This Site

Never go on holidays... Looks like a few days into my holiday on the Sunshine Coast, one of the electrical storms sweeping through Brisbane these days knocked out the server, even in spite of various forms of surge protection. Ah well - a motherboard replacement and some serious fiddling with Linux later (massive thanks to Nic Suzor for pointing me to the tip that enabled my successful necromancy), here we are again.

And while we're here, I might as well note that the audio and Powerpoint from my Interactive Minds presentation on 27 November are now online. I'm afraid the audio quality is, shall we say, 'for collectors only', but here it is, for what it's worth. This end-of-year IM event aimed to highlight trends in 2008 and predictions for 2009, and regular readers of this blog will recognise a few of my recurring obsessions. Many thanks to Jen Storey for the invite.

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.

So I joined Facebook this week - not because I had a deep and burning desire to do so, but because we've created a youdecide2007 Facebook group as part of the support network for our youdecide2007.org citizen journalism Website for the upcoming Australian federal election. Since joining, I've received a good dozen of friends requests from friends and colleagues; people have left messages on my wall; I've been invited to events - all of which are pretty regular occurrences on the site, I guess. (The same keeps happening with my LinkedIn account, which I haven't even logged on to …

Brisbane
So, I'm back in Brisbane and I've finally had a chance to post those remaining blog entries from ICA and CATaC. I've also uploaded my photos from the trip to Flickr, and I'll add them and some other materials to blog posts soon. Unfortunately, while I was away there were some problems with my Web and mailserver, so if anyone's emails to me bounced over the last couple of weeks, please resend them.

As I understand it now, the problem may have been caused by the Windows w3wp.exe service, which is part of the Internet Information Services (IIS) suite. This service handles Web server requests and can max out the CPU if too many requests come in at the same time (and at peak time, we sometimes get up to 1000 spam trackbacks per hour - none of which you see because they're usually all caught by the spam filter on the Website). I've now tweaked IIS by setting the 'worker process recycling' values to far lower limits - this means that the server will consume less system memory and CPU time before it starts to clean out old server processes. Hopefully this fixes the problem - and if anyone has useful suggestions for how to set the server limits, please let me know.

I realise I haven't posted here for a while - but that doesn't mean that things haven't been busy on this site. I spent some time upgrading the site to the latest version of Drupal recently, and that's meant some fairly tricky code fixes because some of the Drupal modules I'm running here haven't been fully upgraded to version 4.7.x yet - but at least trackback.module is now out in a new version which incorporates some of my contributions. Good to contribute to an open source project for once, instead of just doing research on them... The new version of Drupal has also switched to a new templating system, so while the look of this site may not have changed much overall, I've had to do some fairly serious reworking of the code underneath. Anyway, that's the reason for the four days' gap in the site statistics which you can see on the front page (and happily the changeover over those days also wiped out four days of trackback spam...).

I made the move to Firefox over the last few days, and as a result I've been exploring the wealth of Firefox extensions which is also available. One of them is Performancing, which adds a basic WYSIWYG offline editor for blog posts to Firefox - and this in turn brought me to look more widely at the current state of blog clients: software which enables the offline writing and editing of blog posts for later submission to a blog, using a standard XML-RPC interface. Unfortunately - especially as far as real WYSIWYG editing is concerned (as opposed to editing plain text with a few HTML tags thrown in) -, there still isn't that much out there. I did find at least a couple of promising options, though.

It's been a busy week - partly also because I'm going on holidays in the middle of next week and wanted to finish a few things before then. So, I spent most of last night working on one of the audio recordings from my recent trip to the U.S.: I've now added a recording from my guest lecture [weblink:286] to this site. As I said back then, my favourite version of that lecture was the one I gave at Temple University in Philadelphia, and so I worked mainly with that recording; however, I also noticed that for some reason the last few minutes of it were missing from the recording, and so I've spliced in the ending from the Brown University recording a few days earlier. In addition, I also made some minor updates to my list of recent publications, splitting this up into publications, recorded talks, and creative work, and added a box with the most recent stuff in the upper right corner of this blog. Hope that's useful. I'm hoping to add recordings from my Wikinews paper at AoIR 2005, and the Northeastern University New Media Panel, soon.

Ho boy. Well, my new spam filter for comments on this site seems to be doing its job - the site has been (and still is at the moment) flooded by comments advertising online gambling, but none of them (we're past the 150 comments mark here!) have actually made it through. Filtering by content is the only way to catch these postings - they're coming from a wide range of IP addresses, so there seem to be a fair few machines out on the Net that have been hacked to send comment spam.

Other than that, I've spent the day working on my application for promotion to lecturer level B at QUT. If I wasn't feeling a bit under the weather already anyway, just listing all the various projects I'm involved in is exhausting. QUT divides academic work into three main areas - here are the major items I've listed so far:

Phew. More Drupal updates today, and I think I have most of it under control now. In the process I've added a Creative Commons licencing scheme, a blogroll, direct access to the content categories, and a few other goodies. Still no news on the monitored sites list (using Drupal's Weblinks module); I've manually added a list of sites to the right sidebar for the time being.

Other updates also continue. Today was the start of week three of semester, but I'm already having to update unit outlines for next semester (when I'm again teaching the Creative Industries unit at QUT, as well as New Media Technologies). NMT (in which students produce the M/Cyclopedia of New Media) still requires more development; I'm exploring ways to translate the wiki knowledge structure of the M/Cyclopedia into the unit content structure and delivery. How do you teach new media without falling into the trap of providing a simplified linear history of new media - how do you show the complex interconnected nature of new media concepts and issues instead (and enable students to explore them for themselves)?