I've been invited to take part in a two-day event in Canberra this coming week, organised by the Council for Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (CHASS) - they're inviting early-career researchers (a definition which I'm slowly starting to slide out of) to talk to politicians about their research in order to better inform members of the legislative about current research agendas and the need for policies which address these aims and build on the findings.

As part of the 'Expanding Horizons' programme, we'll have breakfast with Julie Bishop, the Federal Minister for Education, Science and Training, morning tea with the Lindsay Tanner, Shadow Minister for Finance, and will then pair off to meet selected parliamentarians for more private meetings - I've been selected to talk to Senator George Campbell, the Oppositiom Whip. Along the way, we'll also hear from a variety of other high-profile politicians, researchers, and other officeholders in the nexus between education, research, and politics. Should be an interesting (and exhausting) programme!

I made the move to Firefox over the last few days, and as a result I've been exploring the wealth of Firefox extensions which is also available. One of them is Performancing, which adds a basic WYSIWYG offline editor for blog posts to Firefox - and this in turn brought me to look more widely at the current state of blog clients: software which enables the offline writing and editing of blog posts for later submission to a blog, using a standard XML-RPC interface. Unfortunately - especially as far as real WYSIWYG editing is concerned (as opposed to editing plain text with a few HTML tags thrown in) -, there still isn't that much out there. I did find at least a couple of promising options, though.

I published the 'transmit' issue of M/C Journal last week, edited by my colleagues Henk Huijser and Brooke Collins-Gearing. Some very good articles there, and the issue will be a tough act to follow (with Donna Lee Brien, I'm currently editing the next issue 'collaborate').

When I say 'I published', incidentally, I don't mean this in any abstract sense - right now it's quite literally me who generates the issue pages from the articles and other materials edited by the issue editors, and uploads them to the server. We do have a rudimentary system in place for publishing the journal, but (built on the Textpattern engine) it remains very clunky and kludgy so far. Happily, that might soon change: QUT Communication Design student Gordon Grace is currently exploring options for moving M/C Journal to a more manageable online journal editing and publishing system. Personally, I can't wait... (Gordon also designed the cover for Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production.)

One of the reasons I link to Suw Charman's blog is for posts like this: "An Adoption Strategy for Social Software in Enterprise" - a clear and useful outline of the process and pitfalls of adopting social software tools like blogs and wikis in enterprise environments. In my case, recently this adoption process has taken place, more or less successfully, in the QUT Large Teaching & Learning Grant which I co-direct, and in which we are introducing blogs and wikis into the teaching environment of several undergraduate and postgraduate units across two faculties.

I sent out this call for papers for the M/C Journal 'street' issue a few days ago:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - 7 March 2003

M/C - Media and Culture
http://www.media-culture.org.au/
is calling for contributors to the 'street' issue of

M/C Journal
http://journal.media-culture.org.au/

M/C Journal is looking for new contributors. M/C is a crossover journal between the popular and the academic, and a blind- and peer-reviewed journal.

I reviewed the recent Australian publication Barons to Bloggers for the Media International Australia journal a little while ago. The review has now been published in MIA 118 (February 2006), and they've also been nice enough to allow me to republish it here. 

Debate? What Debate?

Jonathan Mills, ed. Barons to Bloggers: Confronting Media Power. Carlton, Vic.: Miegunyah Press / Melbourne UP, 2005. ISBN 0 522 85207 6.

Today I went to a meeting at QUT's Gardens Point campus which was centred in particular around the recent case of Sony v Stevens in Australia, and its implications in light of the recent Australia-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA).

Brian Fitzgerald from the QUT Law School begins by outlining the case. Sony alleged that Stevens, who operated a computer shop, had sold a circumvention device for a technological protection measure - that is, mod chips for the Sony Playstation 2 console. These chips enabled the console to play games from regions other than Australia, as well as backup or unauthorised copies. Playstations are coded (similarly to DVD players) for regional access; this is controlled by a Boot ROM chip in the console. This allegation hinges on the definition of a technological protection measure as defined by WIPO and encoded into Australian law by the Copyright Act - TPMs prevent or inhibit the infringement of copyright.

Ugh. Having been at work since 7.30 a.m. to make some solid progress on the edgeX ("Mapping the Missing Grassroots") project and develop up some tech specs for the site we'll build for it, I got home at 6.30 p.m. only to move right on to producing the next issue of M/C Journal, which I'm happy to say is online as of now (that is, 1 a.m.) - and there'll be a formal announcement shortly. From what I've seen of the articles during the production process, editors Henk Huijser and Brooke Collins-Gearing have done excellent work, and I look forward to reading some of the articles in more detail.

A little while ago I mentioned that my book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production had been nominated for the Communications Policy Research Award at Fordham University's Donald McGannon Communication Research Center. My publisher Peter Lang now informs me that it's made the semi-finals of the award process. While I don't exactly know what this means - are there four books left from the initial field, and do these now get evaluated against one another in a two-step elimination process? will there be slow-motion replays on ESPN6? - it sure does sound good. Fingers crossed.