Sydney.
Up next here at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress is Michael Smith, Corporate and Consumer Group Marketing Director at Optus, who shifts our focus to mobile media. He notes that some 75% of the Optus Zoo mobile portal is user-generated - "stuff that's interesting to me". Users want to access content on their own terms, and so Optus is connecting with a number of media industry partners - this is different from the completely integrated Telstra Bigpond approach, or the handset-as-portal approach of the iPhone, for example.

Sydney.
We're now starting the post-lunch session here at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress. The speaker is Tony Surtees, CEO of Australian regional broadcaster Prime's digital arm iPrime. He begins by noting that complacency is the enemy of innovation - and for that reason, starting new businesses during times of recession is actually very appropriate, as this added pressure means that complacency goes away.

By way of a very funny video from Bring the Love Back, Tony suggests that consumers have changed, but advertisers haven't. Time investment and advertising spend on different media no longer match - online advertising significantly lags behind take-up, while newspaper advertising remains significantly above circulation figures. Additionally, of course, people increasingly multitask (especially also between TV and online). Each time new media are introduced, we begin consuming them, but we consume them in multiple, different ways.

Sydney.
The next speaker here at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress is Gerry Gouy, Commercial Director for International Digital Media at MTV Networks. He begins by saying that today, there is no digital media any more - there is only media. Convergence is here - not for everyone, but for many.

Big media companies have been guilty of siloing media into old and new - so why the tipping point now? Gerry says that there has been a rapid shift of TV online, ubiquitous high-speed broadband (well, outside of Australia, at least...), a drop in broadcast media ad sales, and a simultaneous growth in online advertising (and here especially search and video ads).

Sydney.
We're in the next session at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress now, with Robbee Minicola from Hybrid Television Services. She begins with a story about her grandmother sharing her recipes (giving away IP) - but the question remains: can you actually follow the recipes the way she can? The same is true in the television field, and Robbee says that 'TV is the new black'.

Watching television, users are mostly in a passive, lean-back state - focussed, relaxed, and easy to intrigue. This is critical to how content and services are delivered through the TV. But is a TV a TV any more? Today, TVs can be used to play games, download content, browse the Internet - when before, TV was drama, news, and sport, today its potential is virtually unlimited. Broadcasters must stop working with a narrowcast view of TV.

Sydney.
I've travelled south for the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress, at which I'll speak tomorrow. Arriving this morning I've missed the opening keynote, but I'll try and blog as much as I can of the rest of the proceedings.

So, we start with a panel by Australia media industry leaders. Michael Anderson from Austereo begins by talking about the launch of digital radio, which he sees as an enhancement to what radio does - no longer something significantly new as it's taken so long to launch in Australia, but a useful addition nonetheless. He suggests that in the US Internet radio has not yet been a success - it is nigh anemic, and largely a failure, he says. The industry there is trying to grow through cost-cutting. The UK isn't much better, and Australia is in fact ahead of most other nations in terms of its digital radio market.

Today I've started sending out calls for submissions to the 2009 conference of the Australia/New Zealand Communication Association, which will take place in Brisbane on 8-10 July 2009. We are calling for paper submissions for the conference overall, and for the Digital and Social Media stream in particular. For more information about the conference, a full list of all conference streams, and to submit your papers, please see the conference Website at http://www.anzca09.org/.

Digital and Social Media conference stream

ANZCA09: Communication, Creativity and Global Citizenship

8-10 July 2009
QUT Creative Industries Precinct, Brisbane, Australia
Stream convenors: Axel Bruns, Creative Industries Faculty, QUT / Teresa Rizzo, AFTRS

Copenhagen.
We're now starting the second keynote here at the AoIR 2008 conference in Copenhagen, by Rich Ling. He begins by asking how technology has become part of the 'social woodwork', how it is being domesticated. The Internet, he suggests, is actually a quasi-broadcast medium, in spite of rhetoric to the contrary - a one-to-many metaphor holds sway for many of its services (excepting email, of course, but certainly this applies for many Websites).

Mobiles, by contrast, are a point-to-point form of communication - SMS and mobile voice communications account for the vast majority of usage, and the mobile telephone enables individual (rather than geographically fixed) addressability. Mobile phone communication is also a relatively intimate form of communication - and while new phones and new services may change this, most people use relatively old and limited phones which do not cope with such services particularly well (the most popular phone in Norway, for example, belongs to a now discontinued and comparatively ancient line of phones).

This is weird.

OK, I understand the logic behind Nigerian email spam: if you copy, paste, and email the same plea for help (and bank account details) often enough, you're going to find someone gullible enough to send them to you - even today, when most of us are all too well aware of these emails and know how to spot them the moment they drop into our inbox (if they don't get spamfiltered out before then anyway). I also see how, before this kind of spam started accounting for a sizeable percentage of all email sent and received, and especially before email became a major means of communication in the first place, people might still have fallen for similar messages from faraway countries when they received them in letter form.

But this? A hand-written letter from Uganda, basically containing the same standard text ("I warmly greet you in God's name", and all that), snail-mailed to my office address? Surely today, with the benefit of our added experience of spam scams, the hit/miss ratio just wouldn't make it worth the effort - spam emails are cheap and literally send themselves, but with handwritten letters you also have to cover the cost of manually writing and (air-) mailing them?

I'm glad there's finally an official statement about this: along with a number of other Australian universities, and with commercial and government partners, QUT is a participant in a high-profile new Cooperative Research Centre which will get started from mid-year. The Smart Services CRC follows on from the successful Smart Internet CRC which was based at Swinburne University (and which had already run a Smart Services forum recently). Along with a number of my colleagues from Creative Industries, I'll be involved in this in some capacity...