Snurb's blog

Ho boy. Well, my new spam filter for comments on this site seems to be doing its job - the site has been (and still is at the moment) flooded by comments advertising online gambling, but none of them (we're past the 150 comments mark here!) have actually made it through. Filtering by content is the only way to catch these postings - they're coming from a wide range of IP addresses, so there seem to be a fair few machines out on the Net that have been hacked to send comment spam.

Other than that, I've spent the day working on my application for promotion to lecturer level B at QUT. If I wasn't feeling a bit under the weather already anyway, just listing all the various projects I'm involved in is exhausting. QUT divides academic work into three main areas - here are the major items I've listed so far:

Heh. Our recently announced book project Uses of Blogs is starting to build some interest. I've seen a number of visitors come in from Furl blogs over the last couple of days, and it's interesting to see some of the comments from people who are using Furl to blog about the book. My favourite comment so far:

If I used Amazon, I'd put it on my wish list.

Check the Furl reference for the Uses of Blogs entry for more information.

With my colleague Jane Turner, I've put in a paper proposal for the Creative Places + Spaces conference in Toronto in October. Let's hope they like it - for me it would also make a great combination with the AoIR conference in Chicago a few days later (maybe I could even swing by the Peter Lang offices in New York on the way?). Anyway, we'll see what they think.

Here's what we've proposed:

In 2002, Queensland University of Technology developed the world’s first Creative Industries Faculty and introduced the new Bachelor of Creative Industries degree, replacing its existing Bachelor of Arts offering. The degree is designed to be inherently interdisciplinary, and aims to provide students both with the creative skills to develop and realise innovative ideas for projects in the creative industries field, as well as with the theoretical and conceptual knowledge to understand and operate effectively within the emerging creative economy in Australia and other nations.

Phew. More Drupal updates today, and I think I have most of it under control now. In the process I've added a Creative Commons licencing scheme, a blogroll, direct access to the content categories, and a few other goodies. Still no news on the monitored sites list (using Drupal's Weblinks module); I've manually added a list of sites to the right sidebar for the time being.

Other updates also continue. Today was the start of week three of semester, but I'm already having to update unit outlines for next semester (when I'm again teaching the Creative Industries unit at QUT, as well as New Media Technologies). NMT (in which students produce the M/Cyclopedia of New Media) still requires more development; I'm exploring ways to translate the wiki knowledge structure of the M/Cyclopedia into the unit content structure and delivery. How do you teach new media without falling into the trap of providing a simplified linear history of new media - how do you show the complex interconnected nature of new media concepts and issues instead (and enable students to explore them for themselves)?

OK, I've updated my Drupal installation to the 4.6 RC version. Looks like most things are working - still waiting for an updated weblink module to appear, so the links to the Robert Fripp and Sid Smith diaries are gone for the time being. On the upside, trackback should work again. I've also taken new action against a persistent online poker site which has kept spamming me both through their frequent accesses to this site (presumably to get themselves listed in the site logs, even though they're not public) and through a couple of bouts of trackback spam. Well, their IP is banned now, so we'll see what happens.

This morning I'm doing a live chat with Trebor Scholz in New York, for his New Media and Arts Education programme. The chat transcript will also be online at the site soon. We've just managed to connect up via Apple iChat; on my end using a Powerbook which my colleague Peta Mitchell has lent me - thanks Peta! (Not sure if there's any way for others to link into the Webcam chat itself - you might just need to wait for the transcript...)

I've finally written my review of the new Paatos album - this has been sitting here for some months now, and I just never got around to it. It's now been published on M/C Reviews, but here it is as well:

We're on to the last panel session of the conference now - a summary panel with Larry Lessig, Stuart Cunningham, and Sal Humphreys as well as conference host Brian Fitzgerald. Larry starts by pointing out that what's happening in the computer games field is real, it's common, and traditional property owners have exactly the wrong intuitions in dealing with it. For one, there is a significant monetary value being generated in the online environment (there is even a story of sweatshops in Mexico developing gaming assets and selling them profitably on eBay). It is also a very common activity - and one which is a voluntary form of play as work, much along the same lines as free and open source software development.