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Snurb — Sunday 29 April 2007 00:57

Produsing Culture: Implications of User-Led Content Creation

Politics | Produsers and Produsage | MiT5 2007 |

Boston.
My colleague Jean Burgess is the first presenter this morning at MiT5 - we have an all-QUT panel going this morning. She begins with a nod towards Andrew Keen's recent book The Cult of the Amateur, which provides an argument not based on a deep understanding of Web2.0, but is mainly a response to the increasing hype around Web2.0 (providing a kind of hysterical anti-hype which in itself still adds to the hype, though). Jean's own work on vernacular photography provides a more intelligent, nuanced look at some of the Web2.0 phenomena.

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Snurb — Saturday 28 April 2007 08:45

Collaboration and Collective Intelligence (But Where's Pierre Lévy?)

Produsage Communities | Produsers and Produsage | Intellectual Property | Online Games | MiT5 2007 |

Boston.
We're now in the second plenary session at MiT5, which was opened by Tom Malone who began by introducing the concept of collective intelligence (and MIT is now starting a Center for Collective Intelligence). The first speaker is Trebor Scholz from the Institute for Distributed Creativity, and he notes that one of the key questions in participatory, collective environments is now that of labour - all the many activities performed by the users in such spaces can be described as a form of labour, but in the main such labour contributes particularly to the value of the spaces within which it takes place, not so much to the fortune of those performing that labour. This, Trebor says, is a further move towards the commercialisation of social life - the very few benefit from the work of the very many, in a classic capitalist move.

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Snurb — Saturday 28 April 2007 07:14

Defining Web2.0

Produsers and Produsage | Social Software in Higher Education (Carrick Institute) | MiT5 2007 |

Boston.
The next session I'm attending has nothing less than the task of defining what exactly we mean by 'Web2.0'. Fred Benenson and Peter B. Kaufman are making a start with their Five Theses about Creative Production in the Digital Age, and Fred also notes the importance of free software as an enabler of the Web2.0 development. He sees YouTube as the key mediator of Web2.0 styles and ideas at present, and as a site which opens up further questions of copyright, creators' rights, and other related issues.

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Snurb — Saturday 28 April 2007 07:13

Defining Creative Labour

Produsers and Produsage | Intellectual Property | Social Software in Higher Education (Carrick Institute) | MiT5 2007 | Creative Industries |

Boston.
From the packed plenary theatre we have now moved on to the first of the smaller sessions (which is similarly full) - one of nine or ten parallel sessions (so please don't take these blog entries as entirely representative of MiT5 proper...). This session is on creative labour in a produsage environment, and Mirko Tobias Schäfer begins by "Revisiting the Case of Interactive Audiences and the User as Producer". He notes that in 1983 TIME nominated the (personal) computer as 'machine of the year' - an interesting precursor of the recent nomination of 'you' as person of the year 2006, which has perhaps redressed the balance again from technology to users.

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Snurb — Saturday 28 April 2007 04:14

Opening Media in Transition: Connections between Folk and Digital Cultures

Produsers and Produsage | Intellectual Property | MiT5 2007 |

Boston.
Today we're starting the MiT5 conference here at MIT, and we begin with a welcome by Comparative Media Studies director Henry Jenkins. He begins with a nod to fan culture as a space of media mash-ups, and plays a short excerpt from the Colbert Report, which issued a challenge to remix its content and provided a segment ready-made for remixing. Inded, Henry suggests that Colbert as a comedian was inherently made by YouTube, and he has shown strong interest in remix culture in other environments (he also issued a challenge to his viewers to introduce falsifying edits into Wikipedia, furthering his playful engagement with participatory culture).

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Snurb — Sunday 22 April 2007 08:08

Been and Gone

Travel | Produsers and Produsage | Conferences |

Boston.
After a very brief few weeks in Brisbane, I'm back on the road again, for the second leg of my sabbatical. This trip takes me to Boston, where I'm a visiting scholar at MIT for the next couple of months. I'll also present at MiT5 and Creativity & Cognition 6, and when I return to Brisbane at the end of June, I'll hopefully have most of my upcoming produsage book ready to send to my publisher.

All American BreakfastFor now, though, I'm taking it easy these first few days here, dealing with my jetlag (which doesn't seem too bad …

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Snurb — Friday 30 March 2007 21:53

Some More Eyecandy from IssueCrawler

Politics | Blogs and Blogging | Participatory Journalism and Citizen Engagement (ARC Linkage) |

Hot on the heals of my research into blog coverage of the David Hicks case, some more of my IssueCrawler crawls have completed recently. Eventually (when a number of followp-up crawls I'm planning for the coming weeks also complete), I'll analyse them in some more detail, but for now, here are a few preliminary observations. Larger images of the network graphs are on Flickr; click the respective images to see them. I've also uploaded the interactive SVG graphs; you'll need the Adobe SVG viewer plugin in Internet Explorer to display them correctly...

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Snurb — Friday 30 March 2007 20:18

Leeds: Last Impressions

Travel | Produsers and Produsage | Blogs and Blogging | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Conferences |

www.flickr.com

This is a Flickr badge showing photos in a set called Leeds 2007. Make your own badge here.

Leeds.
Well, as the great mind and speedy fingers that is Robert Fripp might say (or type), my suitcase is about-to-be-becoming packed; my time here at the University of Leeds is at and end, and I'm flying back to Australia tonight. I'm spending a last few hours here at the office to say my goodbyes and gather my various notes and files. Time to reflect on the past two months, too, and to tie up a few loose ends. My thanks first of all of course to Stephen Coleman and the rest of the staff at the Institute for Communications Studies for making me welcome here; I hope to stay in touch with many of them even after I've left the place.

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Snurb — Sunday 25 March 2007 22:24

ICE on the Road

Travel | ICE3 2007 |

Leeds.

www.flickr.com

This is a Flickr badge showing photos in a set called Scotland 2007. Make your own badge here.

I've safely returned to Leeds from my trip to the ICE 3 conference on the shores of Loch Lomond, Scotland. Given the cost of flying to Glasgow, and the unreliability (and sadly, occasional catastrophic failure) of the British rail network, I ended up driving myself to Scotland and back in a rental car, and this worked out pretty well overall. As I crossed the North Pennines into Cumbria, the snow-streaked landscape did look as bleak as the frozen steppes of Siberia, but happily things improved again as I approached Glasgow. I stopped for lunch and a spot of sightseeing in Glasgow itself, and promptly lost my way trying to re-enter the motorway towards Loch Lomond, but this minor diversion was nothing against my confusion on the way back - I guess it would have helped had I known that on Scottish roadsigns, "Carlisle" is the codename for the south (providing overt directions to England is considered to be in bad taste, perhaps?). Although this cost me an hour, there were no major other problems on the way (except for the occasional Fiat driver appearing to suffer from the delusion of being at the wheel of a Ferrari) - and kudos also to the good folks at Google Maps, whose directions served me well in getting to Scotland and back.

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Snurb — Saturday 24 March 2007 22:22

From Smart Internet to Smart Services

Internet Technologies | Smart Services CRC | Creative Industries |

I'm glad there's finally an official statement about this: along with a number of other Australian universities, and with commercial and government partners, QUT is a participant in a high-profile new Cooperative Research Centre which will get started from mid-year. The Smart Services CRC follows on from the successful Smart Internet CRC which was based at Swinburne University (and which had already run a Smart Services forum recently). Along with a number of my colleagues from Creative Industries, I'll be involved in this in some capacity...

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Recent Work

Presentations and Talks

Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

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Books, Papers, Articles

Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks (Social Media + Society)

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Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media (Crikey)

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Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

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Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

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