Snurb's blog

Following on from his recent interview series, Trebor Scholz at the Institute for Distributed Creativity is now hosting a one-day conference. The title is drawn from the interview he did with me, which is kinda nice - wish I could be there! (Incidentally, the conference is being podcast as well...)

Share, Share Widely
A Conference on New-Media Art Education

Friday, May 6th, 11am - 8pm

The folks at Peter Lang sent me the proof for the cover of my book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production today. This is based on a design by QUT student Gordon Grace, who also led the team that redesigned M/C - Media and Culture last year. So, look out for it in the bookshop - it should go to print in a month or so...

A few days ago, I received some nice email feedback for a review of King Crimson's 2003 album The Power to Believe, which I'd published in M/C Reviews at the time. Michael Cussen wrote to me:

Very good review of Power to Believe. Did you send it to DGM?

I hadn't, but I've now sent off a quick message to Sid Smith, Crimso biographer and currently helping to build the upcoming new Website for their record label Discipline Global Mobile. I'm also including pointers to two earlier pieces for PopMatters:

I posted the call for papers for the upcoming 'copy' issue of M/C Journal today:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - 18 April 2005

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

Don't know why this is suddenly all happening now, but I've been contacted by a good cross-section of the Australian media over the last couple of days. In addition to the Online Opinion piece which is now up, at first Jennifer Dudley from Brisbane's Courier-Mail approached me as an expert commentator on blogging; she's published an article about information addiction in today's issue (which itself is based on a posting by blogger Om Malik who points to a kind of 'Internet Anxiety Disorder' that results from the vastness of information now available to everyone). Then I was approached by Peter Gooch from ABC radio to do a live interview on the same topic, sparked by that article. I was on air around 1.30 p.m. today.

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!

The Speculation and Innovation conference is now coming to a close with a final plenary session. Brad haseman discuses what events might be possible in the future. For example, there might be further seminars, such as a one-day seminar on categories and research points to supervisors of practice-led research, or seminars aimed at how we can construct programmes to induct research students into research practices relevant to practice-led research. Other suggestions for future action would be to rework expectations of the exegesis in creative practice as research higher degree projects (to find a better word), or a project to build structures across institutions in the creative arts, media, and design sector to advocate quality at a national level.

We're starting on the final plenary sessions at SPIN now. The first speaker here is Toss Gascoigne from CHASS, the Council for the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. Toss notes the fact that the HASS sector is wildly underrepresented within the government sector - while there are organisations representing the sciences and other areas, and an Australian Chief Scientist, there is no such representation for the HASS field. Toss and his organisation are working on changing this, and some of their work was presented yesterday already (see e Commercialisation in the Humanities). Unfortunately, of course, the HASS sector is also measured in terms of its validity using science-derived rules (publications output etc.), and CHASS has been asked by the federal government to provide alternatives to such measures. Toss also points out the continuing need for organisations in the HASS sector to become members of CHASS and take part in its decision-making and advisory processes.