Blogs

Phew. I have spent four out of the last five working days virtually in non-stop meetings on a wide variety of issues - from research and teaching planning sessions to team meetings for the ACID Press project (which has a very outdated outline on the ACID Website, I'm afraid), meetings of the AoIR 2006 conference organising team, preliminary work for a new book project, and a PhD confirmation presentation by Creative Industries student Stephen Harrington - and tomorrow is looking no better, with an all-day meeting of the team of our teaching and learning project using blogs and wikis at QUT. In between all the meetings about what work needs to be done, it would be nice to find some time to actually do some work... (At least I did find the time to accept an invitation to join the editorial board of New Media & Society, and I look forward to being part of it.)

Heh. I've been tagged by Jean, who'd herself been tagged by Mel, I think. So, in the blogosphere's best version of a not-for-profit pyramid scheme, lessee:

Four jobs I've had:

1. Listening into Soviet Red Army transmissions in Eastern Germany, from the West German border
2. Hardware import agent
3. Helpdesk dude (these two both for VillageTronic when they were still doing Amiga hardware)
4. Translator

Four movies I can watch over and over:

Saw this on the AoIR mailing-list today - looks interesting:

From: David Brake <d.r.brake[at]lse.ac.uk>
Subject: [Air-l] Literature review of harm and offence caused by various media inc. Internet, mobile phone, computer games
To: air-l-aoir.org@listserv.aoir.org

Sonia Livingstone and Andrea Millwood Hargrave have just published a comprehensive review of recent (last 5 years) academic and regulatory literature across a range of media including the Internet, mobile phones and computer games as well as TV, radio, film and print media (I was one of the contributors to the review- particularly on the Internet, mobile phone and computer games areas). Links to the 40 page executive summary (free), the press release and ordering information for the 256 page paperback are available from this Media@LSE blog posting:

We've just sent out a notice to extend the call for papers for the 2006 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Brisbane in September - paper proposals are now due on 21 February (there were a number of requests for extension from people who are only now getting back from their holidays). So, if anyone hasn't submitted a paper yet, now's the time to do so!

Also, some good progress on sponsors and keynote speakers over the last couple of weeks - hopefully I'll be able to say more about this soon... Other than that, this has been a week of meetings for me so far - yesterday I think I had only about one hour in my entire working day outside of meeting rooms. It would be nice to get some work done occasionally, rather than just to talk about what work needs to get done!

Following up on my "More DGM, Less DRM" post a little while ago: in his diary, Robert Fripp has now responded to some of the reports about the launch of DGMLive, and clarified some of the usage restrictions for downloaded music which apply for DGMLive downloads. "Act rightly" is the governing phrase - an idea which is positively alien to the mainstream music industry, of course.

Jill Walker is blogging less, or so she says - this wouldn't be newsworthy if Jill wasn't a genuine A-list academic blogger, and (I suspect) an inspiration for many an academic, and others in what we might laughingly refer to as the real world, to start blogging themselves. Certainly Jill was one of those names we just had to get on board for the Uses of Blogs book - and her struggles in completing what turned out to be a very insightful, and fairly personal, chapter in the book may be a sign of the times for a number of the 'early' bloggers as they're coming to terms with a) the occasional sense of stardom that A-list status might bring, and b) the fact that life doesn't stop, or stop changing, just because you're blogging it.

It's been a positive few days on either side of the Australia/Invasion Day holiday. On Wednesday we gained a major sponsor for the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Brisbane in September, which should enable us to attract a further fairly high-profile keynote speaker; more on this as we go. Later that day we aso started work on the edgeX, or "Mapping the Missing Grassroots", ARC Linkage project between QUT and UQ Ipswich with Ipswich City Council - and I'm looking forward to seeing this one get going. More work on both today, with a few keynote speaker possibilities emerging...

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.