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Snurb — Thursday 26 June 2008 11:20

Futures for Journalism?

Politics | Journalism | Blogs and Blogging | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Industrial Journalism | CCi 2008 |

Brisbane.
The next plenary speaker in this very enjoyable session on day two of the CCi conference is Margaret Simons, asking the question "What are journalists for?" She begins by noting the role of the Australian Press Council, long perceived as a publishers' poodle, and recounts how she has recently been contacted by a researcher at the APC inquiring about the development of journalistic staff numbers in Australian publishers - publishers themselves were not interested to share these numbers, presumably because there is a strong decline in numbers in the current, distressed context of the journalism industry.

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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 — Tuesday 10 June 2008 16:07

Concept Maps for Selected Australian Political Blogs, Part II

Blogs and Blogging | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Social Media Network Mapping |

(Crossposted from Gatewatching.)

In this second part, we'll follow on from our discussion of key themes in The Other Cheek, Larvatus Prodeo, and Club Troppo by looking at the concept maps which Leximancer produces. But first, a recap of the background for this study: I've already posted about our work in developing a new methodology for mapping link and concept networks in the Australian blogosphere. For a first test run of this project, we archived posts in some 300-400 Australian political blogs between the start of November 2007 (the last month of the federal election campaign) …

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Snurb — Tuesday 10 June 2008 16:05

Concept Maps for Selected Australian Political Blogs, Part I

Blogs and Blogging | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Social Media Network Mapping |

(Cross-posted from Gatewatching.)

In a previous post, I mentioned our work in developing a new methodology for mapping link and concept networks in the Australian blogosphere. For a first test run of this project, we archived posts in some 300-400 Australian political blogs between the start of November 2007 (the last month of the federal election campaign) and the end of January 2008, and we've now begun an exploratory analysis of this corpus of data.

As noted in our discussion paper for this project, the first step in this analysis is to distinguish between different functional …

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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 — Wednesday 26 March 2008 17:31

Convergence, Citizen Journalism, and Social Change

Blogs and Blogging | Participatory Journalism and Citizen Engagement (ARC Linkage) | Industrial Journalism | AMIC 2008 |

Brisbane.
We're now in the opening session of the AMIC conference "Convergence, Citizen Journalism and Social Change". Today is just a short afternoon with a couple of keynote speeches; tomorrow, the bulk of the papers (including my colleague Jason Wilson's and mine) will be presented. Pradip Thomas from the University of Queensland is offering some opening remarks - referring to the common trope of the decline of mainstream journalism, and the corresponding rise of citizen journalism and its effect on political developments.

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Snurb — Tuesday 25 March 2008 17:18

Citizen Journalism in the 2007 Australian Federal Election (AMIC 2008)

Politics | Blogs and Blogging | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Participatory Journalism and Citizen Engagement (ARC Linkage) | AMIC 2008 |

AMIC 2008

Citizen Journalism in the 2007 Australian Federal Election

Axel Bruns

  • 27 March 2008 - AMIC 2008 conference, Brisbane, Australia

Citizen journalists and news and political bloggers had a considerable impact on journalistic coverage of the 2007 Australian federal election campaign. Already, even before the election proper had been called, the alternative viewpoints of citizen journalists and bloggers could be seen to have significantly disrupted the previously relatively static arrangements between government and opposition parties and the journalistic establishment, and to have challenged standard modes of reporting and interpreting political events. This paper discusses the role of citizen journalists and news and political bloggers in the 2007 Australian federal election campaign by examining four key sites of such alternative reporting, analysis, and commentary: the hyperlocal citizen journalism site Youdecide2007.org, the leading left-of-centre political group blog Larvatus Prodeo, the influential psephologist blogger Possums Pollytics, and ABC Online's attempts at blogging the election campaign.

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Snurb — Thursday 21 February 2008 14:58

Club Bloggery: Super Rehearsal for November

Politics | Blogs and Blogging | Participatory Journalism and Citizen Engagement (ARC Linkage) | Gatewatching.org | Club Bloggery |

We've been meaning to slow down the Club Bloggery series a little while we get busy with other research, but have found this difficult especially at a time when so many new topics present themselves. So, the latest instalment in the series went online about a week ago already, and I'm only now getting around to posting a link to it here - this time, we look at how the U.S. blogosphere is shaping up in its coverage of the current presidential primaries, and the actual election later this year.

Along with the previous one, this latest piece generated …

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