Blog

I'm happy to say that Club Bloggery has returned for 2008. Club Bloggery was our weekly series for ABC Online's Opinion pages during the 2007 election campaign - and while the election is now well and truly over, Jason, Barry, and I will continue to track developments in the Australian blogosphere and beyond during 2008 (if at a slightly more relaxed pace). While I was on holidays during the second half of January, the guys already posted an article discussing the mainstream media's feeding frenzy over Heath Ledger's death (and the role of blogs in setting the record straight) …

We're now in the second of today's presentations by Ralph Schroeder from the Oxford Internet Institute, hosted by the Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation (they're certainly getting their money's worth!). This one shifts our focus considerably, to virtual environments.

Perhaps the obvious question here is how people interact in such environments. Ralph suggests that from current environments, it's already possible to forecast what shape future environments will take; he has created a model called the Connected Presence Cube to describe such environments.

This morning I'm spending time in a seminar by Ralph Schroeder from the Oxford Internet Institute, organised by the Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation. There's another seminar this afternoon, but this morning Ralph's talking about e-Research and the development of tools for distributed knowledge production.

He begins by noting the significant interest and investment in e-research - the shared use of digital distributed tools, data, and resources for research; these change the research landscape by globalising knowledge, reconfiguring disciplines, and (perhaps) ultimately advancing science. Knowledge, however, is traditionally understood as being always local, and tends to be siloed in specific disciplines - e-research breaks with such assumptions, and allows scientists to conduct interdisciplinary work which shifts boundaries. Science, at any rate, is drifting gradually towards more team-based research approaches, and the amount of scientific data and information is increasing rapidly.

I'm delighted to see that Uses of Blogs, the collection Joanne Jacobs and I edited in 2006, has been reviewed in this month's book review section at David Silver's fabulous Resource Center for Cybercultural Studies. The reviews are very positive overall, and David has also asked us to respond to their key points, which we've now done. Some great critical comments, too, which we're going to follow up on if and when the time comes to do a second edition...

I'm very pleased to see that a new article of mine has just been published in the energetic Greek online journal Re-Public. Editor Pavlos Hatzopoulos invited me a little while ago to respond to a first wave of articles discussing and critiquing the emergent phenomena of the social Web, and the contributor list already includes a number key thinkers in the field, from Michel Bauwens to Trebor Scholz. In fact, I responded specifically to the opening discussion between Trebor and Paul Hartzog, which revisits the industrial-age question of "Who owns the means of production?" for the new, information-age …

It looks like there are a good half dozen edited collections about citizen journalism that are currently under development; some of them are probably spurred on by the impending U.S. presidential election and the role that news bloggers and citizen journalists will undoubtedly play in it, but I'm also aware of collections being developed as far afield as Australia, Germany, and India (and I've written contributions for a few of them). One of them, Megan Boler's Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times is about to be released, and is already listed on Amazon - as I've mentioned here …

Happy new year, everyone - I'm glad we've made it. In this first post for 2008, I'm delighted to announce the launch of a new Website to accompany my forthcoming book and track further research: Produsage.org will be a central space for anything that relates to the concept of produsage - for now, I've already posted up some introductory definitions and background information about produsage, excerpted from the book, a few articles about the concept, and some more details about Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage itself. This doesn't mean I'll discontinue this site, of course - but Produsage.org is now the key site for all produsage information, and I'll cross-post material here as appropriate.

The election may be over, but our Club Bloggery series for ABC Online continues unabated for now (if perhaps at a pace more commensurate with the impending summer holidays). This week, we take a look back in some degree of anger at the 'just kidding' defence for political stunts gone wrong, which was employed several times during the campaign. Barry, Jason, and I have now posted the article at ABC Online and on our group blog Gatewatching.

Not Funny

By Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, and Barry Saunders

One of the most prominent recurring features of the long election campaign …

As we get closer to the release date for my upcoming book [weblink:475], I'm now starting to deal with the tail end of the production process - finalising the cover image and organising the back cover text. Having featured comments from John Hartley and Geert Lovink on the back cover of my last monograph, I aimed high with this one as well, and I'm very pleased that both MIT's Henry Jenkins, one of the most eminent scholars in the field of user-led participatory culture, and Michel Bauwens, the driving force behind the inspiring Foundation for P2P Alternatives, have …

Absolutely nothing unexpected happened on the weekend. Absolutely nothing unexpected has happened since: though slow to work out which way the wind blows, Dennis Shanahan, Paul Kelly and colleagues at the former (and future?) Government Gazette have skipped nary a beat in switching to singing the praises of Kevin the Rudd. Only Glenn Milne seems to have missed the memo - he's still working on his hagiography of 'poor' Peter Costello. Oh, and Caroline Overington, of course, who is making headlines for all the wrong reasons.

Two new entries for David Silver's 'Gone Gallery' …