Mower MagicWell, here I am at the National Library in Canberra - and the first thing that greeted me is a large peace sign mowed into the lawns across Lake Burley Griffin from Parliament House. Nice work.
I've spent the weekend updating the site of M/C - Media and Culture, for which I serve as General Editor. Phew - a lot of work, even though the placement students who designed the upgrade have done a fantastic job updating the look and feel of the site. The next step now is to upload the new issue, 'fame'; this should happen tonight, I hope.
I'm going to try update my site to the latest version of Drupal today - skipping a few generations from 4.1 to 4.4.2... Let's hope for the best. If all goes well this will mean I can do trackbacks on the blog as well!
OK, after the end of AoIR 2004 I'm back in Brighton now. I couldn't get access with my laptop at the University of Sussex at all for the last few days, so I'm now about to post my backlog of blog entries (my backblog?) from the last few days.
The next (and last for this conference) session is about to begin, titled simply 'resistance?' Still a good turnout for the session even though people are now starting to leave the University of Sussex to catch their various planes. Andrew Ó Baoill starts this session with a study of MoveOn.org, a political group which started in 1998 around the Clinton impeachment campaign and enables participation in political action by members of the public.
An Early Start...The last day of AoIR 2004 has dawned on us. I've had the bad luck to have been given the 8.30 a.m. timeslot for my own paper - standing in an empty theatre at the moment waiting for people to finish their breakfast and make their way here. The session I'm in - ostensibly on 'online news and journalism/Internet vs. traditional media' - contains a pretty eclectic bunch of papers, so we'll see how many will show up in the end… They have ten more minutes.
And we're on to the last session of the day, which continues the blogging theme. I should probably note that not all papers at this conference are concerned with blogs - there are some eight or nine sessions running simultaneously here, themed around many other topics; as always, the topics I cover here are only the ones I was most interested in and do not necessarily represent the overall intellectual thrust of the conference accurately. (I'm sure the other bloggers here will present a very different version of AoIR 2004 in their blogs, even if admittedly many of them have also attended most of the blogging-related sessions…)