Never go on holidays... Looks like a few days into my holiday on the Sunshine Coast, one of the electrical storms sweeping through Brisbane these days knocked out the server, even in spite of various forms of surge protection. Ah well - a motherboard replacement and some serious fiddling with Linux later (massive thanks to Nic Suzor for pointing me to the tip that enabled my successful necromancy), here we are again.

And while we're here, I might as well note that the audio and Powerpoint from my Interactive Minds presentation on 27 November are now online. I'm afraid the audio quality is, shall we say, 'for collectors only', but here it is, for what it's worth. This end-of-year IM event aimed to highlight trends in 2008 and predictions for 2009, and regular readers of this blog will recognise a few of my recurring obsessions. Many thanks to Jen Storey for the invite.

Sydney.
The final Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress panel for today shifts our focus from broadcasting to (print as well as online) publishing. Hugh Martin, General Manager of APN Online, opens the discussion by noting the long history of developing online counterparts to print newspapers (and the slightly shorter history of doing the same for magazines). He points to the recent announcement that the Christian Science Monitor is soon to cease its print version, moving entirely to an online newspaper, while magazine publisher Condé Nast has a very hard time working out how to make money online.

Gießen.
My own keynote at this Web 2.0 and politics conference here in Gießen is next, in a session which discusses the possible impact of blogs, citizen journalism, and other forms of online political participation on wider political processes. My own thoughts as presented here build to some extent on the article I published in Information Polity earlier this year, and also draw on recent Australian examples (the role of Possums Pollytics in the Australian election campaign of 2007, and the new GetUp! project Project Democracy). I've posted the slides below, and will add the audio when I can the audio is now online, too.

Copenhagen.
It's the final session here at AoIR 2008. I've come in a little late for Lisa McLaughlin's presentation; she's been working in Malaysia to examine the Multimedia Super Corridor project which incorporates the Cyberjaya (technology) and Putrajaya (administration) districts.

The project was initiated in 1996 with much fanfare, but met with limited success as companies approached to develop representations there were initially reluctant to do so as the availability of a highly skilled technology workforce was doubtful. There was also strong skepticism about the project from the local community, not least because the building of the MSC required the displacement of existing communities of Tamil plantation workers. If knowledge societies require 'fast subjects', then these existing communities were now pushed into a position of 'slow subjects' providing menial services to those working and living in the MSC.

Copenhagen.
As it turns out, I have two papers in this post-lunch session on the last day of AoIR 2008 - in competing sessions. Luckily, Lars Kirchhoff and Thomas Nicolai are on hand to present one of them (I'll post the slides for this as soon as I get them from the two) - and I'm here to present my paper with Jason Wilson and Barry Saunders on hyperlocal citizen journalism (understood here in a relatively broad sense).

The first speaker here is William Dutton from the Oxford Internet Institute, whose aim is to move beyond terms such as Netizen and citizen journalism and towards an understanding of various political uses of the Net as forming a fifth estate, in addition to the press as a fourth estate in society. Such uses promote social accountability in business, industry, government, politics, and other sectors.

Copenhagen.
We're starting the last day of this very enjoyable AoIR 2008 conference already. This one is going to busy for me, as three of my papers are scheduled for today - two of them, in fact, in competing sessions (but luckily my colleagues Lars Kirchhoff and Thomas Nicolai, who are the lead authors, are able to present one of them). This morning, we're starting with a session on the online dimensions of national elections across a number of countries.

The first presenter is Yeon-Ok Lee, whose focus is on last December's presidential election in South Korea. The previous election to this, of course, was won by a small margin by the liberal underdog Rooh Moo-Hyun, due in good part to the activism of Korea's Netizens and to coverage by citizen journalism site OhmyNews. This made the 2007 election a particularly interesting case for further research.