With the Internet Turning 40 and International Communication Association conferences completed, I'm briefly back in Brisbane, before setting off for the Australia/New Zealand Communication Association (ANZCA) conference in Canberra next week (hopefully with a recharged audio recorder!).

In the meantime, here's a quick update on some new publications I've been involved in - a number of my recent book chapters on a range of topics have now been published:

First, with a chapter on "News Blogs and Citizen Journalism" in e-Journalism: New Media and News Media I'm introducing my work on gatewatching and citizen journalism to an Indian readership - the book was edited by Kiran Prasad, who was my office mate at the University of Leeds while I was there in 2007 to do some research for the produsage book, and was published by B.R. Publishing in Delhi. I don't think the publisher actually has a Website - but there's a good overview of the collection at Cyberjournalist, and it also includes contact details for BR Publishing.

Hong Kong.
My paper is the second in this session at The Internet Turning 40, and I'm posting the Powerpoint below - it presents a rather different story from José's. Unfortunately, the recording didn't work - you'll have to read the paper...

Technorati : Internet Turning 40, Pro-Am, business, collaboration, community, produsage
Del.icio.us : Internet Turning 40, Pro-Am, business, collaboration, community, produsage

The Internet Turning 40

Exploring the Pro-Am Interface between Production and Produsage

Axel Bruns

• 19 June 2010 - The Internet Turning 40 conference, Hong Kong

Full Paper (PDF)

There's a fair amount of travelling coming up for me over the next few months - and as always, where I'm attending conferences I'll endeavour to cover them on snurb.info (though a good part of my travels in May is for personal reasons, so don't expect too much - a few tweets here and there, perhaps).

First, though, I'm off to Perth and Adelaide next week to speak at the State Libraries of Western Australia (on 28 April) and South Australia (on 30 April) . In a talk I'm calling "Outreach and Co-Curation: Engaging with Library Users", I'll explore how libraries and librarians may use social media to connect and collaborate with library users - this updates my keynote at the ARLIS conference a couple of years ago and also builds on the social media reports I've written for the Smart Services CRC. Ultimately, what this points to is the significant potential for librarians and library users to engage in a shared practice of co-curating information and knowledge: importing and adapting produsage approaches into library practice, and in the process perhaps opening up new user communities for our libraries. I've already posted the Powerpoint here - and all going well, I'll add the audio from the presentation later on as well. UPDATE: The audio from the SLSA talk is now online as well. Thanks again to the SLSA and SLWA folks for organising the event!

Smart Services CRC

Social Media: Understanding Online Communities

Axel Bruns

• 21 April 2010 - Smart Services CRC Participants Meeting, Sydney

Technorati : collaboration, communities, produsage, smart services, social media
Del.icio.us : collaboration, communities, produsage, smart services, social media

With my colleague Jan Schmidt from the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg, I'm delighted to have been approached by the editors of the Taylor & Francis journal New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia to edit a special issue on produsage. Below is the Call for Papers - we welcome any enquiries and submissions. Please spread the word!

Exploring Produsage

A Special Issue of New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia

Call for papers

The concept of produsage points to the shift away from conventional producer/consumer relationships, and highlights the more fluid roles of users and contributors within social media environments. Participants in open source projects, in Wikipedia, in YouTube and Second Life are no longer merely consuming or using preproduced material, but neither are they at all times acting as fully self-determined producers of fully formed new works; rather, they occupy a hybrid position as produsers of content.

I'm very happy to report that the second part of my Social Media report for the Smart Services CRC has now been released, again under a Creative Commons licence. Volume 1 is still available here, and provides a general overview of the state of the art in social media; in doing so, it also points to a number of key social media sites which represent important developments in the field.

Volume 2 is divided into two parts: Part 1 offers background information that is crucial to the development of an understanding of how communities work and what motivates their participants to contribute, while Part 2 converts that understanding into a series of strategic recommendations for profit and non-profit organisations aiming to develop a presence within the social media environment. There is probably nothing here that will surprise long-time followers of social media developments - instead, the report aims at those individuals and organisations who feel the need to develop social media strategies, but have yet to establish a full understanding of what makes online communities tick, and of how to engage with them.

It's been a good week already - on Monday I've received notice that we've been successful with a major research grant application in this year's ARC Discovery round. The three-year project for which we're receiving $400,000 from the ARC, with my esteemed colleague Jean Burgess as the postdoc researcher, will extend the existing work on blog mapping which I've been engaged in for the past few years and take it to a new level - beyond capturing 'only' what happens in the Australian political blogosphere, we'll be working to get a much more comprehensive picture of Australian public communication online across blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and perhaps even Facebook. None of this would be possible without the fantastic work of our colleagues Lars Kirchhoff and Thomas Nicolai at Sociomantic Labs in Berlin, incidentally, so a very big thanks to them for their massive contribution so far - we're looking forward to the next three years... Below is the abstract for the research project (and no doubt I'll post more about it here as we get going in early 2010) - and there are various articles and presentations covering our blog mapping efforts to date elsewhere on this site.

New Media and Public Communication:
Mapping Australian User-Created Content in Online Social Networks

Understanding the ways people contribute to and use the Internet for a wide range of purposes is important to Australia's future from both a social and an economic perspective. Effective, evidence-based policy depends on developing a vastly improved understanding of the current level of Australians' online activities and interests. This project provides crucial, detailed baseline data on the social, cultural and technological dynamics of Australian online public communication, which can inform further government initiatives to strengthen the country's digital economy and to maximise civic engagement through media participation.

Journalism & Media Research Centre / Curtin University of Technology

Produsage and Beyond: Exploring the Pro-Am Interface

Axel Bruns

• 29 Oct. 2009, 2-4 p.m. - Staff Seminar, Seminar Room, Journalism & Media Research Centre, 3-5 Eurimbla St (corner High St), Randwick, Sydney

• 29 April 2010 - Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia

The concept of produsage (Bruns 2008) describes the user-led collaborative approach to content creation which is prevalent in open source, citizen journalism, and the Wikipedia, as well as many other social media spaces. While many produsage projects have emerged initially to challenge dominant players in industry, their successful establishment as viable and sustainable alternatives also opens the door for an exploration of manageable cooperative arrangements between industry and community. Many challenges remain for such Pro-Am (Leadbeater & Miller 2004) models, however - not least an often deep-seated sense of mutual distrust -, and successful Pro-Am models may be most likely to succeed when sponsored by trusted third parties (public broadcasters, NGOs). This presentation explores pitfalls and possibilities in the Pro-Am space.

Milwaukee.
The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2009 is David Bello, whose focus is on Amazon's Mechanical Turk system. This is a form of crowdsourcing, which itself combines the outsourcing of labour to an external provider with community-provided open source labour; crowdsourcing thus exhibits an open quality where users are not employed or hired, but simply choose to perform the tasks that they are interested in. In crowdsourcing, the requesting body solicits the general public to join the labouring community.

In the Amazon case, the company provides the platform which mediates the labour process; using this platform, a requesting body can provide tasks which are then performed by the labouring community. Community members are remunerated according to their provision of HITs (human intelligence tasks), which address problems that cannot be done by computers (semantic and cultural understanding, or sensory translation).