Athens.
The next speaker at WebSci '09 is Alison Powell, and she focusses on the debate around net neutrality and the behaviour of net neutrality lobbies in this context. The debate stems from a US court ruling classifying Internet services as information rather than communication services, which eliminated the requirement of common carriage - ISPs would now be able to privilege certain types of traffic or slow down others. This became a major public debate during 2006 and 2007, driven in part by the 'Save the Internet' coalition backed by Google.

Time to catch up with a few publications - my recent work is featured in a number of new collections:

Mobile Technologies: From Telecommunications to Media, edited by Gerard Goggin and Larissa Hjorth, collects some of the best papers from the Mobile Media 2007 conference (which I blogged about at the time) in Sydney. Looks like a fabulous collection, and I'm delighted that an article by former QUT Visiting Scholar Liu Cheng and me about SMS news in China has been included. We're looking especially at the experience at Yunnan Daily Press, where Cheng led the roll-out of SMS news functionality, and we're including some staggering statistics about the growth of Internet and mobile use in China as well (I wonder how they'll be affected by the global financial crisis...).

For the world, 1989 was a momentous year. East Germans take to the streets in weekly protests. Poland's Solidarnosc is legalised, and later wins the Polish elections. Hungary defortifies its border with Austria, sparking a wave of defections from Eastern bloc nations to the West. Czechoslovakia's velvet revolution ends decades of communist rule, and Václav Havel is elected president. Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu is forced from power. And the Berlin Wall comes down, quite literally, in small pieces and large chunks. Also that year, Chinese troops crush the Tiananmen Square protests. George Bush the elder becomes US president, Ayatollah Khomeini dies, and Kurt Waldheim becomes president of Austria, while the last Soviet tanks leave Afghanistan and the rise of Slobodan Milosevic's nationalists begins in Yugoslavia. And in Australia, Andrew Peacock succeeds John Howard as opposition leader. That, at least, is what the history books and annual digests will tell you.

Never go on holidays... Looks like a few days into my holiday on the Sunshine Coast, one of the electrical storms sweeping through Brisbane these days knocked out the server, even in spite of various forms of surge protection. Ah well - a motherboard replacement and some serious fiddling with Linux later (massive thanks to Nic Suzor for pointing me to the tip that enabled my successful necromancy), here we are again.

And while we're here, I might as well note that the audio and Powerpoint from my Interactive Minds presentation on 27 November are now online. I'm afraid the audio quality is, shall we say, 'for collectors only', but here it is, for what it's worth. This end-of-year IM event aimed to highlight trends in 2008 and predictions for 2009, and regular readers of this blog will recognise a few of my recurring obsessions. Many thanks to Jen Storey for the invite.

Gießen.
My own keynote at this Web 2.0 and politics conference here in Gießen is next, in a session which discusses the possible impact of blogs, citizen journalism, and other forms of online political participation on wider political processes. My own thoughts as presented here build to some extent on the article I published in Information Polity earlier this year, and also draw on recent Australian examples (the role of Possums Pollytics in the Australian election campaign of 2007, and the new GetUp! project Project Democracy). I've posted the slides below, and will add the audio when I can the audio is now online, too.

Copenhagen.
As it turns out, I have two papers in this post-lunch session on the last day of AoIR 2008 - in competing sessions. Luckily, Lars Kirchhoff and Thomas Nicolai are on hand to present one of them (I'll post the slides for this as soon as I get them from the two) - and I'm here to present my paper with Jason Wilson and Barry Saunders on hyperlocal citizen journalism (understood here in a relatively broad sense).

The first speaker here is William Dutton from the Oxford Internet Institute, whose aim is to move beyond terms such as Netizen and citizen journalism and towards an understanding of various political uses of the Net as forming a fifth estate, in addition to the press as a fourth estate in society. Such uses promote social accountability in business, industry, government, politics, and other sectors.

Copenhagen.
The final keynote at AoIR 2008 is by Steve Graham. His interest is in the politics of urban space in the context of ubiquitous computing. He begins by noting utopian projections of the future, where everything is mediated profoundly through digital technologies - what Dana Cuff has called 'enacted environments'.

This includes visions of augmented reality (involving the delivery of location-specific information), and builds on ideas such as the 'Internet of Things', the use of RFIDs, biometrics, tracking systems, computerised surveillance, security discourses about e-borders, geolocation, GPS tracking, etc. This relies also on machine-readable entities, with sensors linked to databases that recognise and track individual objects of interest.