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The next speaker in our ASMC14 panel is Anders Larsson, whose interest is in the professionalisation of politics – especially in the context of the increasing use of social media and other ICTs. Campaigns now regularly use social media for political marketing, and Anders's study focusses on the use of Facebook for such purposes – using Netvizz, he gathered activity around the Facebook pages of Swedish and Norwegian parties, party leaders, and other politicians.

For Norway, such activity by political actors spikes around the September 2013 election, of course; activity in Sweden is more stable, and spikes around a major …

The first session at ASMC14 is one I'm in, and focusses on social media and politics – and my QUT colleague Tim Highfield is the first speaker. His interest is in how diverse social media platforms have been integrated into election campaigns and related aspects. This involves a range of new and established actors, and a range of platforms which are used for various purposes from campaigning, activism, and backchannel discussions for televised events, through to being a third space for public discussion and engagement with established voices including journalists and politicians.

In Australia, a number of established Twitter hashtags …

After the excitements of our research collaborations in Germany I've made my way to Amsterdam for the Social Media and the Transformation of Public Space conference (ASMC14 for short). We begin with a keynote by José van Dijck and Thomas Poell, which sets the theme for the conference. José begins by noting the growth of user-generated content platforms and social media over the past decade, replacing some intermediary organisations (from commercial industries to state institutions).

While some of this has been received very positively, this also raises issues of privacy and publicness – is the social Web a public …

It’s been a little quiet again here, as I’ve taken February and March off on Long Service Leave. That’s all about to change, though, because two major new research projects are about to start now – more of these soon.

For the moment, here’s my first conference presentation for 2014, from the Media Talk symposium at Griffith University in Brisbane. I used this to work through the three layers of communication on Twitter which Hallvard Moe and I have identified in our chapter in Twitter and Society, and to provide some examples for how these layers operate in practice …

Now that I’m back in Australia from my extended conference trip, I immediately got back on a plane to travel to a freezing Melbourne, to present our social media research in crisis communication and beyond at the 2013 IBM Research Colloquium. Below are my slides and audio – many thanks again to Jennifer Lai and her team at IBM Research Australia for the invitation!

The next speaker at Digital Methods is Irmgard Wetzstein, whose interest is in social media monitoring tools. Social media monitoring is an increasingly important research area, of course, in both scholarly and commercial research, as the rise of 'big data' demonstrates. A social media monitoring industry has now emerged, providing a range of tools and services across various platforms. There are even systematic evaluations of the various tools, documenting this diversity.

If many such tools have emerged from commercial contexts, are they nonetheless also useful for scholarly purposes? Irmgard's study examined some 100 tools, focussing on tools which provide analytics …