New Work on the Australian Twittersphere, and on Produsage

Phew – it’s been a busy month since my last update. Here’s a run-down of the latest news. First, the emerging maps of the Australian Twittersphere which I presented at the Digital Humanities Australasia conference in Canberra in March have received quite a bit of press coverage over the past week or so, following our press release about this work. Here are some of the highlights:

• The Australian ran a big page three article about our research, and reprinted the annotated map itself;
• the Australian Financial Review also printed the map on page three;
• Stilgherrian gave us a great write-up in Crikey;
• news.com.au Websites and newspapers also ran a syndicated story about the map;
• industry sites B&T and Startupsmart pointed out the commercial uses of this enhanced understanding of the Australian Twittersphere;
• and even science site Phys.org covered our work.

I’ve also done about a dozen radio interviews about this research (which isn’t easy, considering how visual this work is); will post up some links to recordings if they become available. More information about this work is also available on the (newly refurbished) Mapping Online Publics Website, of course.

I’ve also just had the pleasure of presenting a keynote on the place of social media within the wider media ecology to the Queensland conference of the Australian Teachers of Media. I’ve posted my slides and audio from the event, which draw substantially on the Twittersphere maps and the crisis communication research we’ve done, here on the blog. Many thanks to ATOM Queensland for the invitation to speak at the conference!

And finally, continuing a different line of research, a new article on produsage and commerce has just been published in a special issue of the journal Information, Communication, and Society which was edited by Oscar Westlund. The print issue isn’t out yet, but the article is already available on the journal Website, or as a pre-print here.