Snurb's blog

The West Wing is back on Australian TV screens - back being the operating word here, with episodes restarting with the "Twenty Hours in America" two-parter from the Bartlet re-election campaign which originally screened in the U.S. on September 2002. Australians will know that this is due to the show's move from the commercial Nine Network, which buried the show in the 23:30 timeslot, to the publicly funded ABC; there, at least it's on at 21:30 for the time being, and without commercial breaks (now if only we could continue to get double episodes every week to catch up with the action!).

We went on a nice but all-too-short post-V-day getaway to North Stradbroke Island last weekend, but I'm afraid any sense of relaxation went out the window quickly when I saw on Monday that numbers in my Creative Industries unit had risen to nearly 370 students by Monday morning. This meant quickly adding a couple more tutors and giving them an induction to the material, and elsewhere too I've been playing catchup all week already - not because I've been slack in the lead-up to the semester, but because there's just so much to do at the moment.

David Sifry has posted the latest "State of the Blogosphere" report, extracted from Technorati data. Plenty to digest here, and discussion on what the findings may mean has already started on Sifry's blog as well as elsewhere, and perhaps one of these days I'll even find the time to add my own views on this.

In other news, though, we've just received the copyeditor's comments on the Uses of Blogs manuscript. No major edits required, so hopefully we'll be able to turn it around pretty quickly. Warm up the presses, Peter Lang!

Phew. I have spent four out of the last five working days virtually in non-stop meetings on a wide variety of issues - from research and teaching planning sessions to team meetings for the ACID Press project (which has a very outdated outline on the ACID Website, I'm afraid), meetings of the AoIR 2006 conference organising team, preliminary work for a new book project, and a PhD confirmation presentation by Creative Industries student Stephen Harrington - and tomorrow is looking no better, with an all-day meeting of the team of our teaching and learning project using blogs and wikis at QUT. In between all the meetings about what work needs to be done, it would be nice to find some time to actually do some work... (At least I did find the time to accept an invitation to join the editorial board of New Media & Society, and I look forward to being part of it.)

Heh. I've been tagged by Jean, who'd herself been tagged by Mel, I think. So, in the blogosphere's best version of a not-for-profit pyramid scheme, lessee:

Four jobs I've had:

1. Listening into Soviet Red Army transmissions in Eastern Germany, from the West German border
2. Hardware import agent
3. Helpdesk dude (these two both for VillageTronic when they were still doing Amiga hardware)
4. Translator

Four movies I can watch over and over:

Saw this on the AoIR mailing-list today - looks interesting:

From: David Brake <d.r.brake[at]lse.ac.uk>
Subject: [Air-l] Literature review of harm and offence caused by various media inc. Internet, mobile phone, computer games
To: air-l-aoir.org@listserv.aoir.org

Sonia Livingstone and Andrea Millwood Hargrave have just published a comprehensive review of recent (last 5 years) academic and regulatory literature across a range of media including the Internet, mobile phones and computer games as well as TV, radio, film and print media (I was one of the contributors to the review- particularly on the Internet, mobile phone and computer games areas). Links to the 40 page executive summary (free), the press release and ordering information for the 256 page paperback are available from this Media@LSE blog posting:

We've just sent out a notice to extend the call for papers for the 2006 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Brisbane in September - paper proposals are now due on 21 February (there were a number of requests for extension from people who are only now getting back from their holidays). So, if anyone hasn't submitted a paper yet, now's the time to do so!

Also, some good progress on sponsors and keynote speakers over the last couple of weeks - hopefully I'll be able to say more about this soon... Other than that, this has been a week of meetings for me so far - yesterday I think I had only about one hour in my entire working day outside of meeting rooms. It would be nice to get some work done occasionally, rather than just to talk about what work needs to get done!

Following up on my "More DGM, Less DRM" post a little while ago: in his diary, Robert Fripp has now responded to some of the reports about the launch of DGMLive, and clarified some of the usage restrictions for downloaded music which apply for DGMLive downloads. "Act rightly" is the governing phrase - an idea which is positively alien to the mainstream music industry, of course.

Jill Walker is blogging less, or so she says - this wouldn't be newsworthy if Jill wasn't a genuine A-list academic blogger, and (I suspect) an inspiration for many an academic, and others in what we might laughingly refer to as the real world, to start blogging themselves. Certainly Jill was one of those names we just had to get on board for the Uses of Blogs book - and her struggles in completing what turned out to be a very insightful, and fairly personal, chapter in the book may be a sign of the times for a number of the 'early' bloggers as they're coming to terms with a) the occasional sense of stardom that A-list status might bring, and b) the fact that life doesn't stop, or stop changing, just because you're blogging it.

It's been a positive few days on either side of the Australia/Invasion Day holiday. On Wednesday we gained a major sponsor for the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Brisbane in September, which should enable us to attract a further fairly high-profile keynote speaker; more on this as we go. Later that day we aso started work on the edgeX, or "Mapping the Missing Grassroots", ARC Linkage project between QUT and UQ Ipswich with Ipswich City Council - and I'm looking forward to seeing this one get going. More work on both today, with a few keynote speaker possibilities emerging...