A little while ago Trebor Scholz suggested that I should respond to a post of his on the Institute for Distributed Creativity mailing-list, about using wikis and blogs in teaching. I finally got around to this yesterday, and thought I might post it up here as well. This also refers back to the interview Trebor did with me last year, and to the Large Teaching & Learning Grant project which I co-direct at QUT (see [weblink:166] for some more information). Any comments welcome!

I'm very happy to report that [weblink:158], which Joanne Jacobs and I have edited for Peter Lang, is about to go to the printers. One of the last things we've signed off on now is the book cover, based on an idea by Jo and me and produced with the assistance of ACID's Gavin Winter, who took the photo of the Rode microphone - here's a preview. There's probably no need to explain this, but of course the advancing phalanx of microphones in the image is symbolic for the multiplication and amplification of voices in and through the blogosphere - every blogger has their own soapbox, talk-back show, stage, or public lecture event now.

I made the move to Firefox over the last few days, and as a result I've been exploring the wealth of Firefox extensions which is also available. One of them is Performancing, which adds a basic WYSIWYG offline editor for blog posts to Firefox - and this in turn brought me to look more widely at the current state of blog clients: software which enables the offline writing and editing of blog posts for later submission to a blog, using a standard XML-RPC interface. Unfortunately - especially as far as real WYSIWYG editing is concerned (as opposed to editing plain text with a few HTML tags thrown in) -, there still isn't that much out there. I did find at least a couple of promising options, though.

I reviewed the recent Australian publication Barons to Bloggers for the Media International Australia journal a little while ago. The review has now been published in MIA 118 (February 2006), and they've also been nice enough to allow me to republish it here. 

Debate? What Debate?

Jonathan Mills, ed. Barons to Bloggers: Confronting Media Power. Carlton, Vic.: Miegunyah Press / Melbourne UP, 2005. ISBN 0 522 85207 6.

Well, I've just sent [weblink:158], the book Jo Jacobs and I have been editing for the last half year or so, on its way to the publisher Peter Lang, as well as informing our fabulous contributors that it's all happening. Let's hope the Digital Formations series editor Steve Jones and our editor Damon Zucca at Peter Lang like the collection - Jo and I think it's come together very well and provides a great and diverse range of insight into the contemporary uses of blogs, well beyond the diaristic or political forms of blogging which most mainstream media commentary still continues to focus on (which is not to say that we don't cover those as well!).

There is only one set of sessions at AoIR 2005 this Sunday morning, almost as something of an afterthought (and a few people have already left for the airport, also having to negotiate the traffic disruptions caused by the Chicago Marathon this morning). Which is a bit of a shame, seeing that the session I'm attending now contains this year's winners of the Carl J. Couch Center Internet Research Award, that is, the three best student papers submitted for the conference.

Ericka Menchen Trevino: What Motivates Bloggers?

Ericka Menchen Trevino from the University of Illinois at Chicago, this year's first-placed entrant, is the first speaker. Her study investigates the motivations of bloggers, and she begins by noting that some of the things being said about blogging now were said less than a decade ago about plain old homepages as well. However, blogs of course are updated relatively regularly, which means that there is a certain level of commitment to them even if hosted blogs have made it very easy to create a blog.

I came a little late to this next session at AoIR 2005 - we've already started a presentation on photoblogging by Eric Meyer, Howard Rosenbaum, and Noriko Hara from Indiana University.

Eric Meyer, Howard Rosenbaum, and Noriko Hara: Trends across Photoblogging Sites

The purists' definition of photoblogging is as chronological blogging using photos; photoblogs.org distinguishes clearly between photoblogs and galleries, but in practice that division isn't as clear: various approaches to Flickr use, for example, blur the line. Some people do use Flickr as a kind of photoblogging, which also enables tagging and commenting on photos, for example.