Blogs

Spent most of the ANZAC day public holiday on Monday working on a paper for the 2005 Wiki Symposium in San Diego. My colleague, the soon-to-be Dr Sal Humphreys has done much of the legwork for this paper which we'll be submitting before Friday; it details the use of wikis in my New Media Technologies unit at QUT and discusses the overall frameworks for using wikis in teaching. I'll post it here once it's done.

I've just had word that my paper for the Association of Internet Researchers Conference this year has been accepted - so I guess I'll be going to Chicago in October... The paper is titled "Wikinews: The Next Generation of Alternative Online News?" and deals with a form of open news which arrived too late to be fully considered in my book, so it's a kind of addendum to the book itself. As this is the peak association in my line of research, I'm also hoping to have a bit of a launch for the book at the conference.

Following on from my recent email conversation with King Crimson biographer Sid Smith, he's asked me to help pass on this alert to fans:

Inside King Crimson DVD and CD

A statement from Robert Fripp and DGM

The Inside The Music series is a "pot of gold" for Bob Carruthers & classic rock productions. It addresses a valuable & useful area of popular music studies; but in a cheap, nasty & cynical fashion that exploits everyone & scams the artists, the music & the fans.

Kairosnews has posted an extensive bibliography of blog research, including papers by many of the usual suspects. Thanks to Jill Walker for pointing this out.

I spent most of yesterday working on the final draft of my book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production. The proofread manuscript arrived back from Peter Lang in New York earlier this week, and so I went through the thing one last time to apply the requested changes - nothing too serious (a few last remnants of Australian spelling and a few minor formatting issues), but a fairly tedious and time-consuming process nonetheless. Had to change printers at the last minute as well as the one in my office developed an annoying smudging problem, but finally now the whole lot is printed (and Peter Lang will scan these pages for printing the book) and the completed package has started the return journey around the world. According to Fedex it should arrive there in ten hours, and if all goes well this would mean the book can go to the printers this coming week!

Suddenly conferences are popping up all over the place - and I'm particularly sorry I didn't hear about this one earlier (the call for papers is closed now):

The 14th AMIC Annual Conference

"Media and Society in Asia: Transformations and Transitions"

18 - 21 July 2005, Beijing, People's Republic of China.

AMIC is the Asian Media Information and Communication Centre, based in Singapore. Conference topics include:

• Role of

I received an invitation to participate in a proposed symposium at Stanford today. Looks very promising, even though I don't have a strong computational bent in my own research. The last couple of topics in particular have piqued my interest. (Note that the symposium is only proposed so far, not confirmed.)

AAAI 2006 SPRING SYMPOSIUM SERIES
COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES TO ANALYZING WEBLOGS

March 27-29, 2006 - Stanford University, California, USA

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AREAS OF INTEREST

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This symposium focuses on computational approaches to analysis of individual blogs and the blogosphere as a whole:

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: