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'Anyone Can Edit': Understanding the Produser - Guest Lecture at SUNY, Buffalo / New School, NYC / Brown Univ. / Temple Univ.

Institute for Distributed Creativity
Cultural Studies Concentration of Eugene Lang College

'Anyone Can Edit': Understanding the Produser

The Mojtaba Saminejad Lecture

  • 28 September, 6 p.m. - SUNY Buffalo
  • 11 October, 10 a.m. - New School, New York City
  • 12 October, 5 p.m. - Brown University, Providence
  • 14 October, 12.30 p.m. - Temple University, Philadelphia

Recent decades have seen the dual trend of growing digitization of content, and of increasing availability of sophisticated tools for creating, manipulating, publishing, and disseminating that content. Advertising campaigns openly encourage users to 'Rip. Mix. Burn.' and to share the fruits of their individual or collaborative efforts with the rest of the world. The Internet has smashed the distribution bottleneck of older media, and the dominance of the traditional producer > publisher > distributor value chain has weakened. Marshall McLuhan's dictum 'everyone's a publisher' is on the verge of becoming a reality - and more to the point, as the Wikipedia proudly proclaims, 'anyone can edit.'

Slow Blogging

Hmm, what is it with blogging academics at the moment? Most of the people on my blogroll (such as it is) seem to be in a go-slow period with their blogging at right now - Jean had to reassure us she's still there; Jill signed off for the northern summer once or twice; Jo's blogging has been intermittent for a while as well. For me, if I don't get a good holiday early on, by the time my birthday comes around in August I'm just about out of steam for the year, and so the blog has suffered as well.

Behaviours of the Blogosphere

Suw Charman points to a new report on the growth and patterns of readership in the blogosphere - some interesting stats, even if they're fairly US-centric. I'm slightly miffed that reports such as this still tend to throw open news sites like Slashdot into the mix as if they were blogs (which clearly they're not), but then again Slashdot now offers individual user blogs in addition to its collaborative open news content, so perhaps that's why it's included here.

Progress on Uses of Blogs

A good day yesterday: not only did I receive my hardcopies of the Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production book, but the first chapters for the next book, Uses of Blogs, which Jo Jacobs and I are currently editing, have also come in (with a surprisingly large number of contributors requestion a week's extension, though). In fact, both Jo and I also had some further good news - I can't quite disclose mine just yet, but Jo will become the new Collaboration Manager for ACID! Congratulations, Jo, and great to have you on board.

I Seek Dead People

OK - there's no way for this not to sound somewhat morbid, so here it is. I've been invited to do a brief research residency at the Institute for Distributed Creativity in New York later this year, and as part of my time there I'll be giving a memorial lecture related to my research work (most likely covering issues around gatewatching and collaborative news production, blogs, and the rise of the produser). Being a memorial lecture, it needs to be in memory - in honour - of somebody, though, and that's where I'm coming up short at the moment. The usual suspects - say, oh, Marshall McLuhan and the like - are a little too obvious, while some other key scholars in the field aren't actually dead yet (I checked). And in spite of the helpful suggestions of a colleague, the authors of that silly diatribe just don't qualify.

At any rate, the iDC folk would probably prefer the lecture to be dedicated to someone less known anyway. So, dear reader, any suggestions? Do we have any unsung heroes of citizen news, of news blogging, who were killed for their efforts? Who are the first martyrs of blogging? Please post your suggestions in a comment to this entry. And be assured that despite my somewhat flippant tone here, I do take this question very seriously - a memorial is no laughing matter.

Online Teaching with Blogs and Wikis

Yesterday my colleagues Peter Duffy, Sal Humphreys and I put in a paper proposal for the Online Teaching conference here at QUT in September. This builds on the work Sal and I have been doing for the International Wiki Symposium in San Diego, but with a focus more on teaching and pedagogy aspects rather than the underlying teaching technologies. Here's the abstract:

Delivery in the Beyond - Possibilities for the Use of Blogs and Wikis in Education

In a knowledge economy it is no longer sufficient to use online learning and teaching technologies simply for the delivery of content to students. In the new environment, graduate capabilities increasingly and crucially identify the ability to effectively use new media technologies for collaborative and (co)creative purposes as well as for the critical assessment and evaluation of existing information. Higher education therefore must refocus its efforts, from a mere interest in developing information literacies to an emphasis on developing advanced creative, collaborative, and critical ICT literacies in students.

Editing Our Future

Following the interview I did with Steve Meacham last week, I'm quoted at length in today's Sydney Morning Herald, in an article titled "Editing Our Future" (page 18). Ostensibly this is about the content preservation efforts by the National Library of Australia and the International Internet Preservation Consortium, but in also covering some of the key reasons for why contemporary Internet content must be preserved for posterity t also goes into blogging and various other key forms of content production and publishing on the Web. Steve's done a great job with the article; it's also online here (at least according to Google News - I can't be bothered dealing with the SMH's silly user registration system).

Media Futures

I did my interview for ttn, the Network Ten kids' news show, this afternoon, speaking about the future of the media. Mainly I talked about the significant changes to the traditional production/consumption dichotomy which have been driven by the emergence of electronic media and especially the rise of the Internet and the Web. We touched on the blogs, digital storytelling and other forms of grassroots digital media production - and yes, I'm fully aware of the irony of doing this on an 'old' medium such as television. Hope what I said made sense - the whole thing seemed to be over so quickly, but I suppose that's the nature of TV...

Articles on (as in, about) Blogs

Kairosnews has posted an extensive bibliography of blog research, including papers by many of the usual suspects. Thanks to Jill Walker for pointing this out.

Computational Approaches to Blog Analysis

I received an invitation to participate in a proposed symposium at Stanford today. Looks very promising, even though I don't have a strong computational bent in my own research. The last couple of topics in particular have piqued my interest. (Note that the symposium is only proposed so far, not confirmed.)

AAAI 2006 SPRING SYMPOSIUM SERIES
COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES TO ANALYZING WEBLOGS

March 27-29, 2006 - Stanford University, California, USA


AREAS OF INTEREST

This symposium focuses on computational approaches to analysis of individual blogs and the blogosphere as a whole:

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