All Conferenced Out, and Fired Up for Next Year

Well, that's it - this year's Association of Internet Researchers conference is over. It's been a great and varied (in a good way) event - always good to see a broad range of papers from many disciplinary backgrounds, as well of course to catch up with friends and colleagues I hadn't seen for a year. (As always, by the way, all errors in the blog transcripts of sessions are mine and not the presenters'.) I was surprised that so few Australians and (I think) no New Zealanders made their way to Chicago this year - from what I could tell, new AoIR president Matt Allen, Denise Rall from Southern Cross University, and I were the only ones currently based down under, with Amanda Spink soon to be joining us at QUT. Next year, when the conference is held in Brisbane, this should change significantly, of course - hopefully without losing too many of our European and North American colleagues in the process.

Matt has already asked me to be involved in the conference organisation for next year in some capacity, and I've already got a few ideas of what I'd like to see in Brisbane. Most urgently, I guess we'll have to define the conference topic - talking to colleagues over dinner last night the idea of 'flow' came to mind as a potential overall topic. It would be possible to extend this into a number of useful areas:

• flow between - bridging digital and geographical divides
• flow around - circumventing censorship and other obstacles
• flow on - effects of Internet use on other domains
• flow across - information dissemination and diffusion
• flow through - network technologies and bandwidth
• flow up (and down) - top-down and bottom-up media approaches
• flow from, past, to - producer, user, and consumer positions in information exchange

Anyway, just an idea... Whatever the topic, I would like to invite everyone to join us for AoIR  7.0 in Brisbane this time next year - and I'd like to thank the team around Caroline Haythornthwaite and Steve Jones for their hard work organising this year's conference. Myself, I have another half day here in Chicago now before heading on to New York City for a few more public lectures (as well as day trips to Boston, Providence, and Philadelphia for lectures there). If anyone's in NYC on Tuesday, come along to the New School in the morning or The Thing in the evening!