(Buffalo) Well, today is my busy day here in Buffalo - with a workshop after lunch and my guest talk in the evening. I met some of the students here as Trebor Scholz showed me around yesterday, and I'm looking forward to the events. Some other interesting developments: I received an email yesterday from former La Trobe University MA student Derek Lackaff, whose thesis on heterarchical moderation schemes in Slashdot and elsewhere I had the pleasure to examine recently - turns out he's now based here in Buffalo doing his PhD... Also, an email from Mark Tribe at Brown University - he's invited me to do a guest lecture there as well, and I may be able to take a day trip to Providence during my week in New York City. And I phoned David Marshall at Northeastern University in Boston, who is also looking to set up something. More soon!

(Buffalo) Well, after 24 hours on progressively smaller planes I'm finally here in Buffalo, arriving late last night. An eventless flight on Qantas and American Airlines - a nice sunrise over the Californian coastline flying into LAX, and luckily none of the landing gear problems that occurred so dramatically and telegenically on a JetBlue flight at the same airport just a few days ago. Flying across the U.S. by daylight for the first time I was struck by the vast and barren expanses of land still left more or less untouched especially in the West (this would have been Arizona in particular, I guess) - perhaps its just me, but you don't think about America in such terms these days... Of course I also couldn't help but think 'Google Earth' at the same time - will have to revisit some of the sites along the way later (was that the Las Vegas or Phoenix speedway I saw from the air?).

• 28 Sep., 1 p.m.: Produsers and Produsage - workshop at SUNY Buffalo
• 28 Sep., 6 p.m.: 'Anyone Can Edit': Understanding the Produser - guest lecture at SUNY Buffalo
• 30 Sep., 1.30 p.m.: Teaching Creativity in a Creative Town - exhibition in the Creativity Marketplace at the Creative Places + Spaces conference, Toronto
• 8 Oct., 8.30 a.m.: Wikinews: The Next Generation of Online News? - paper at the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Chicago
• 11 Oct., 10 a.m.: 'Anyone Can Edit': Understanding the Produser - guest lecture at New School, New York City
• 11 Oct., 6 p.m.: Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production - guest talk at The Thing / Postmasters Gallery, New York City
• 12 Oct., 12 noon: Public/Private Intersections in New Media - panel guest at Northeastern University, Boston
• 12 Oct., 5 p.m.: 'Anyone Can Edit': Understanding the Produser - guest lecture at Brown University, Providence
• 14 Oct., 12.30 p.m.: 'Anyone Can Edit': Understanding the Produser - guest lecture at Temple University, Philadelphia

I'm now starting work on my Wikinews article, for the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Chicago in October, and possible later publication in the 'News and the Net: Convergences and Divergences' issue of the journal Scan, edited by Chris Atton and Graham Meikle. I've sent a questionnaire about the Wikinews experience to my contact there, but if any other Wikinewsians happen to read this, your views would also be very much appreciated. Reply through comments, or email me.

A few unexpected twists and turns to the day today... Looks like my server IP address changed during the night and that change wasn't detected and reported to the DNS service - sorry if the site seemed down and email didn't work for a while. It should be fixed now (spam's coming in again, yay), and while looking for the cause of the problem I also noticed some very interesting stats over at ZoneEdit, who are my DNS host: turns out that DNS lookups of the media-culture.org.au domains for M/C - Media and Culture have grown almost exponentially over the last years!

Well, looks like my book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production is really for sale now - I have a sales ranking at Amazon! Still a fair way to go from #194,377 to the top of the bestseller list, but I guess it's a start. So, thank you, dear customers so far (all, what, five of you...). And if you're still thinking of buying the book, please feel free to do so through this link and make me a little extra money. OK, commercial over.

Speaking of gatewatching, I'm half-way through a thesis I'm examining for an Australian university (can't give any precise details at this point for obvious reasons) which also deals with sites such as Slashdot, Kuro5hin, and Plastic. Good stuff so far, with a stronger emphasis on the moderation system rather than the news(gathering) aspects I cover in the book. It's a pity the author and I were working on our research simultaneously; otherwise we could have collaborated quite well, I think.

OK - there's no way for this not to sound somewhat morbid, so here it is. I've been invited to do a brief research residency at the Institute for Distributed Creativity in New York later this year, and as part of my time there I'll be giving a memorial lecture related to my research work (most likely covering issues around gatewatching and collaborative news production, blogs, and the rise of the produser). Being a memorial lecture, it needs to be in memory - in honour - of somebody, though, and that's where I'm coming up short at the moment. The usual suspects - say, oh, Marshall McLuhan and the like - are a little too obvious, while some other key scholars in the field aren't actually dead yet (I checked). And in spite of the helpful suggestions of a colleague, the authors of that silly diatribe just don't qualify.

At any rate, the iDC folk would probably prefer the lecture to be dedicated to someone less known anyway. So, dear reader, any suggestions? Do we have any unsung heroes of citizen news, of news blogging, who were killed for their efforts? Who are the first martyrs of blogging? Please post your suggestions in a comment to this entry. And be assured that despite my somewhat flippant tone here, I do take this question very seriously - a memorial is no laughing matter.