Athens.
I'm now in the business session of this first day of WebSci '09 - it brings together a variety of Greek business leaders and politicians. The session will be in Greek, but there's a simultaneous interpreting service - we'll see how that turns out. The first speaker is the representative of the Greek Minister for Development, who points to the importance of life-long learning, the decline of distance, and new modes of working which are associated with the move to a digital economy; this is also associated with new forms of e-commerce and electronically mediated cultural activity.

Looks like my email footer is about to grow by a couple of lines: late last week I accepted an offer to take on the role as project leader for the Social Media project in the Smart Services CRC, following the swift footsteps of Darren Sharp, who's moving on into an industry position. I've already been involved as a researcher in a number of projects within the CRC - and our first few outputs from this work should become available on the CRC Website in the not-too-distant future -, but in this new role I'll have a great deal more responsibility for seeing our current Social Media projects through to completion, and supporting the development of the next round of projects.

Today I've started sending out calls for submissions to the 2009 conference of the Australia/New Zealand Communication Association, which will take place in Brisbane on 8-10 July 2009. We are calling for paper submissions for the conference overall, and for the Digital and Social Media stream in particular. For more information about the conference, a full list of all conference streams, and to submit your papers, please see the conference Website at http://www.anzca09.org/.

Digital and Social Media conference stream

ANZCA09: Communication, Creativity and Global Citizenship

8-10 July 2009
QUT Creative Industries Precinct, Brisbane, Australia
Stream convenors: Axel Bruns, Creative Industries Faculty, QUT / Teresa Rizzo, AFTRS

Copenhagen.
I spent the first session of this second day at AoIR 2008 as a member of a panel on academic publishing - I didn't blog this, for obvious reasons. This second session starts with a paper on "Transcoding Place" by Vicki Moulder, in the overall area of social design and media convergence. How do communities enact agency in this space, especially given that digital social architecture is a fluid system, unlike conventional physical architecture?

Designers and creative professionals have a responsibility and are able to cause real change in design; this is especially important in the context of the changes brought about by media convergence. Can meaningful online agency (e.g. tagging and uploading content to YouTube and other social media sites) compare in any real sense with activism on the streets? Vicki and her colleague Jim Bizzocchi examined this question in the context of the Crude Awakening event at Burning Man, comparing the semantic structure of a face-to-face event in the Nevada desert (attended by some 45,000 spectators) with its video documentation (which was uploaded to YouTube by numerous users within hours of the event).

So, last Saturday I went to the Future of Journalism event in Brisbane (and spoke on one of the panels). Contrary to my usual practice, I didn't live-blog the event - panel-based events are notoriously difficult to blog. Here, then, are some reflections on what I saw - adding to comments already posted by Mark Bahnisch, Marian Edmunds, Cameron Reilly, and Bronwen Clune, among others.

The event began well, with Margaret Simons setting the theme with her usual insightful comments. Her observations about the troubled economic future for the journalism industry (and here, especially newspapers) are perhaps nothing new to most of us (though still not necessarily fully appreciated by many journalists themselves), and the bleak future that this malaise points to especially for in-depth, costly, quality investigative journalism has been discussed in some detail already (including by Jason, Barry and me in the Club Bloggery series), but it was a useful framing for the panels to follow.

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.

Singapore.
The ISEA 2008 conference is pretty much over now - the last event broadly connected with it is a talk by new media theorist Lev Manovich in the beautiful Lasalle arts space. With a title of "Cultural Analytics", I wouldn't be so surprised if this was going to be pretty close to what my colleagues at QUT have in mind when they talk about cultural science...

His aim here is to extrapolate from current to future cultural trends, and he notes that such futurism is traditionally very difficult. Part of his approach, therefore, is to develop new projects with his students which may have the potential to set new trends themselves. Overall, he says, we'll see a very significant new cultural development that builds on data mining and data visualisation technologies.

Singapore.
The morning session on this second day at ISEA 2008 continues with Caroline McCaw and Rachel Gillies, with a project related to Dunedin in New Zealand. Overall, there is a series of 20 place-responsive public artworks across New Zealand by national and international artists; the Dunedin component involves three artists (Douglas Bagnall, Adam Hyde, and Zoe Walker and Neil Bromwich) in separate locations around the world collaborating over the Internet - one of these locations was Edinburgh, after which Dunedin is partially named.

Singapore.
The post-lunch session of this first full day at ISEA 2008 starts for me with a bunch of papers grouped under the overall title of 'Transforming Media'. Janez Strehovec is the first presenter, and his interest is in new media art as research. He begins by noting the wide-ranging and diverse nature of new media art. Common to many new media artworks is the lack of stability for the artefacts that are being created - artefacts are no longer stable, material art works, but instead art is reconceptualised as process. This also undermines the 'artist as genius' stereotype.