Internet Technologies

We're on to the post-lunch sessions now - and the researchers' working group has been joined by the access working group. There are seven hypothetical usage cases for the archive which they've envisaged, and these will help us work out what the archive would need to be able to do.

Niels Finneman is next, speaking about the archiving of Danish election sites which led on to the question of developing a national Danish Internet archive. They didn't find either the Australian or Swedish models appropriate for their purposes, and so tried to find a middle way.

Alex Halavais is next; he also presented at AoIR last year. He points out that a few years back hyperlinks rarely crossed national borders (other than into the US, I suppose), but this has been reducing over time. Language borders persist, of course, and continue to mean there is little linking across language borders.

Paul Koerbin from the National Library of Australia now speaks on issues of how to select content for an archive of Internet content (and whether selection is even necessary given that there are wholesale archivists like Internet Archive). The NLA has a specific statute which leads its PANDORA project towards archiving selected content, however.

We're on to the next keynote (which we've delayed through our question time in the previous panel). Wendy Hui Kyong Chun from Brown Univerity makes a start here. She talks of the tendency to take work at interface value - to fetishise new technology as cool rather than look beyond the interface itself. What conditions, what makes possible an experience of use?

Arriving in TallinnISEA has reached Tallinn. I'm blogging this live from the welcome session by the Estonian minister of culture. A fairly creative industries-inflected welcome, actually - obviously the Estonian government realises the value of these industries to its economy. (And I must say it's amazing to see the changes this place has gone through in the last 10-15 years.) Now we're on to Tapio Mäkelä's welcome.

Virtual Nation: The Internet in Australia, a book I've contributed to, is now available from UNSW Press. A preview of my chapter is also online in my publications section on this site.

This from Trevor Cook:

I've been busy organising this inaugural event to be held from 12 - 16 July

The purpose of the week is to focus on some key issues and attract attention to the emerging role of PR bloggers in developing and spreading knowledge about public relations. Often decried as a secretive profession we want to share our knowledge with everyone and encourage a better understanding of the contribution we make to our societies

I've long maintained that the Internet is not virtual. Now it turns out that the 'real' world is becoming hyperlinked...

I came across this through a call for papers for an online conference called Memefest - part of their approach is to invite articles inspired by a 1993 piece called "Cyberwar Is Coming". Should be interesting to see what new articles emerge from this, and the original article also seems useful.