I should have expected little else, of course - all I got to see at AoIR 2006 were the two panels I participated in, and the two conference keynotes; my duties as conference chair (i.e. running about to make sure there were no major disasters) prevented me from anything else. The two panels, organised by Terry Flew and Ted M. Coopman, went very well, though. Together, they presented the two sides of citizen journalism: its grounding in the activist tactical media movements of the 1980s and 1990s (on Ted's panel "Byte Me! Digital Media as an Activist Critique and Parallel Mediasphere"), and its continuing longer-term establishment as a legitimate form of journalism in relation to the traditional news industry (on Terry's panel "Online News Media and Citizen Journalism").

My colleague Graham Meikle from Macquarie University, author of the fabulous Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet, has just let me know that his review of my book [weblink:28] will be published in the next issue of Media International Australia. He's kindly allowed me to republish his review here - many thanks, Graham!

I was lucky enough to be a team member in two education research projects proposed to the Carrick Institute in the last application round. One, with my friend and colleague Donna Lee Brien and a host of other colleagues, will work on developing a network of creative writing postgraduates, and I'll post more about it here soon as the project develops. The other, led by [weblink:505] from the University of Canberra, has now been officially announced - here is our press release:

Social Software in Higher Education

Canberra - 24 August 2006

A quick heads-up for anyone in the Brisbane region: I'll be on ABC radio 612 this afternoon, some time after 1 p.m., getting interviewed by Richard Fidler about YouTube. Questions we'll cover may include:

• What kind of videos are on YouTube?

• Who is using it?

• Will YouTube change the way we access entertainment/info/news?

• How is it different to MySpace?

• Are there any censorship/copyright issues?

Tonight I'm at UQ yet again, for the second CCCS public lecture by visiting scholar Georgina Born (and you've got to admire my restraint in not titling this blog entry "Born Again"). This talk looks like it's going to be more generally about the lessons to be learnt from the BBC's history and present. She begins by noting the distance between executive rhetoric and the reality of work in public service broadcasters (PSB), but of course such contradictions characterise any complex organisation.

I'm spending the afternoon at a public lecture by Georgina Born from Cambridge University, at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland (who, as it turns out, for some time was also the cellist and bassist in British Prog icons Henry Cow). She begins with a nod towards Habermas's public sphere concept, which in relation to broadcasting has been seen as having been imperfectly realised (e.g. through the universalism of service, reach, and programming of the BBC in Britain). In these media debates, the specifically literary and cultural dimensions of the original conception of the public sphere appear to have been ignored, however, and there is also a gender issue here which privileges 'hard' content (e.g. news) over 'soft' content such as drama.

No, I'm not leaving QUT - but today is the first day of the new semester, and it's the first time in five years that I'm not acting as unit coordinator for KKB018 Creative Industries, one of the Creative Industries Faculty's undergraduate core units. KKB018 was the unit that I was originally employed to develop - and as far as I know, it was the first mainstream undergraduate unit (course, subject - choose whatever terminology applies in your neck of the woods) world-wide to introduce students to the creative industries. I've now finally passed on responsibility for the unit to my esteemed colleague John Banks - with my role as conference chair for AoIR 2006 and my involvement in various major research projects it simply was no longer feasible to coordinate such a large unit as well. So, today I say goodbye, with a quiet sigh of relief after what's been a long and occasionally rocky road.