Well, the AoIR 2006 conference in Brisbane is over, and I'm slowly recovering... If I've been slow in updates to this blog in recent weeks, it's been simply because conference preparations had taken over my life - between running around to get things organised, dealing with last-minute registrations, changes, and other issues, and actually being there to make sure everything happened on the days as we'd planned it, there was very little time left for anything else (including luxuries like, say, sleep). Overall I'm very pleased with how it went, though, and we've had some great feedback on the conference - most importantly, I think we've proved that there is plenty of life outside of the North American and European conference circuits, and I hope that AoIR will continue its drive to engage with international communities of scholars. Asia, Latin America, South Africa - let's go!

As conference chair, of course I didn't get to see anything of the conference beyond my own panels, and the two keynotes. Slowly the reports from the conference are emerging, though, so I get to see a little more of it at last. My thanks especially to Kevin Lim, who not only blogged and photographed extensively at the conference, but also conducted a number of impromptu interviews at the closing reception - the video and some further discussion are over on Kevin's blog, but I've taken the liberty of also posting the video here...

I was interviewed for an ABC Online science story the other day, about an article published by a number of physicists recently. Not the most likely story to comment on for an Internet researcher, you might think (even if, as it turns out, my first degree was in physics) - but what's happened here is that the researchers in question have applied complex network theory to the musicians' database of the All Music Guide (AMG), which both tracks collaborations between musicians and provides recommendations of musical similarity made by its panel of expert contributors. What's come out of this are two datasets, one indicating the network of collaborations across the 30,000-odd musicians tracked by AMG, and one showing the similarities between these artists as AMG's pundits see them.

During the AoIR 2006 conference, we launched the latest addition to M/C - Media and Culture's stable of publications: M/C Dialogue, edited by my colleague Jinna Tay. M/C Dialogue focussed on publishing interviews with scholars, artists, and other public intellectuals, and I'm very excited about it - judging by the initial response there's a great deal of interest in the site already, and it seems to fill a real gap in the online publishing environment. Of course we're also very keen to encourage more interviews to be submitted (an interview with AoIR 2006 keynote speaker Guo Liang by Randy Kluver should be up soon), and I'm particularly hoping that anybody going to major conferences will think about interviewing keynote speakers and other key scholars there (audio and video interviews are particularly encouraged). We are hoping, too, that the peer review process (if for obvious reasons not blind peer review) which we follow for the site will enable interviews to be counted as 'proper' academic publications for once...

I should have expected little else, of course - all I got to see at AoIR 2006 were the two panels I participated in, and the two conference keynotes; my duties as conference chair (i.e. running about to make sure there were no major disasters) prevented me from anything else. The two panels, organised by Terry Flew and Ted M. Coopman, went very well, though. Together, they presented the two sides of citizen journalism: its grounding in the activist tactical media movements of the 1980s and 1990s (on Ted's panel "Byte Me! Digital Media as an Activist Critique and Parallel Mediasphere"), and its continuing longer-term establishment as a legitimate form of journalism in relation to the traditional news industry (on Terry's panel "Online News Media and Citizen Journalism").

At the Creative Places + Spaces conference in Toronto last year, I met a couple of colleagues from Breda University in the Netherlands, who run a number of creative industries-related courses - but in a leisure management context, which is quite different from the approach we're taking at QUT, but also includes exciting new concepts such as ' imagineering'. This week, Peter Horsten and Arend Hardorff are in Brisbane to visit QUT as well as a number of other local organisations (such as Michael Doneman's Edgeware) and explore opportunities for further collaboration. Last night, Ann and I took them out for dinner at the Tibetan Kitchen, and ended up chatting until the restaurant staff had to tell us in no uncertain terms 'we're closing now'. Let's hope we can maintain the connection - good to see you again, guys...

My colleague Graham Meikle from Macquarie University, author of the fabulous Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet, has just let me know that his review of my book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production will be published in the next issue of Media International Australia. He's kindly allowed me to republish his review here - many thanks, Graham!

I was lucky enough to be a team member in two education research projects proposed to the Carrick Institute in the last application round. One, with my friend and colleague Donna Lee Brien and a host of other colleagues, will work on developing a network of creative writing postgraduates, and I'll post more about it here soon as the project develops. The other, led by Robert Fitzgerald from the University of Canberra, has now been officially announced - here is our press release:

Social Software in Higher Education

Canberra - 24 August 2006

A quick heads-up for anyone in the Brisbane region: I'll be on ABC radio 612 this afternoon, some time after 1 p.m., getting interviewed by Richard Fidler about YouTube. Questions we'll cover may include:

• What kind of videos are on YouTube?

• Who is using it?

• Will YouTube change the way we access entertainment/info/news?

• How is it different to MySpace?

• Are there any censorship/copyright issues?

On 22 September, I'm going to be on a panel at a journalism conference to mark the 85th anniversary of journalism at the University of Queensland. The conference has undergone a number of changes over the past few month, and has now become a one-day symposium at the Brisbane Marriott Hotel, but I hope that the panel session will be useful, interesting, and well-attended nonetheless.

For those in the Brisbane area: I'll be on a panel at the Straight Out of Brisbane festival (SOOB) this Saturday afternoon, discussing "Media Futures". Below is the blurb for the event - see more details on the SOOB Website. My session also follows directly from the launch of radio station 4ZZZ's Convergent Community Newsroom, which involves my colleague Barry Saunders. Should be interesting!

Media Futures
Sat 19 Aug 1:00pm - 2:30pm :: SOOB Festival Club, 610 Ann St, Valley
Free