Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism

A little while ago I mentioned that my book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production had been nominated for the Communications Policy Research Award at Fordham University's Donald McGannon Communication Research Center. My publisher Peter Lang now informs me that it's made the semi-finals of the award process. While I don't exactly know what this means - are there four books left from the initial field, and do these now get evaluated against one another in a two-step elimination process? will there be slow-motion replays on ESPN6? - it sure does sound good. Fingers crossed.

We went on a nice but all-too-short post-V-day getaway to North Stradbroke Island last weekend, but I'm afraid any sense of relaxation went out the window quickly when I saw on Monday that numbers in my Creative Industries unit had risen to nearly 370 students by Monday morning. This meant quickly adding a couple more tutors and giving them an induction to the material, and elsewhere too I've been playing catchup all week already - not because I've been slack in the lead-up to the semester, but because there's just so much to do at the moment.

Phew. I have spent four out of the last five working days virtually in non-stop meetings on a wide variety of issues - from research and teaching planning sessions to team meetings for the ACID Press project (which has a very outdated outline on the ACID Website, I'm afraid), meetings of the AoIR 2006 conference organising team, preliminary work for a new book project, and a PhD confirmation presentation by Creative Industries student Stephen Harrington - and tomorrow is looking no better, with an all-day meeting of the team of our teaching and learning project using blogs and wikis at QUT. In between all the meetings about what work needs to be done, it would be nice to find some time to actually do some work... (At least I did find the time to accept an invitation to join the editorial board of New Media & Society, and I look forward to being part of it.)

Jill Walker is blogging less, or so she says - this wouldn't be newsworthy if Jill wasn't a genuine A-list academic blogger, and (I suspect) an inspiration for many an academic, and others in what we might laughingly refer to as the real world, to start blogging themselves. Certainly Jill was one of those names we just had to get on board for the Uses of Blogs book - and her struggles in completing what turned out to be a very insightful, and fairly personal, chapter in the book may be a sign of the times for a number of the 'early' bloggers as they're coming to terms with a) the occasional sense of stardom that A-list status might bring, and b) the fact that life doesn't stop, or stop changing, just because you're blogging it.

Well, I can't say New York City exactly put its best face forward for me - it's been alternately drizzly, rainy, windy, or just plain miserable here at least as far as the weather was concerned. With the talks on Tuesday and the Boston/Providence and Philadelphia trips on Wednesday and Friday, Thursday was my only 'off' day here, but it wasn't exactly great for sightseeing. In fact, around mid-day it rained so hard that I had to buy a pair of jeans because my other trousers were soaking wet... (Well, the other reason was that on the flight to the U.S. my old jeans developed what here they'd probably call a 'wardrobe malfunction', putting me in danger of mooning people each time I bent over.)

Well, the New School talk on produsers and produsage went pretty well, I think - my thanks again to my hosts here, and to Trebor Scholz from the Institute for Distributed Creativity for setting it up. Unfortunately, once again I forgot to record the talk, but I guess I have another couple of chances to do so when I present it at Brown and at Temple. Afterwards, I also caught up with Shekhar Deshpande from Arcadia University to discuss what's happening in Creative Industries at QUT at the moment, and Shekhar was nice enough to show me through a little bit of East Village as well. Currently I'm enjoying the free wireless Internet access available at the New School, and then it's on to The Thing for the next talk - hope my voice holds up...

And we're in the first Association of Internet Researchers conference session for Saturday - unfortunately I couldn't blog the first presenter as she was running her Powerpoint off my laptop. Sunyi Lee from Northwestern University presented on possible business and licencing models for p2p filesharing, and ended with a useful point on the change of the conceptualisation of music, from music as product (selling CDs, DVDs, etc.) to music as service - where users may pay for access rather than distinct units of merchandise.

Sorin Matei: Mapping WiFi and Encryption in Lexington

The second speaker is Sorin Matei from Purdue University, presenting on the process of diffusion in wireless networks. Can there be a predictive model for the diffusion and encryption standards in wireless networking technologies (focussing here on WiFi, 802.11 standards)? What is interesting about WiFi is that at least in the beginning it was a replacement techniology for ethernet LANs, but was soon sold as a technology of freedom (from wires) in the residential market, creating always-on, personal connectivity. Further, WiFi can also be seen as a 'realm of dissent' in which the 'community network' movement can reinvent itself.

(Buffalo) I went out to Niagara Falls this morning - just a 30 minute trip up the highway from Buffalo itself, right up to the Canadian border. In theory I could have just continued on from there to Toronto, my next stop on this trip, which wouldn't have been too much further to go, but strangely enough I'm booked on a flight this afternoon which takes me there via Toronto (adding a good three or four hours of transit time to my day). Not entirely sure my travel agent checked the map when we made the booking...

Niagara was beautiful, if windy and quite chilly - but the intermittent sun brought out multiple rainbows over the falls and really blew up the mist from the water cascades. I can't imagine what the falls would have been like before the power generation scheme reduced the flow over the actual falls themselves. It's clearly going towards autumn here - I saw plenty of squirrels (including one of the rarer black ones) burying their nuts and other goodies in the ground for the cold season.

(Buffalo) Well, that went well - some very good discussion at the 'Produsers and Produsage' workshop today, and a few critical questions which I'm looking forward to thinking about further. I recorded the workshop and will try to post an edited version soon after I'm back in Brisbane... The evening talk was great as well - excellent turnout, with people even sitting in the aisles and corridor. Again, some good questions, and I hope people found it useful. Check out the photos from the workshop and talk on the iDC site, too! Tomorrow Trebor and I will record a brief video summary of the produser idea - more details soon. And I capped off the day with a beautifully al dente Maine lobster ravioli. Good night!