Copenhagen.
The final session of this first day of AoIR 2008 begins with James Owens, whose focus is on online news and democratic communities. Interactive technology enables the production of new social formations, but can also reproduce existing social formations; this can be related especially also to local community formations. James is interested in three Chicago-based Websites (of the Tribune, a citizen journalism site supported by the Tribune, and the local Indymedia site), and is interested here especially on whether such sites promote or prevent social fragmentation.

Copenhagen.
The next session at AoIR 2008 is on the civil society. Paul Nixon and Antje Greber are the first presenters, and begin by addressing the question of how to define civil society in the first place. This is related to traditional conceptions of the public sphere, of course. One definition is of civil society as aggregated interest formulation, accumulated in a community of associations.

In a democratic society, civil society and its organisations form the third sector (in addition to government and public administration, and for-profit businesses and corporations). This third sector also contrasts with the private sphere. There are also views by which in a corporative state, civil society organisations are providers of social services; additionally, civil society organisations allow for more particpation in the policy-making process, protest and monitoring, advocacy, community building and democratisaton, etc.

Copenhagen.
The post-lunch session here at AoIR 2008 starts with Paul Emerson Teusner, presenting on the presence of emerging religious movements in the blogosphere. How do authority rankings in the blogosphere affect the standing of such religious bloggers? Paul focusses here on a sample of 30 blogs in the Australian blogosphere, examined between July and October 2006.

This is backgrounded by the rise of Web 2.0 and its growth in user-led content production, of course, as well as by the merging of public and private spheres through social networking technologies. However, the effects of these phenomena are not so strongly felt in the religious blogosphere as yet - traditional religious authorities have not yet been replaced by any form of user-led religiosity, in other words. What is common to the blogs studied is an understanding that any culture war between Christianity and secularism has been lost, so the focus is not on missionary efforts but simply on developing a sustainable arrangement with the secular mainstream.

Copenhagen.
The first keynote speaker at AoIR 2008 is Mimi Ito, well-known from her work on mobile media. Today, she presents early results from a different research project, however, on youth participation in networked publics. This ethnographic research involved a significant number of interviews, group meetings, diary studies, and surveys, as well as observations of activities and outcomes. This, then, investigates activities as embedded in a broader network ecology.

Mimi points out the growing availability of tools for creating and modifying creative content, and to publish, share, and distribute such material, and how in the process professional and amateur media content creation are being 'munged' together. In the middle of scales from consumer to producer, from personal communication to mass media, and from gift, barter, and dialogue to commodity exchange there are plenty of interesting things happening - but how are youth learning, socialising, and communicating in such networked publics?

I'm spending the morning at the 2008 Arts Libraries Society of Australia and New Zealand conference, at the Queensland State Library. I'm afraid I'm only here for the opening keynotes (one of which I'm giving) - my hectic schedule for this week between overseas trips doesn't give me any more time to see what else is happening.

The first keynote speaker this morning is Kathryn Greenhill from Murdoch University, presenting on the possibilities of Second Life as a platform. She begins by taking us on a flight around Info Island - the central library island in Second Life - and follows this with a quick explanation of what Second Life is and how it works. The aim here, she notes, is immersion, not just information.

Singapore.
Day three at ISEA 2008 starts with a paper by Nedine Kachornnamsong, who has developed an art installation for Copenhagen airport. She begins by reflecting on the purpose of such an installation - most travellers are likely just to move quickly and painlessly through the airport space, rather than linger and appreciate the art. What is the sense of place that exists in an airport?

Copenhagen is a hub for Scandinavian air travel, and acts as a transit airport for transfers into the nordic countries. It incorporates a great deal of Scandinavian design (including significant use of wood in interior spaces); for an airport, it's a very pretty space, but this may remain secondary to many travellers for whom the airport remains simply a transitional space. What is remembered, mostly, are the bad experiences travellers may have - delays, lost luggage, unfriendly staff.

Singapore.
We're still in the first paper session at ISEA 2008 - but I'll start a new post for the next three presentations. The next speaker is Konrad Becker, who has previously published the Tactical Reality Dictionary and is now working on a Strategic Reality Dictionary to complement it. He notes that tactical media spontaneity nonetheless relies on the availability of underlying infrastructures, raising questions around the strategic dimension. Tactics are more strongly related to temporal considerations, strategies to spatial issues. Konrad now shows a matrix tracing different combinations of space and time, and points to scientific understandings of time and space.

(Cross-posted from Produsage.org.)

I'm happy to report that the Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre has finally been launched. It's taken far too long to get to this point (initial Australian federal government approval for the CRC application was received shortly before Christmas, 2006), but after a lengthy process of negotiations between the twenty or so universities, government bodies, and industry partners involved in the CRC, the Centre has finally been launched by the federal minister responsible, Senator Kim Carr, on 3 July 2008.

Make no mistake - with funding totalling some $120 million over its seven-year timeframe, this is a very significant development for the Australian digital services industry, as the range of partners involved in the Centre also documents. The Centre will conduct research and development across a range of domains, from financial services through education to mobile media, building on the work of its predecessor, the Smart Internet CRC.

I've long been a fan of Mark Pesce's work; his articles at the recently renamed The Human Network site have been a strong influence on my own work. So, I'm very happy to be able to host a seminar by Mark on behalf of the CCi at the Creative Industries Precinct in Brisbane this coming Thursday. In preparation for the event, Mark has now published a new piece entitled "Little, Big", which I'm sure he'll have more to say about when he speaks here on Thursday.

Anyone planning to attend Mark's talk should RSVP to me as soon as possible, as spaces are limited (a.bruns[at]qut.edu.au). Here's the announcement for Mark's talk: