Blog

We went on a nice but all-too-short post-V-day getaway to North Stradbroke Island last weekend, but I'm afraid any sense of relaxation went out the window quickly when I saw on Monday that numbers in my Creative Industries unit had risen to nearly 370 students by Monday morning. This meant quickly adding a couple more tutors and giving them an induction to the material, and elsewhere too I've been playing catchup all week already - not because I've been slack in the lead-up to the semester, but because there's just so much to do at the moment.

David Sifry has posted the latest "State of the Blogosphere" report, extracted from Technorati data. Plenty to digest here, and discussion on what the findings may mean has already started on Sifry's blog as well as elsewhere, and perhaps one of these days I'll even find the time to add my own views on this.

In other news, though, we've just received the copyeditor's comments on the [weblink:158] manuscript. No major edits required, so hopefully we'll be able to turn it around pretty quickly. Warm up the presses, Peter Lang!

Phew. I have spent four out of the last five working days virtually in non-stop meetings on a wide variety of issues - from research and teaching planning sessions to team meetings for the ACID Press project (which has a very outdated outline on the ACID Website, I'm afraid), meetings of the AoIR 2006 conference organising team, preliminary work for a new book project, and a PhD confirmation presentation by Creative Industries student Stephen Harrington - and tomorrow is looking no better, with an all-day meeting of the team of our teaching and learning project using blogs and wikis at QUT. In between all the meetings about what work needs to be done, it would be nice to find some time to actually do some work... (At least I did find the time to accept an invitation to join the editorial board of New Media & Society, and I look forward to being part of it.)

Heh. I've been tagged by Jean, who'd herself been tagged by Mel, I think. So, in the blogosphere's best version of a not-for-profit pyramid scheme, lessee:

Four jobs I've had:

1. Listening into Soviet Red Army transmissions in Eastern Germany, from the West German border
2. Hardware import agent
3. Helpdesk dude (these two both for VillageTronic when they were still doing Amiga hardware)
4. Translator

Four movies I can watch over and over:

Saw this on the AoIR mailing-list today - looks interesting:

From: David Brake
Subject: [Air-l] Literature review of harm and offence caused by various media inc. Internet, mobile phone, computer games
To: air-l-aoir.org@listserv.aoir.org

Sonia Livingstone and Andrea Millwood Hargrave have just published a comprehensive review of recent (last 5 years) academic and regulatory literature across a range of media including the Internet, mobile phones and computer games as well as TV, radio, film and print media (I was one of the contributors to the review- particularly on the Internet, mobile phone and computer games areas). Links to the 40 page executive summary (free), the press release and ordering information for the 256 page paperback are available from this Media@LSE blog posting: