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Milwaukee.


The final keynote of AoIR 2009 is by Megan Boler, editor of Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times. She begins by noting the shared sense of aporia at the conference. What do we do as we face the rapidly changing environments of social media - do we feel let down by the Internet, do we daily have to renegotiate the changing visage of the Internet? Megan is particularly interested in exploring this in the context of war, and especially the war on terror - so much especially of the material produced from critical perspectives is dismissed as noise here, so how do we make what we feel is important audible and visible? (To illustrate this, Megan shows a video compiling the repetitive use of certain keywords - September 11, Saddam Hussein, war on terror, terrorism - by US leaders.)

Milwaukee.


The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2009 is David Bello, whose focus is on Amazon's Mechanical Turk system. This is a form of crowdsourcing, which itself combines the outsourcing of labour to an external provider with community-provided open source labour; crowdsourcing thus exhibits an open quality where users are not employed or hired, but simply choose to perform the tasks that they are interested in. In crowdsourcing, the requesting body solicits the general public to join the labouring community.

In the Amazon case, the company provides the platform which mediates the labour process; using this platform, a requesting body can provide tasks which are then performed by the labouring community. Community members are remunerated according to their provision of HITs (human intelligence tasks), which address problems that cannot be done by computers (semantic and cultural understanding, or sensory translation).

Milwaukee.


The next speaker at AoIR 2009 is Kylie Jarrett, who moves on to problematising Google and its 'don't be evil' motto. There is a sense of disquiet about the absolute symbolic power enjoyed by the company at this point, but there are also many defensive responses as so many people are very attached to it. What is the source of this belief in Google?

Symbolic power needs to be legitimated, and Google attempts this by outlining its core principles on its site: focus on the user and all else will follow, do one thing really well, fast is better than slow, democracy on the Web works, people don't need to be at their desk to need an answer, it's possible to make money without being evil, there's always more information out there, great isn't good enough, etc.

Milwaukee.


The next speaker at AoIR 2009 is Michele White, who shifts our interest to eBay and its eBay Live! convention culture. This is an interesting translation of the asynchronous online trading model to a face-to-face venue for expressions of community, and through them comsumers are incorporated into and work for the community and brand. These people are consumer-fans who invest time and money into building an identity for the brand - this is for the most part no critical reinterpretation of eBay's brand message, but rather an enthusiastic dissemination.

Milwaukee.


The next session at AoIR 2009 starts with Andrew Herman, who introduces the idea of 'Blackberry capitalism'. He notes the shift towards wireless Internet use in recent years; most US Internet users now access the Net wirelessly, for example, and trends are similar in many other countries. There is no distinction in much of the data between wireless and mobile uses, however; mobile Internet use entails some very different practices from mere wifi access. Mobile communication has similarly changed away from mere mobile telephony, of course; the possibilities of mobile communication have extended well beyond talking and texting, but don't simply converge with wireless Internet usage practices.

Milwaukee.


The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2009 is Anatoliy Gruzd, whose focus is on the communities of blog readers, and how such communities of people discussing shared issues across different blogs may be discovered automatically - that is, how the social networks connecting them may be identified. This is important not least because of the massive growth in online information - we need to develop better tools to extract salient material from this overload of content, and to do so, knowing the social context is paramount.

Milwaukee.


Daisy Pignetti is the next speaker at AoIR 2009, and focusses on the post-Hurricane Katrina blogosphere. She calls this Disaster 2.0, with events such as the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York as Disaster 1.0 (a time when many users had substantial difficulty accessing the Internet, and had to employ smart, lateral strategies in order to work out what was going on). In the aftermath, citizens of the US came together online to share their stories and perceptions of the event, and this led to substantial change.

During Katrina, television coverage was substantially hindered by the catastrophe itself - journalists couldn't get to the scene of the event itself, due to the flooding, and at times said that they 'just didn't know' what was happening; the Net, by contrast, performed much better in covering the event and helping with emergency relief. For the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the paper's blog actually became the paper as the printed paper couldn't be delivered, of course; the site Katrina.com became an information centre for disaster relief, and many other such sites emerged as well. One site that was developed mapped the flooding depth onto Google Maps, in fact.

Milwaukee.


The next speaker at this AoIR 2009 blog research session is incoming AoIR Veep Alex Halavais, presenting a paper co-authored with Helen Martin. He begins, though, by referencing previous work of a researcher recording graffiti in New York City: this was done as a way of tracing how people make use of emerging workarounds. In the 1970s, bathroom wall graffiti was the equivalent to what is now blogging, Alex says, so us bloggers today are essentially writing on bathroom walls. Tracking this provides a trace of how people work around their lack of access to participation and voice in the mainstream media, of how they manage to make their ideas heard regardless.

Milwaukee.


Wow, it's the last day of AoIR 2009 already... This morning I'm in the session on blogospheres, which begins with Carmel Vaisman. Her interest is in how bloggers influence political contexts, beyond the conventional and somewhat clichéd framing of bloggers as citizen journalists or political activists - what she wants to do, then, is to track blogging practices in order to understand what political impact they may have. This is in the context of the Israeli blogosphere in this case (and Carmel is a political blogger herself in Israel, and in that role has been in contact with political organisations who are building connections to the political blogosphere).

Milwaukee.


The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2009 is Zack Hayat, whose interest is in active participation on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a space for collaborative content creation as well as for interpersonal interaction (for example through its community portals - or whatever they are positioned as in the various international Wikipedia versions - and discussion pages). There has been exponential growth in Wikipedia participants over the past years, but the number of regular editors has remained relative stable; growth has been mainly in less active editors. Some 60% of Wikipedia has been created by 5% of its users, as Jimmy Wales has said.