With my colleague Jan Schmidt from the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg, I'm delighted to have been approached by the editors of the Taylor & Francis journal New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia to edit a special issue on produsage. Below is the Call for Papers - we welcome any enquiries and submissions. Please spread the word!

Exploring Produsage

A Special Issue of New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia

Call for papers

The concept of produsage points to the shift away from conventional producer/consumer relationships, and highlights the more fluid roles of users and contributors within social media environments. Participants in open source projects, in Wikipedia, in YouTube and Second Life are no longer merely consuming or using preproduced material, but neither are they at all times acting as fully self-determined producers of fully formed new works; rather, they occupy a hybrid position as produsers of content.

(Crossposted from Produsage.org.)

I'm delighted to note that three new reviews of my book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage - by Verena Laschinger, Alan Razee, and Erin Stark - have been published over at the Resource Centre for Cybercultural Studies. RCCS editor David Silver kindly also asked me to provide a response to these reviews, which point to a number of further avenues for research into the produsage phenomenon that I hope many of us who work in this field will pursue.

I'm very happy to say that our first report for the Social Media project at the Smart Services CRC has now been published. Written with my research assistant Mark Bahnisch (an expert in the field in his own right), this report provides an overview of the state of the art in social media,and focusses especially on the dynamics of user community participation in social media sites; as part of this, we're also looking at a number of leading social media sites (and one or two 'interesting failures'), particularly in three key areas: news and views, products and places, and networking and dating.

The last months have been enormously productive (and, at times, exhausting!) for me. In addition to my own book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage, I've also contributed to a number of other publications - and quite a few of them are now finally available in print and/or online.

In a previous post, I've already mentioned Megan Boler's edited collection Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times. I've now received my copy of the book, and very nice it looks, too - a great collection of essays from many key authors and researchers in the field, combined with Megan's interviews with journalists and media activists including Robert McChesney and Hassan Ibrahim of Al Jazeera. My own contribution explores the post-tactical opportunities for citizen media, and draws parallels to the long-term establisment of other once tactical movements; a pre-print version of the chapter is online here. The book is available from Amazon and MIT Press.

Continuing the streaming media theme from Wednesday: the latest issue of the journal Media International Australia has now been released - "Beyond Broadcasting", edited by Graham Meikle and Sherman Young. I've contributed an article and have received permission from the editors to re-publish it here. In the article, I try to take a fresh look at television in an increasingly Internet-driven media environment.

Traditionally, the Net's equivalents to television (mainly, streaming media) have been viewed through the lens of the older technology; to some extent, streaming media has tried to mimic television's feel and format - this is visible …