have different levels of credibility here. This is also connected to subcultural theory, of course, which ascribes certain subcultural capital to agents in contact with the media and refers to consuming certain exclusive information and the 'right' cultural products.

Milwaukee.
After the first keynote at AoIR 2009, I'm now in a panel on last.fm that begins with Nancy Baym. She asks what the term 'friend' means in a social networking site; this both in an interpersonal context and in the context of society as a whole, where some suggest that the term 'friend' is losing its meaning through its use on social networking sites. Last.fm was founded in London in 2005, and now has more than 35 million users; it is highly international, and based in the first place on the use of audio scrobbling application which share what its users are listening to.