Produsage Communities

Back after lunch now, and we're in the next session on blogs and related media forms. Karen Gustafson makes the start, speaking on blogs and the creation of community, especially on political blog sites. She has selected four high-ranking political blogs to study, including Instapundit and others. They have a range of ideological positions and are themselves influential amongst blogs. However, this is of course a very narrow subset of all blogs.

Common discourses around blogs include the idea of an emergence of public spheres, but also a conceptualisation of blogs as symptoms of fragmentation. They are an important addition …

Finally had an opportunity to do some basic networking in the break. I really don't seem to have much success with technology at the moment, though - now even my mobile phone seems to be acting up! I came in late on Mattia Miani's presentation on electronic democracy in cooperative enterprises, so I'm not sure how much sense I'll be able to make of the rest of this talk.

Yay, I've run into a fellow blogger, Lilia Efimova (and we've commiserated about not being able to do live blogging of this conference, in the absence of direct Internet access). Interesting to discuss approaches to coping with this.