Athens.


The final speaker in this session at WebSci '09 is Helen Margetts from the Oxford Internet Institute, whose interest is in what influences people's decision to act collectively (or not). Is it the extent to which others are participating? Related to this is the question of whether use of the Internet makes a difference to such collective action decisions - since it is now possible to know, in real time, how many other people are participating. We can now measure information effects, perhaps for the first time, but what are the appropriate methods for doing so?

Athens.


The next session at WebSci '09 focusses on the impact of the Web on government processes and policies. We begin with a paper by Albert Batlle, who notes that e-government studies so far have rarely been interdisciplinary, continue to lack a theoretical basis, still only speculate about the benefits of e-government, conduct studies which focus only on what online elements are available (they are focussing only on the supply side of e-goverment, not the demand side), and may even be guilty of technological determinism.

Albert's own study used instead an interdisciplinary approach, examined new interaction mechanisms and back office processes and their dynamics, studied uses of both explicit and implicit information, and operated on an empirical basis by studying citizen attention services in Quebec, Catalunya, and (the Brazilian federal state) Sao Paulo. The focus, then, is on information flows within public administrations, and examined their implications at Fountain's three levels of institutionalised government processes, public organisations and interorganisational networks, and ongoing social relations in social network interactions. If information flows change at one level, the hypothesis predicts, this will also occasion change at the other levels. What is of greatest interest here is organisational change in government structures.

Athens.


Finally for this first day at WebSci '09, we move to the poster session, which includes our poster on the Australian political blogosphere mapping project; the A1 poster itself is available here, and there's also a brief article to provide further background detail. From the post slideshow that's playing at the moment, there's quite a bit of really interesting stuff here - and all of the posters are also available online.

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...).