As we get closer to the release date for my upcoming book [weblink:475], I'm now starting to deal with the tail end of the production process - finalising the cover image and organising the back cover text. Having featured comments from John Hartley and Geert Lovink on the back cover of my last monograph, I aimed high with this one as well, and I'm very pleased that both MIT's Henry Jenkins, one of the most eminent scholars in the field of user-led participatory culture, and Michel Bauwens, the driving force behind the inspiring Foundation for P2P Alternatives, have …

Absolutely nothing unexpected happened on the weekend. Absolutely nothing unexpected has happened since: though slow to work out which way the wind blows, Dennis Shanahan, Paul Kelly and colleagues at the former (and future?) Government Gazette have skipped nary a beat in switching to singing the praises of Kevin the Rudd. Only Glenn Milne seems to have missed the memo - he's still working on his hagiography of 'poor' Peter Costello. Oh, and Caroline Overington, of course, who is making headlines for all the wrong reasons.

Two new entries for David Silver's 'Gone Gallery' …

Just before the Australian federal election last Saturday, we managed to get our latest Club Bloggery piece out to ABC Online. It's now been eclipsed by more recent developments, of course, but still offers a pretty good overview of the campaign for (online) hearts and minds that was. Read it at our group blog Gatewatching, or at the ABC.

Scoring the e-lection

By Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders, and Axel Bruns

This close to the election, it's customary for newspapers to recommend a vote one way or the other. We're not about to do that at Club Bloggery …

It's been a while since I've posted anything about my produsage book project - the last update I gave simply consisted of some quick stats about the continuing writing process when I was still on sabbatical with the Comparative Media Studies group at MIT in Boston. Back then, for those of you keeping count, I was almost a fortnight into writing the book itself (following months of research and preparation), and had written about 150,000 words; after another few days, the complete first draft of the manuscript weighed in at a slightly frightening 190,000 words - at that time, something …

Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders, and I have now posted the seventh instalment of our ABC series Club Bloggery, covering the online dimensions of the Australian election campaign. Just to mix things up a bit, this week we had a look at what's been happening on YouTube over the past few weeks, and found that (perhaps unsurprisingly) the more interesting developments are in DIY campaign advertising and mash-ups. Plenty of links included with the story, which we've also posted to our group blog Gatewatching - I encourage you to see for yourselves!

Election Flops on YouTube

By Axel Bruns, Jason

…

Digital Media and Democracy:
Tactics in Hard Times

I'm very happy that a few of the articles and chapters I've worked on throughout the year are now coming close to publication. One of them is a chapter in Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times, a book edited by Megan Boler for MIT Press; my contribution is based on one of my papers for the AoIR conference last year and explores the possibilities for citizen journalism beyond the tactical moment, as it transcends the industrial journalism/citizen journalism two-tier structure first described (though not exactly in those terms) …

Today I posted the call for papers for the first issue of M/C Journal in 2008 - 'citizen', edited by Jason Wilson and Barry Saunders:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - 12 Nov. 2007

M/C - Media and Culture
http://www.media-culture.org.au/
is calling for contributors to the 'citizen' issue of

M/C Journal
http://journal.media-culture.org.au/

M/C Journal is looking for new contributors. M/C is a crossover journal between the popular and the academic, and a blind- and peer-reviewed journal. In 2008, M/C Journal celebrates its tenth anniversary.

We've now published the next instalment of our Club Bloggery series at ABC Online and on our Gatewatching group blog. After four long weeks of the election campaign proper, and many more months of pre-election scuffles, this time we couldn't hold back any more and finally decided to 'go' The Australian for its atrociously partisan and misleading coverage of the election. And from the comments the piece has received on the ABC site and elsewhere, it looks like we're not the only ones to think so... Kudos to the ABC subbies, who found the appropriate image to go …

The next instalment of our Club Bloggery series for ABC Online is now up. As always, we've posted a slightly longer version of the article on our group blog Gatewatching, in addition to the ABC article itself. Here's an excerpt:

Digging Deeper

By Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders, and Axel Bruns

Climate change dominated a couple of days of Federal Election campaigning earlier this week, with the major parties both fumbling in laying out their responses. Peter Garrett and Malcolm Turnbull were punished by the mainstream media for, respectively, revealing something approximating a real opinion about how climate change agreements should work, and for being involved in a debate about Government policy before it's implemented.