Brisbane.
The last AMIC 2008 session this afternoon starts with a paper by my colleague Jason Wilson, our research associate on the Youdecide2007 project and its follow-ups, and he presents especially on the experience and lessons from Youdecide. There may be a need for a structural modification in the role of conventional journalists, and a change of attitude towards working with citizen journalists.

Brisbane.
The post-lunch session at AMIC 2008 starts with Zheng Jiawen from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, whose focus is on citizen journalism in China - and particular, on Zola Zhou, popularly recognised as China's first citizen journalist. Broadly, citizen journalism is a public response to the inadequate performance of the mainstream journalism industry (and rose to prominence especially after the events of 11 September 2001). Its rise also contributed to a new debate on the nature of journalism itself, and many initial views argued that news blogging was not journalism due to the narrow subjects explored by most blogs, the reliance on second-hand information, the limited sources and experience of news blogging, and its limited credibility.

Brisbane.
I was the first presenter in the next session at AMIC 2008 (and my presentation on citizen journalism in the 2007 Australian federal election is already online here). Hopefully the audio recording worked as well - I'll add it as soon as possible. The audio from my talk is now online.

Brisbane.
The second day of the AMIC conference has now started, and we begin with a keynote from Vipul Kant Upadhay, the CEO and Editor in Chief of Merinews.com in India. This site is now the largest Internet news portal in the country, and builds very significantly on citizen journalism. Vipul begins by noting that he is no journalist by profession, but instead came to this venture through student activism; his initial motivation was the widespread corruption and nepotism in India.

Brisbane.
We're now in the opening session of the AMIC conference "Convergence, Citizen Journalism and Social Change". Today is just a short afternoon with a couple of keynote speeches; tomorrow, the bulk of the papers (including my colleague Jason Wilson's and mine) will be presented. Pradip Thomas from the University of Queensland is offering some opening remarks - referring to the common trope of the decline of mainstream journalism, and the corresponding rise of citizen journalism and its effect on political developments.

Over the next few weeks I'll be a participant in a number of events in Brisbane and online. As always, I'll try to do as much live-blogging as possible. Here's a preview of what's coming up:

• This Wednesday and Thursday I'm at the AMIC conference on Convergence, Citizen Journalism, and Social Change, where I'll also present my paper "Citizen Journalism in the 2007 Australian Federal Election (AMIC 2008)". I've already uploaded the Powerpoint slides and full paper for this (a round-up of citizen journalism developments during the 2007 Australian federal election), and I'll try to record the presentation as well.
  

• I'll end up missing the last half-day of the AMIC conference, though - I've also been invited to attend the "Creative Destruction: Lessons for Science and Innovation Policy from the Rise of the Creative Industries" workshop organised by the Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi) and the Forum for European-Australian Science and Technology Cooperation (FEAST), which takes place on Thursday and Friday, and I'll make it to the Friday round-table discussions at least. The focus of this workshop is on further developing the new field of cultural science (an extension of cultural studies through a strong injection of evolutionary economics, in the context of creative industries research), and I'm currently working my way through the position papers circulated in advance of the workshop (and presented on day one) - heady stuff in an area which is closely linked with my own research into produsage. Given the complexity of the material, hopefully I'll be able to capture the key discussions at least.

• Finally, a couple of weeks later, on 8-12 April, I'll take part in the online "e-Festival of Ideas" organised by Vibewire, and discussing democracy, media, arts, and social change. More information below: