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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 …

I'm very pleased to announce the launch of issue 10.4 of M/C Journal. Interestingly, one of our articles has already been noted in the mainstream press (even though they got the name of the journal somewhat wrong...). Speaking as a migrant to Australia, I'm not sure I agree with Gerard Henderson's views about the proposed citizenship test - that is to say, I'm pretty sure I don't -, but good to see that M/C Journal has been able to make a contribution to this debate.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - 27 Aug. 2007

M/C - Media and Culture
is proud …

As we're slowly approaching the official start of the Australian federal election campaign (not that the unofficial campaign hasn't already started...), we're also getting very close to the launch of our citizen journalism site to accompany the election. This is the first major project in a three-year ARC Linkage research programme around citizen journalism which involves SBS, On Line Opinion, Cisco Systems, the Brisbane Institute, and my colleagues and me at QUT Creative Industries.

A little while ago, I posted a request on this blog asking for graphics artists who would be able to convert my rough sketch of a graphic to illustrate the idea of the soft gentle slope of cultural participation into something a little more attractive. I was delighted to have received a very quick response to this request, and I'm very happy to post the updated image here. Update: in light of Jeremy's comment, I've also changed the term from 'soft' to 'gentle slope'. Thanks for that, Jeremy.

It may have taken a little while, but there were some interesting developments around my book [weblink:28] recently. To begin with, readers can now finally browse the book online at Amazon - of course the book itself has been available there for a couple of years already, but it's now been scanned and is available to explore in some more detail. Check it out...

On the other hand, there's also been some news from the real Amazon - a review of the book by Marcelo Träsel was published a little while ago in the Brazilian journal InTexto. Obviously, the …

Heh. At least it seems like the Higher Education section of The Australian has managed to quarantine itself from the melt-down that's occurred amongst its political journalists. There's a nice piece there today about our efforts at QUT to develop the C4C framework of collaborative capacities required of graduates in the developing produsage environment - an article which was sparked by our paper at Mobile Media 2007 (and a similar paper I presented at ICE 3 earlier this year). Campus Review also reported on this recently, following a Sydney University press release. Neither note Trendwatching as the originators …

I'm very happy to announce the next issue of M/C Journal:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - 9 July 2007

M/C - Media and Culture
is proud to present issue three in volume ten of

M/C Journal
http://journal.media-culture.org.au/

'complex' - Edited by Jayde Cahir and Sarah James

Sydney's City Rail has recently launched an advertising campaign with the slogan of "untangling our complex rail network". City Rail position Sydney's rail network as a complex system. Describing something as 'complex' can be the answer to many questions. Rather than positioning 'complex' as the end result we would like to explore it as a starting point. What is complex? How is it complex? Why is it complex?