The next speaker at AoIR 2012 is Sky Croeser, co-presenting with the very busy Tim Highfield. Her focus is on Occupy Oakland, a subset of the overall Occupy movement, and its use of the #oo Twitter hashtag. Occupy Oakland is shaped by the radical history of Oakland – the Black Panthers emerged here, and there have been more recent public protests in the city as well.

The next session at AoIR 2012 starts with a paper by my colleague Tim Highfield that Stephen Harrington and I contributed to as well – he's focussing on Australian politics on Twitter. (Slides and audio to follow.) Here are the slides and audio; my notes on the presentation are below.

The final speaker in this panel at AoIR 2012 is Delia Dumitrica, whose interest is in how citizens conceptualise the use of social media in political communication. Her premise is that this can be understood as an attempt to discursively articulate wider issues of trust in politicians.

The second presenter in this session at AoIR 2012 is Sander Schwartz, who shifts our attention to the use of social media during the 2011 Danish election. His project drew on a panel of 6,000 volunteers whose Internet use was monitored, as well as on a survey of some 2,000 respondents from this group. The panel was representative of the wider Danish population; the survey group was self-selecting.

The next session at AoIR 2012 begins with a paper presented by Julian Ausserhofer and Axel Maireder about national politics on Twitter, in the case of Austria. Twitter is now being used by a range of political actors in the country, including journalists and politicians, who are at times publicly interacting with one another using the platform. Many users also link to news media materials, of course.

The next speaker at AoIR 2012 is Jenny Korn, whose focus is on the #FuckProp8 hashtag which emerged around the Californian referendum to ban gay marriage, known as Proposition 8. The success of this referendum was a surprise to many Californians themselves, and resulted in a substantial amount of pushback, in the form of the hashtag (and its alternative #rejectprop8).

The second speaker in this AoIR 2012 session is Lucy Morieson, whose focus is also on Australian online news – in particular, on the Websites of The Age, Crikey, and The Conversation. This also plays out against the changing business and professional environments for Australian journalism, of course.

The first AoIR 2012 session this Saturday starts with my paper with my colleagues Tim Highfield and Stephen Harrington, which presents our work on the Australian Twitter New Index (ATNIX). Below are the slides – for more, also see my column at The Conversation. Audio to follow soon! I've added the audio now, too.

Sharing the News: Dissemination of Links to Australian News Sites on Twitter from Axel Bruns

The next speaker in this AoIR 2012 session is Constance Kampf, whose interest is in online activism. There are a number of different forms and levels of activism, of course – from a general expression of support for specific causes to radical and potentially dangerous interventions. Much online activism has been driven by issues of transparency, but that term is ill-defined: does it just mean the openness and availability of information about known phenomena, or also an absence of unknowns?