Phew. I have spent four out of the last five working days virtually in non-stop meetings on a wide variety of issues - from research and teaching planning sessions to team meetings for the ACID Press project (which has a very outdated outline on the ACID Website, I'm afraid), meetings of the AoIR 2006 conference organising team, preliminary work for a new book project, and a PhD confirmation presentation by Creative Industries student Stephen Harrington - and tomorrow is looking no better, with an all-day meeting of the team of our teaching and learning project using blogs and wikis at QUT. In between all the meetings about what work needs to be done, it would be nice to find some time to actually do some work... (At least I did find the time to accept an invitation to join the editorial board of New Media & Society, and I look forward to being part of it.)

(Singapore) I've been travelling for around 24 hours straight now, and the end is in sight - currently I'm enjoying the free Internet connections at Singapore's Changi Airport, before the last flight leg into Brisbane in a couple of hours. Strictly speaking, when I arrive in Brisbane I'll have been underway for more than the 34 hours of plane travel over these last couple of days, though - my last day in the U.S. was taken up with another day trip, another guest lecture, this time at Temple University in Philadelphia. Of the four times I've now done the 'Understanding the Produser' lecture, this one was my favourite, I think - I had enough time to expand on some of the key ideas, there were great questions throughout, and some very nice comments afterwards (a close second was the first time, at SUNY Buffalo). Many thanks to Hana Iverson and her group for inviting me in (and shouting me dinner afterwards).

I've been meaning to post something about this for a while: in response to that silly article in The Australian recently, some 40 of us in the Creative Industries Faculty (which is what, half the permanent staff?) have written a joint response which was published in the letters section a couple of weeks ago. This was a spontaneous response by staff, not an action orchestrated by Faculty management, and so should demonstrate the massive groundswell of disgust and disagreement engendered by the original article (whose sheer cluelessness and lack of consideration for fellow students and staff continues to amaze me). Unfortunately, the authors of that article still haven't given up on their self-appointed crusade, sending out yet another diatribe (which was largely ignored by all) through an internal forum. Their persistence in the face of so many helpful corrections to their misconceptions reminds me of the old joke about the driver going up the wrong highway access ramp, then hearing a radio warning that someone is going in the wrong direction on the highway: 'What do you mean, someone? There's hundreds of them!' Anyway, here's the full letter we sent to The Australian, with all signatories:

My postgraduate coursework student Qiongli Wu pointed me to the Trendwatching site the other day - very interesting stuff. This ties right in with much creative industries theory, and especially points to the rise in user-led content production which is also at the heart of the open news and blogging phenomena I write about in my Gatewatching book. Of course in watching for new trends in this field the Trendwatching team are involved in a form of gatewatching - and what's more, they've even set up a world-wide network of what they call 'springspotters' to help them carry out this task.

Well, after working flat out on it nearly all of last week (and much more work in the preceding weeks), I finally submitted my application for promotion to lecturer level B at QUT on Friday. Let's hope for the best, and that I met the very specific format requirements for it as well! Many thanks especially to my referees - both those who provided statements of support for me and the four colleagues who will now act as formal referees commenting on my performance in the areas of research and scholarship, teaching, and service. So this weekend, I'm going to be catching up with other things that I didn't have time for during the week - answering the 180+ emails that are piling up in my inbox (and that's just the QUT email account alone), posting a few blog updates (including my report from the Eidos launch - see [weblink:212]), and working on the next assignment for the Graduate Certificate in Higher Education that I'm currently studying for.