Blog

Milwaukee.


Relief: my stomach seems to be the right way up again, and the horrible headache from yesterday is gone, too. Just in time for the second day at AoIR 2009, which begins with the blogs session that has both my paper (with Tim Highfield, Lars Kirchhoff, and Thomas Nicolai) and Tim's paper in it. More on those soon, but we begin the morning with Anders Larsson, who provides a review of current research on blogs and blogging. Technorati has now indexed some 133 million blogs since 2002, and there has been wide research interest in blogs as well - from a focus on politics in blogs to communication processes among individuals and more recently an interest in the organisational and professional uses of blogs.

Milwaukee.


The final speaker for this session at AoIR 2009 is Michael Dick, who focusses on the idea of Web science as political economy. This builds on Tim Berners-Lee's idea of Web Science, which applies especially computer science approaches to the study of the Web's evolution, design, and operation, with an aim of understanding and 'managing' the Web. The majority of these ideas, however, are the Semantic Web in disguise, Michael says.

This assumes a continual evolution of the Web, from a Web of documents to the interactive Web 2.0 and on to the 'deep Web' which further mines the vast amount of data generated through Web 2.0 services. The next steps from here are the Semantic Web and the Web of data, which describe and utilise this material using universal ontology languages. Essentially, this converts loose Web 2.0 folksonomies to manageable taxonomies.

Milwaukee.


OK, I'm soldiering on for the last of today's sessions at AoIR 2009 - can't wait to get back to my room and sleep off this illness, though. Hopefully I'll feel better for my session tomorrow! This session is on theorising Web 2.0, and we begin with Jacob Thomas Matthews. he begins by questioning Web 2.0 as a term, and suggests the collaboative Web as an alternative way of describing this phenomenon. Either way, this is often described as a substantial cultural shift which may lead to the emergence of a new participatory culture which empowers the user.

Milwaukee.


The next speaker in this last.fm panel at AoIR 2009 is Adriana Amaral, who shifts our focus to Brazilian users of last.fm, and points especially to the role of online profiles here. Profiles are often related to a specific scene, subculture, or musical genre, and musical taste is a convergent process involving mass media, word of mouth, friends, community, family, and other social spaces. There are a number of site types here - classification, musical data visualisation, and online radio stations (based on listening data); each of these are important features of last.fm. The way the site deals with tagging intensifies the individual and collective relations of recommendations; its folksonomy can be understood as a narrow typology.

Milwaukee.


Up next in this panel at AoIR 2009 is Simone Pereira de Sá, whose focus is on music recommendation systems; such systems are mediators or translators to which we delegate the task of recommendation. They promise something else for the different actors in the process: artists are presented to the right people, while listeners find new music they should enjoy, and this is further enhanced through social networking tools and tagging functionalities.

Labelling systems deal with the complex issue of music classifications, choices, and tastes, and this ties into the question of musical genres - so, how do recommendation systems work on this basis, and strain, support, or overcome the idea of musical generes? As Simon Frith has suggested, one of the greatest pleasures of entertainment culture is the discussion of different values and tastes; different opinions have different levels of credibility here. This is also connected to subcultural theory, of course, which ascribes certain subcultural capital to agents in contact with the media and refers to consuming certain exclusive information and the 'right' cultural products.

Milwaukee.


After the first keynote at AoIR 2009, I'm now in a panel on last.fm that begins with Nancy Baym. She asks what the term 'friend' means in a social networking site; this both in an interpersonal context and in the context of society as a whole, where some suggest that the term 'friend' is losing its meaning through its use on social networking sites. Last.fm was founded in London in 2005, and now has more than 35 million users; it is highly international, and based in the first place on the use of audio scrobbling application which share what its users are listening to.

Milwaukee.


The first keynote at AoIR 2009 is by Siva Vaidhyanathan, whose focus is on the Googlisation of everything (aiming low, then...). He begins by noting the largely uncritical veneration of Google and its impact on everyday life; Google is now almost impossible to get by without, which is quite an achievement for a company that is only 11 years old. One particularly notable recent project here is the Google library project which aims to digitise as many extant books as possible; where libraries around the world have for some time explored the possibility of a coordinated worldwide project, Google simply came in and got going with it. Especially troubling in this context is the cost of this to libraries.

Milwaukee.


The final speaker in this first session at AoIR 2009 is Carol Soon, who shifts our focus to Singaporean political bloggers. Political blogging and related forms challenge conventional top-down communication flows, of course, and in doing so also undermines established entities' authority in information dissemination. What follows is a diversification of political participation in the networked public sphere - and in the Singaporean context, then, who are the key players here?

The networked public sphere can be seen as an autopoietic system,in which flows of communication and relationships are self-organising, move from the bottom up, freely within clusters and in a self-determined fashion. This challenges systems which traditionally hold more powerful positions - and hyperlink analysis can be utilised to examine the flows of information in this changing environment. Such flows may involve conventional political parties, but also civil society groups (which in Singapore particularly challenges the established system).

Milwaukee.


The next speaker at AoIR 2009 is Uta Russmann, whose focus is on Web campaigning in Austria during the 2008 national elections, which for the first time saw a substantial use of online media for campaiging. There had been a use of Web-based information in previous elections, of course, but so far this remained quite simple and unsophisticated - mainly just various forms of shovelware.

Uta's study examined the use of the Web during the 2008 campaign, focusing on information provision, interaction with voters, and mobilisation of voters for campaigning, as well as broader connection and networking functions between parties and the media. This also takes into account the lessons from the 2007/8 US campaigns, which pointed to the Net becoming a key source of political information and participation especially for younger voters, as well as similar observations in recent campaigns in Germany, Italy, and France.

Milwaukee.


I've made it to the Association of Internet Researchers conference in windy Milwaukee, and promptly managed to seriously upset my stomach - so let's see how we go today. The first speaker in my first session at AoIR 2009 is Aaron S. Veenstra, whose focus is on political blogging during the 2008 US elections. He notes the emergence of what he calls 'new' new media - YouTube, Facebook, Twitter - and these have affected the way we think about political blogging, too.

Overall, too, blogging itself is increasingly difficult to define as technical definitions are dynamic and blogging genres are inconsistent at the top end and incredibly varied at the bottom end. The top tier of blogs may now be separating from the field, and liberal and conservative blogs (in the US) are growing apart; additionally, it is also important to distinguish between community and individual functions.