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Snurb — Wednesday 25 June 2008 18:03

Participation and Voice in Citizen Journalism and Transmedia Documentary

Politics | Journalism | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Participatory Journalism and Citizen Engagement (ARC Linkage) | Youdecide2007 | CCi 2008 | New Media Arts |

Brisbane.
We're now in the final session of the first day at the CCi conference, which I'll try to chair and blog at the same time - we'll see how it goes. My colleague Terry Flew is the first presenter, and he begins by outlining the three layers of impact of new media technologies as artefacts or devices (technologies); communication activities and practices using these technologies; and the social arrangements, institutions, and organisational forms which develop around the use and management of such technologies. Journalism has so far responded to the Internet as a new technology mainly in the first sense, no so much in the two latter senses. This also takes place at a time of perceived crisis in journalism, and in the face of the emergence of citizen journalism in responding to that crisis.

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Snurb — Wednesday 25 June 2008 16:28

Public Information Access Opportunities in the UK

Politics | Blogs and Blogging | Intellectual Property | CCi 2008 |

Brisbane.
The second plenary speaker here at the CCi conference is Richard Allan, a former UK member of parliament who is now working with Cisco Systems and is involved with the UK government Power of Information Task Force. Public sector information consists in part of information about people and places, about public services, and about public culture; traditionally it exists across a data, an analysis, and a presentation layer. The former two are increasingly open for access, the latter also for more flexible interaction. With the rise of the Web as a public information medium, the number of public information Websites has multiplied almost beyond control, and in the UK there is now a drive to consolidate government Websites from over 2500 to a more manageable number in the future. (Even the UK and Australian secret services now have their Websites.)

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Snurb — Wednesday 25 June 2008 15:13

Public Speech, Public Spaces, Public Spheres

Politics | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media Network Mapping | CCi 2008 | Creative Industries |

Brisbane.
The next session I'm attending at the CCi conference is also (broadly) on citizen journalism. Andrew Kenyon from the University of Melbourne is the first speaker, and his focus is especially on the legal perspective on journalism as public speech, building on interviews with editors, journalists, and other media workers. Legal frameworks enable in particular the search for truth, the maintenance of democracy, and (especially in the US) a critique of government, but public speech is often positioned as fulfilling a more generic function (such as consensus formation). Public speech often critiques, and limited protections for public speech is often seen as having a chilling effect on the diversity of public speech that is possible.

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Snurb — Wednesday 21 May 2008 15:44

A Bunch of New Citizen Journalism Publications

Politics | Produsers and Produsage | Blogs and Blogging | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media Network Mapping | Publications |

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.

cover of

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.

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Snurb — Friday 16 May 2008 16:43

Club Bloggery 14: Baillieu and the Blogs of War

Politics | Blogs and Blogging | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Club Bloggery |

It's been a long time between drinks, but over at ABC Online they've just posted the latest Club Bloggery article by Jason, Barry, and me - and we've also reposted it at Gatewatching, as usual. This time, we're reflecting on recent revelations that Liberal Party staffers in Victoria ran a blog to discredit their own leader - from party premises...

Baillieu and the Blogs of War

By Jason Wilson, Axel Bruns and Barry Saunders

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Snurb — Wednesday 14 May 2008 17:06

Towards a Better Methodology for Mapping and Measuring Blog Interaction

Politics | Blogs and Blogging | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Participatory Journalism and Citizen Engagement (ARC Linkage) | Gatewatching.org | Social Media Network Mapping |

I'm crossposting this from Gatewatching.org, where a discussion about the influence of Australian political bloggers on wider political processes that was kicked off by Jason Wilson's recent posts on Tim Blair's move to the Daily Telegraph and Christian Kerr's summary dismissal of Ozblogistan's political combattants in The Australian has prompted me to finally post up some more information about the research we're currently engaged in at QUT, in collaboration with our excellent colleagues at the University St. Gallen in Switzerland. I'm also attaching a detailed discussion paper which documents our methodological model in some more detail - we'd love to get further feedback on this, from fellow researchers and interested bloggers alike. (For a more condensed version of this material, please see our paper for the ISEA 2008 conference in Singapore.)

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Snurb — Sunday 20 April 2008 18:59

Australian Journalists Incapable of 2020 Vision?

Politics | Industrial Journalism |

A quick addendum to my last Gatewatching post, which discussed why in the face of a journalistic environment more concerned with scoring points than reporting on the issues of the day it's not such a bad idea if politicians choose to converse with citizens outside of the media glare: from what I've seen so far, quite a few of the journalists reporting on the 2020 Summit have similarly succumbed to the temptation to file lazy stories poking fun at summit procedures rather than investing the time necessary to inform the rest of the country about what's actually being discussed …

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Snurb — Thursday 17 April 2008 11:16

Consulting Citizens away from the Media Glare

Politics | Produsage Communities | Industrial Journalism |

(Crossposted from Gatewatching.org.)

There's been a bit of discussion amongst political bloggers about a post by PollieGraph's Rachel Hills which pointed out that Liberal leadership contender Malcolm Turnbull had her - and other journalists - on 'limited profile' on Facebook, because of her status as a writer for New Matilda (also noted over at Larvatus Prodeo). Some of the discussion about this has been fairly predictable - with the Libs plumbing untold lows in their approval ratings, it's easy to engage in some gratuitous pollie-bashing - but for once, I have to say that Turnbull's decision to keep the media at arms' length from any online discussion with voters seems like a pretty smart move to me.

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Snurb — Tuesday 15 April 2008 20:25

Vibewire 6: Final Thoughts

Politics | Produsage Communities |

So, the Vibewire e-Festival of Ideas is over. I really enjoyed the discussion over the past week, and I've just posted some final thoughts for what it's worth.

Our discussion of democracy and social dynamics reminds me of the work of French author Pierre Lévy. In his book Collective Intelligence, he suggests that

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Snurb — Friday 11 April 2008 11:08

Vibewire 5: From 'Bad' to 'Good' Elitism?

Politics | Produsers and Produsage | Wikipedia |

Another quick rumination in response to the Vibewire e-Festival of Ideas discussions. This connects very directly to my research for my latest book [weblink:475] - chapters 5 through 8, on Wikipedia, folksonomies, and related issues around knowledge management and knowledge organisation, all deal in some detail with the question of how to come to an arrangement between 'folks' and 'experts' which both respects expert knowledge and asserts the equipotentiality of contributors who are not certified experts. Here's what I wrote on that point - comments welcome!

It's interesting that the question of experts is coming up here - it's something I've thought a lot about recently, especially also in relation to the Wikipedia where that problem has been a point of ongoing discussion. There are plenty of good arguments in either direction here (let experts have far greater say than average people vs. follow the common-sense consensus of everyone) - personally, my preference would be for a middle way which respects expert knowledge but also doesn't accept it unquestioningly just because someone has a degree and a position of authority.

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