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(Crossposted from Gatewatching.)

In this second part, we'll follow on from our discussion of key themes in The Other Cheek, Larvatus Prodeo, and Club Troppo by looking at the concept maps which Leximancer produces. But first, a recap of the background for this study: I've already posted about our work in developing a new methodology for mapping link and concept networks in the Australian blogosphere. For a first test run of this project, we archived posts in some 300-400 Australian political blogs between the start of November 2007 (the last month of the federal election campaign) …

(Cross-posted from Gatewatching.)

In a previous post, I mentioned our work in developing a new methodology for mapping link and concept networks in the Australian blogosphere. For a first test run of this project, we archived posts in some 300-400 Australian political blogs between the start of November 2007 (the last month of the federal election campaign) and the end of January 2008, and we've now begun an exploratory analysis of this corpus of data.

As noted in our discussion paper for this project, the first step in this analysis is to distinguish between different functional …

I've long been a fan of Mark Pesce's work; his articles at the recently renamed The Human Network site have been a strong influence on my own work. So, I'm very happy to be able to host a seminar by Mark on behalf of the CCi at the Creative Industries Precinct in Brisbane this coming Thursday. In preparation for the event, Mark has now published a new piece entitled "Little, Big", which I'm sure he'll have more to say about when he speaks here on Thursday.

Anyone planning to attend Mark's talk should RSVP to me as soon as possible, as spaces are limited (a.bruns[at]qut.edu.au). Here's the announcement for Mark's talk:

Over the last week or so, there have been quite a few responses to a recent talk by Clay Shirky in which he discusses our collective "cognitive surplus" that is now being harnessed by participatory, Web 2.0, produsage initiatives. Shirky's talk has been praised by some, and condemned by others; negative responses seem to focus especially on his apparent disdain for television, which he describes as a kind of "cognitive heatsink", dispersing surplus cognitive energy. (Skip to about 1:50 in the video below.)

Such criticism has been particularly vocal coming from the direction of cultural studies researchers, and while I …

The last months have been enormously productive (and, at times, exhausting!) for me. In addition to my own book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage, I've also contributed to a number of other publications - and quite a few of them are now finally available in print and/or online.

In a previous post, I've already mentioned Megan Boler's edited collection Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times. I've now received my copy of the book, and very nice it looks, too - a great collection of essays from many key authors and researchers in the field, combined with Megan's interviews with journalists and media activists including Robert McChesney and Hassan Ibrahim of Al Jazeera. My own contribution explores the post-tactical opportunities for citizen media, and draws parallels to the long-term establisment of other once tactical movements; a pre-print version of the chapter is online here. The book is available from Amazon and MIT Press.

It's been a long time between drinks, but over at ABC Online they've just posted the latest Club Bloggery article by Jason, Barry, and me - and we've also reposted it at Gatewatching, as usual. This time, we're reflecting on recent revelations that Liberal Party staffers in Victoria ran a blog to discredit their own leader - from party premises...

Baillieu and the Blogs of War

By Jason Wilson, Axel Bruns and Barry Saunders

I'm crossposting this from Gatewatching.org, where a discussion about the influence of Australian political bloggers on wider political processes that was kicked off by Jason Wilson's recent posts on Tim Blair's move to the Daily Telegraph and Christian Kerr's summary dismissal of Ozblogistan's political combattants in The Australian has prompted me to finally post up some more information about the research we're currently engaged in at QUT, in collaboration with our excellent colleagues at the University St. Gallen in Switzerland. I'm also attaching a detailed discussion paper which documents our methodological model in some more detail - we'd love to get further feedback on this, from fellow researchers and interested bloggers alike. (For a more condensed version of this material, please see our paper for the ISEA 2008 conference in Singapore.)

This is weird.

OK, I understand the logic behind Nigerian email spam: if you copy, paste, and email the same plea for help (and bank account details) often enough, you're going to find someone gullible enough to send them to you - even today, when most of us are all too well aware of these emails and know how to spot them the moment they drop into our inbox (if they don't get spamfiltered out before then anyway). I also see how, before this kind of spam started accounting for a sizeable percentage of all email sent and received, and especially before email became a major means of communication in the first place, people might still have fallen for similar messages from faraway countries when they received them in letter form.

But this? A hand-written letter from Uganda, basically containing the same standard text ("I warmly greet you in God's name", and all that), snail-mailed to my office address? Surely today, with the benefit of our added experience of spam scams, the hit/miss ratio just wouldn't make it worth the effort - spam emails are cheap and literally send themselves, but with handwritten letters you also have to cover the cost of manually writing and (air-) mailing them?