All the World's a Library: Produsage and User-Led Curation

I've previously posted the call for expressions of interest in PhD scholarships in the new Smart Services CRC, working on topics related to social media and audience and market foresight. In addition to these PhD positions, I'm now also looking for a part-time Research Assistant for my own project within the CRC, which deals quite directly with the further exploration of user-led content creation (or what I've called produsage) and its possible application in commercial contexts by the CRC's industry partners. Below is the blurb for my project, to give you an idea of what I'll be embarking …

Well, with the Future of Journalism now safely behind us (the event, that is - some reflections at Larvatus Prodeo, and also here later this week, hopefully), it's time to look ahead to other upcoming conferences and talks. I've posted some information about some of these on the Produsage.org site already, so here's a quick summary only. You can also track my progress through these upcoming events at Dopplr.com.

Now that the new Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre has been officially launched, we've begun to recruit for PhD students who'll be based with the QUT node of the CRC. This is an excellent opportunity to work with major Australian industry partners and key researchers in the Creative Industries and Business Faculties at QUT. If you're interested, get in touch now; if you know of anyone who may be interested, please spread the word!

My involvement is with the Social Media and Audience and Market Foresight programmes in the CRC (key industry partners here are Fairfax Digital and Sensis), so that's the focus of my interests; other colleagues in the CRC have slightly different research orientations. If you're considering proposing a PhD project in this field, it should address one or more of the topics of interest listed below.

Following up on a previous post on this subject: Tony Walker over at ABC Digital Futures notes the likely impending demise of one of the most innovative Webcasting projects of recent years: Pandora, the online radio station of the Music Genome Project. For the uninitiated: the MGP is a database of the specific traits of thousands of songs by a wide variety of artists, which enables it to suggest to users that if they like a specific song, they're also likely to enjoy a variety of songs from other albums and by other artists. On that basis, Pandora offers personalised Webcasting of tracks which the MGP identifies as similar to those tracks that a user has already said they like.

A few days ago Geert Lovink contacted me with some interview questions regarding our research into the Australian political blogosphere - this is for a new book, Blog Theory, that he's working on with Jodi Dean for release on Polity Press. Here's what I had to say:

GL: You have just done research into the Australian blogosphere. Do you think there is something like an Australian blogosphere and how would you characterize it?

Well, let me start by saying that 'the blog' is simply a media technology (similar to 'the book' or 'the television'), which can be used in any number of different ways. And similar to those other media technologies (where we also don't speak of a 'booksphere' or 'televisionsphere', I've long argued that we're well past the point where to speak of 'blogging' as a unified form makes sense any more.