Milwaukee.
The first keynote at AoIR 2009 is by Siva Vaidhyanathan, whose focus is on the Googlisation of everything (aiming low, then...). He begins by noting the largely uncritical veneration of Google and its impact on everyday life; Google is now almost impossible to get by without, which is quite an achievement for a company that is only 11 years old. One particularly notable recent project here is the Google library project which aims to digitise as many extant books as possible; where libraries around the world have for some time explored the possibility of a coordinated worldwide project, Google simply came in and got going with it. Especially troubling in this context is the cost of this to libraries.

Milwaukee.
The final speaker in this first session at AoIR 2009 is Carol Soon, who shifts our focus to Singaporean political bloggers. Political blogging and related forms challenge conventional top-down communication flows, of course, and in doing so also undermines established entities' authority in information dissemination. What follows is a diversification of political participation in the networked public sphere - and in the Singaporean context, then, who are the key players here?

The networked public sphere can be seen as an autopoietic system,in which flows of communication and relationships are self-organising, move from the bottom up, freely within clusters and in a self-determined fashion. This challenges systems which traditionally hold more powerful positions - and hyperlink analysis can be utilised to examine the flows of information in this changing environment. Such flows may involve conventional political parties, but also civil society groups (which in Singapore particularly challenges the established system).

Milwaukee.
The next speaker at AoIR 2009 is Uta Russmann, whose focus is on Web campaigning in Austria during the 2008 national elections, which for the first time saw a substantial use of online media for campaiging. There had been a use of Web-based information in previous elections, of course, but so far this remained quite simple and unsophisticated - mainly just various forms of shovelware.

Uta's study examined the use of the Web during the 2008 campaign, focusing on information provision, interaction with voters, and mobilisation of voters for campaigning, as well as broader connection and networking functions between parties and the media. This also takes into account the lessons from the 2007/8 US campaigns, which pointed to the Net becoming a key source of political information and participation especially for younger voters, as well as similar observations in recent campaigns in Germany, Italy, and France.

Milwaukee.
I've made it to the Association of Internet Researchers conference in windy Milwaukee, and promptly managed to seriously upset my stomach - so let's see how we go today. The first speaker in my first session at AoIR 2009 is Aaron S. Veenstra, whose focus is on political blogging during the 2008 US elections. He notes the emergence of what he calls 'new' new media - YouTube, Facebook, Twitter - and these have affected the way we think about political blogging, too.

Overall, too, blogging itself is increasingly difficult to define as technical definitions are dynamic and blogging genres are inconsistent at the top end and incredibly varied at the bottom end. The top tier of blogs may now be separating from the field, and liberal and conservative blogs (in the US) are growing apart; additionally, it is also important to distinguish between community and individual functions.