Blogs and Blogging

A good day yesterday: not only did I receive my hardcopies of the Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production book, but the first chapters for the next book, Uses of Blogs, which Jo Jacobs and I are currently editing, have also come in (with a surprisingly large number of contributors requestion a week's extension, though). In fact, both Jo and I also had some further good news - I can't quite disclose mine just yet, but Jo will become the new Collaboration Manager for ACID! Congratulations, Jo, and great to have you on board.

OK - there's no way for this not to sound somewhat morbid, so here it is. I've been invited to do a brief research residency at the Institute for Distributed Creativity in New York later this year, and as part of my time there I'll be giving a memorial lecture related to my research work (most likely covering issues around gatewatching and collaborative news production, blogs, and the rise of the produser). Being a memorial lecture, it needs to be in memory - in honour - of somebody, though, and that's where I'm coming up short at the moment. The usual suspects - say, oh, Marshall McLuhan and the like - are a little too obvious, while some other key scholars in the field aren't actually dead yet (I checked). And in spite of the helpful suggestions of a colleague, the authors of that silly diatribe just don't qualify.

At any rate, the iDC folk would probably prefer the lecture to be dedicated to someone less known anyway. So, dear reader, any suggestions? Do we have any unsung heroes of citizen news, of news blogging, who were killed for their efforts? Who are the first martyrs of blogging? Please post your suggestions in a comment to this entry. And be assured that despite my somewhat flippant tone here, I do take this question very seriously - a memorial is no laughing matter.

Yesterday my colleagues Peter Duffy, Sal Humphreys and I put in a paper proposal for the Online Teaching conference here at QUT in September. This builds on the work Sal and I have been doing for the International Wiki Symposium in San Diego, but with a focus more on teaching and pedagogy aspects rather than the underlying teaching technologies. Here's the abstract:

Delivery in the Beyond - Possibilities for the Use of Blogs and Wikis in Education

In a knowledge economy it is no longer sufficient to use online learning and teaching technologies simply for the delivery of content to students. In the new environment, graduate capabilities increasingly and crucially identify the ability to effectively use new media technologies for collaborative and (co)creative purposes as well as for the critical assessment and evaluation of existing information. Higher education therefore must refocus its efforts, from a mere interest in developing information literacies to an emphasis on developing advanced creative, collaborative, and critical ICT literacies in students.

Following the interview I did with Steve Meacham last week, I'm quoted at length in today's Sydney Morning Herald, in an article titled "Editing Our Future" (page 18). Ostensibly this is about the content preservation efforts by the National Library of Australia and the International Internet Preservation Consortium, but in also covering some of the key reasons for why contemporary Internet content must be preserved for posterity t also goes into blogging and various other key forms of content production and publishing on the Web. Steve's done a great job with the article; it's also online here (at least according to Google News - I can't be bothered dealing with the SMH's silly user registration system).

Kairosnews has posted an extensive bibliography of blog research, including papers by many of the usual suspects. Thanks to Jill Walker for pointing this out.

I received an invitation to participate in a proposed symposium at Stanford today. Looks very promising, even though I don't have a strong computational bent in my own research. The last couple of topics in particular have piqued my interest. (Note that the symposium is only proposed so far, not confirmed.)

AAAI 2006 SPRING SYMPOSIUM SERIES
COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES TO ANALYZING WEBLOGS

March 27-29, 2006 - Stanford University, California, USA

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AREAS OF INTEREST

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This symposium focuses on computational approaches to analysis of individual blogs and the blogosphere as a whole:

A good meeting with Jo Jacobs and our research assistant Ian Rogers today, to move forward on the Uses of Blogs book. We've signed the book contract now and it's on its way back to Peter Lang in New York. We'll be sending out an update to our contributors shortly, to work out the deadlines leading up to delivery of the manuscript in early November. The more we work on this, the more this is shaping up to be a great collection. The enthusiasm displayed by our contributors (as well as by Jo and Ian) is great, and we do seem to have managed to collect a stellar cast of bloggers and blog researchers. It's a pleasure to work with such a supportive publisher as well!