Well, as the year gets underway, there's some more news about my various book projects as well. Today my publisher Peter Lang informed me that Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production has been nominated for the Communications Policy Research Award at Fordham University's Donald McGannon Communication Research Center. I know it may sound clichéd, but even to be nominated for an award whose previous winners include Lawrence Lessig and Robert W. McChesney feels like quite an honour... We'll see what happens - from the Center Website it looks like last year's winner was announced in May, so there may be a bit of a wait.

I've recently posted this call for papers for the 'collaborate' issue of M/C Journal, which I will edit with my friend and colleague Donna Lee Brien at the University of New England:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - 12 January 2006

M/C - Media and Culture
is calling for contributors to the 'collaborate' issue of
M/C Journal

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

I've been meaning to flag the fact that DGMLive has gone online. The site is the new online arm of Discipline Global Mobile, the record label founded by King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, and offers a growing number of Fripp and Crimson concerts and other goodies for purchase and download. This interests me as a fan, but also for other reasons: music purchased through DGMLive is available in MP3 and FLAC (lossless audio) formats, and is downloaded through the peer-to-peer filesharing software BitTorrent.

Neither of these facts sits well with standard music industry wisdom (now there's an oxymoron for you) that 1. the customer is the enemy, and cannot be trusted, 2. p2p filesharing tools of any kind are evil, and must be destroyed, and 3. because of 1. and 2., there is a need for new music formats which include strong digital rights management (DRM) measures to prevent unauthorised duplication, filesharing, or other supposedly illegal activities. At the same time, having been cheated by industry players at various times during his 40-odd-year career, Fripp can hardly be described as a friend of the music industry - which he has described repeatedly as being 'fulled by greed' -, so perhaps it's not so surprising that he would take a different approach to online distribution.

The other day I published the latest issue of M/C Journal: 'affect'. This was edited by Mel Gregg - well done Mel! Today I sent out the issue announcement:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - 21 December 2005

                                                                        
M/C - Media and Culture
is proud to present issue six in volume eight of

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

'affect' - Edited by Melissa Gregg

Southeast Queensland has been getting some cracker storms in recent weeks, and there's been some good footage of them online as well. I spent the last weekend over on Moreton Island, across the bay from Brisbane, and we got a great one just as we were snorkelling around the wrecks at Tangalooma. Here's a video of the storm approaching, courtesy of Ann - and I have a brief cameo as well...

Yes, I'm still alive - just got back from a two-week holiday on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, and currently downloading the last fortnight's worth of emails (this has been going for the best part of an hour so far). Also deleted a bevy of spam trackbacks; no, I'm still not interested in playing Texas Hold'em poker while consolidating my debt with a dose of Viagra, thankyouverymuch.

And just by way of a note to self (making sure this doesn't get lost under a mountain of other mail) - Nature did an interesting comparison of scientific entries in the Wikipedia and the Britannica, which appears to have found little difference in quality... Good work.

I'm going to be conference chair of the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Brisbane in September 2006 - and we've just posted the call for papers. Please consider submitting a paper proposal!

CALL FOR PAPERS

IR 7.0: INTERNET CONVERGENCES

International and Interdisciplinary Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers

Brisbane, Australia

28-30 September 2006
Pre-Conference Workshops: 27 September 2006

It's been a busy week - partly also because I'm going on holidays in the middle of next week and wanted to finish a few things before then. So, I spent most of last night working on one of the audio recordings from my recent trip to the U.S.: I've now added a recording from my guest lecture 'Anyone Can Edit': Understanding the Produser - Guest Lecture at SUNY, Buffalo / New School, NYC / Brown Univ. / Temple Univ. to this site. As I said back then, my favourite version of that lecture was the one I gave at Temple University in Philadelphia, and so I worked mainly with that recording; however, I also noticed that for some reason the last few minutes of it were missing from the recording, and so I've spliced in the ending from the Brown University recording a few days earlier. In addition, I also made some minor updates to my list of recent publications, splitting this up into publications, recorded talks, and creative work, and added a box with the most recent stuff in the upper right corner of this blog. Hope that's useful. I'm hoping to add recordings from my Wikinews paper at AoIR 2005, and the Northeastern University New Media Panel, soon.

I've been meaning to mention that I've been asked to take part in a panel on research blogging as part of the QualIT 2005 conference (an international conference on qualitative research in IT & IT in qualitative research) at Griffith University this Friday. With Alison Ruth and Jenine Beekhuyzen I'll be chatting about the value of blogging for research. Should be fun, and I daresay I'll get a plug in for Uses of Blogs as well. Come along!

Well, I've just sent Uses of Blogs, the book Jo Jacobs and I have been editing for the last half year or so, on its way to the publisher Peter Lang, as well as informing our fabulous contributors that it's all happening. Let's hope the Digital Formations series editor Steve Jones and our editor Damon Zucca at Peter Lang like the collection - Jo and I think it's come together very well and provides a great and diverse range of insight into the contemporary uses of blogs, well beyond the diaristic or political forms of blogging which most mainstream media commentary still continues to focus on (which is not to say that we don't cover those as well!).