Publications

I'm very happy to report that Uses of Blogs, which Joanne Jacobs and I have edited for Peter Lang, is about to go to the printers. One of the last things we've signed off on now is the book cover, based on an idea by Jo and me and produced with the assistance of ACID's Gavin Winter, who took the photo of the Rode microphone - here's a preview. There's probably no need to explain this, but of course the advancing phalanx of microphones in the image is symbolic for the multiplication and amplification of voices in and through the blogosphere - every blogger has their own soapbox, talk-back show, stage, or public lecture event now.

At the beginning of this week I posted a question about alternatives to Endnote and other bibliographic tools on the Association of Internet Researchers list, as well as on my blog. There response from my peers has been very strong, with a number of options emerging. As a reminder, what I was especially keen on were tools which would allow me to store multiple quotations against a single source - something Endnote isn't very good at at all. Some people did suggest adding quotes into a customised notes field within Endnote, but I don't feel that this is a very effective solution; someone also suggested storing references and quotations simply in a Word document, which is in fact what I did with the research for my book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production, but that's probably not a sustainable option in the long term - good tag, search and filter functionality would be very welcome. Another generic alternative would be to use a blog for storing references, but this means that you have to be connected to add new items, and (unless there's a conversion script available) also doesn't offer functionality for formatting references in different bibliographic styles.

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of issues - from research and teaching planning sessions to team meetings for the ACID Press project (which has a very outdated outline on the ACID Website, I'm afraid), meetings of the AoIR 2006 conference organising team, preliminary work for a new book project, and a PhD confirmation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.)

Spending yesterday and today at home, working. This week and the next are strangely teaching-free weeks for me as the two Monday public holidays mean that my Creative Industries unit doesn't run again until Monday week. So, instead I'm getting some other important work done. Yesterday I made further inroads into two papers - the one co-authored with Sal Humphreys about our wiki efforts in KCB336 New Media Technologies (which will go out to the International Wiki Symposium organisers later today), and one with Danny Butt on digital rights management in the music industry, for a special issue of Media and Arts Law Review (which Sal also has a hand in).