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.
Up next at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress is Robert Leach, Head of MCn Connect, whose interest is in digital television - and he begins by saying that interactive TV is now here; he finds it impossible to watch TV news without being able to 'press the red button' and get the latest news headlines. (Hmmm... Most Australians appear to use the Internet for this, rather than pay-TV?) Digital TV is changing rapidly. Does this mean the death of TV and TV advertising?

No, says Robert - we are watching as much TV as we ever have done, even though usage of other devices is also growing. Where the major growth area lies is digital video in its various forms. In the digital environment, devices have multiplied, but media are converging; the challenge for marketers and advertisers is to involve and engage audiences in video content. Where the Clinton campaign slogan in 1992 was "it's the economy, stupid", today the slogan for advertisers should be "it's the content, stupid" - if broadcasting or other media forms are declining, this is not the fault of technology, but of the content being broadcast. Great content will continue to attract a mass audience - but that audience may exist across a wide variety of devices from conventional televisions to online and mobile devices, scattered across time and space.

Sydney.
My talk was next at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress, and seemed to go down pretty well - I had been somewhat worried about getting booed off the stage by the broadcasters in the room, seeing as I was pointing out the dark clouds on the horizon for them. Here's the Powerpoint, and the paper is online, too - hope the audio recording worked, too! the audio turned out a little noisy once again, but it's better than nothing...

Sydney.
The next speaker at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress 2008 is Tiffany Hall, Technology Controller of Nations & Regions at the BBC. She's focussing on the experience of rolling out the BBC iPlayer, an on-demand TV catch-up service (similar to the ABC's iView); programmes can be streamed or downloaded, and the service is funded by UK television licence funding (which is why content at present is not available outside the UK - unless you use an anonymiser proxy with a UK IP address). The player also contains parental guidance features (as timeshifting undermines the more conventional scheduling of differently rated programmes at different times of the day). iPlayer streams at 800kbps, with sound at 250kbps, and there are further moves to maximise the picture quality. About 80% of users use Windows, about 20% Macs, and only around 1% Linux; the player is now also available on the Nintendo Wii and on the Virgin platform.

Well, with the Future of Journalism now safely behind us (the event, that is - some reflections at Larvatus Prodeo, and also here later this week, hopefully), it's time to look ahead to other upcoming conferences and talks. I've posted some information about some of these on the Produsage.org site already, so here's a quick summary only. You can also track my progress through these upcoming events at Dopplr.com.

Following up on a previous post on this subject: Tony Walker over at ABC Digital Futures notes the likely impending demise of one of the most innovative Webcasting projects of recent years: Pandora, the online radio station of the Music Genome Project. For the uninitiated: the MGP is a database of the specific traits of thousands of songs by a wide variety of artists, which enables it to suggest to users that if they like a specific song, they're also likely to enjoy a variety of songs from other albums and by other artists. On that basis, Pandora offers personalised Webcasting of tracks which the MGP identifies as similar to those tracks that a user has already said they like.

Brisbane.
We're back to paper sessions at the CCi conference now, and for a change I'm in the cultural science stream. The first speakers here are Chris Brennan-Horley from the University of Wollongong Susan Luckman from the University of South Australia and deals with mapping the creative industries in Darwin. This ties into wider creative industries and creative cities theory, and Chris's approach here has been to focus especially on mapping the micro-level through qualitative ethnographic approaches - this is necessary as much grassroots-level creative industries activity remains unaccounted for in standard quantitative surveys of creative industries performance. Chris operated especially through interviews with creative industries practitioners in the city, and he was interested especially in geographic information - what spaces in the city were of importance to such practitioners in relation to their creative work?

Brisbane.
There's a great line-up of keynotes and plenary speeches starting this second day of the CCi conference, before we get back to paper sessions: we kick off with Convergence Culture guru and serial book launcher Henry Jenkins, then move on to Camilla Cooke who was the driving force behind the online arm of the Australian Labor Party's successful Kevin07 campaign in the last federal election, and follow this with journalist and commentator Margaret Simons speaking on future directions for mainstream journalism. Should be good!