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Suddenly conferences are popping up all over the place - and I'm particularly sorry I didn't hear about this one earlier (the call for papers is closed now):

The 14th AMIC Annual Conference

"Media and Society in Asia: Transformations and Transitions"

18 - 21 July 2005, Beijing, People's Republic of China.

AMIC is the Asian Media Information and Communication Centre, based in Singapore. Conference topics include:

• Role of

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I received an invitation to participate in a proposed symposium at Stanford today. Looks very promising, even though I don't have a strong computational bent in my own research. The last couple of topics in particular have piqued my interest. (Note that the symposium is only proposed so far, not confirmed.)

AAAI 2006 SPRING SYMPOSIUM SERIES
COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES TO ANALYZING WEBLOGS

March 27-29, 2006 - Stanford University, California, USA

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AREAS OF INTEREST

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This symposium focuses on computational approaches to analysis of individual blogs and the blogosphere as a whole:

The folks at Peter Lang sent me the proof for the cover of my book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production today. This is based on a design by QUT student Gordon Grace, who also led the team that redesigned M/C - Media and Culture last year. So, look out for it in the bookshop - it should go to print in a month or so...

A few days ago, I received some nice email feedback for a review of King Crimson's 2003 album The Power to Believe, which I'd published in M/C Reviews at the time. Michael Cussen wrote to me:

Very good review of Power to Believe. Did you send it to DGM?

I hadn't, but I've now sent off a quick message to Sid Smith, Crimso biographer and currently helping to build the upcoming new Website for their record label Discipline Global Mobile. I'm also including pointers to two earlier pieces for PopMatters:

I posted the call for papers for the upcoming 'copy' issue of M/C Journal today:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - 18 April 2005

M/C - Media and Culture
http://www.media-culture.org.au/
is calling for contributors to the 'copy' issue of

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

M/C Journal is looking for new contributors. M/C is a crossover journal between the popular and the academic, and a blind- and peer-reviewed journal.

Don't know why this is suddenly all happening now, but I've been contacted by a good cross-section of the Australian media over the last couple of days. In addition to the Online Opinion piece which is now up, at first Jennifer Dudley from Brisbane's Courier-Mail approached me as an expert commentator on blogging; she's published an article about information addiction in today's issue (which itself is based on a posting by blogger Om Malik who points to a kind of 'Internet Anxiety Disorder' that results from the vastness of information now available to everyone). Then I was approached by Peter Gooch from ABC radio to do a live interview on the same topic, sparked by that article. I was on air around 1.30 p.m. today.

Well, my article for Online Opinion is, erm, online now, retitled "Online 'Produsers' Dish Up the News". (It was first posted here as [weblink:164].) Look forward to seeing the comments.

Bugger. So I was cleaning out some trackback spam from the spam filter, and managed to delete all comments on the site. Apologies to everyone who left a comment - nothing personal... Feel free to add them again.

A good meeting with Jo Jacobs and our research assistant Ian Rogers today, to move forward on the Uses of Blogs book. We've signed the book contract now and it's on its way back to Peter Lang in New York. We'll be sending out an update to our contributors shortly, to work out the deadlines leading up to delivery of the manuscript in early November. The more we work on this, the more this is shaping up to be a great collection. The enthusiasm displayed by our contributors (as well as by Jo and Ian) is great, and we do seem to have managed to collect a stellar cast of bloggers and blog researchers. It's a pleasure to work with such a supportive publisher as well!