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Blogs and Blogging

Signed, Sealed ... and to Be Delivered in November

A good meeting with Jo Jacobs and our research assistant Ian Rogers today, to move forward on the Uses of Blogs book. We've signed the book contract now and it's on its way back to Peter Lang in New York. We'll be sending out an update to our contributors shortly, to work out the deadlines leading up to delivery of the manuscript in early November. The more we work on this, the more this is shaping up to be a great collection. The enthusiasm displayed by our contributors (as well as by Jo and Ian) is great, and we do seem to have managed to collect a stellar cast of bloggers and blog researchers. It's a pleasure to work with such a supportive publisher as well!

Blogs and Wikis in Teaching at QUT

I spent most of the day today at QUT's Carseldine campus, with the team of a large teaching and learning project involving staff from Creative Industries and Humanities & Human Services. As part of the project we're exploring the use of blogs and wikis in teaching, and we've now set up the first testbed systems to do so (not for public viewing yet, sorry...). I mentioned some of this work in my interview with Trebor Scholz recently. If anyone's interested, we're using Drupal and MediaWiki as the base technologies.

Furling

Heh. Our recently announced book project Uses of Blogs is starting to build some interest. I've seen a number of visitors come in from Furl blogs over the last couple of days, and it's interesting to see some of the comments from people who are using Furl to blog about the book. My favourite comment so far:

If I used Amazon, I'd put it on my wish list.

Check the Furl reference for the Uses of Blogs entry for more information.

Blog Book Is Go

More tinkering with the Website today, and some work towards an ARC Linkage project which Liz Ferrier and I have developed over the past year or so. But the big news for today is that my colleague Jo Jacobs and I have received the go-ahead for a book on blogs and blogging that we've proposed to Peter Lang Publishing. I've added some more information on the book project on a separate page, and I'll update this as we move forward from here. The book is tentatively titled Uses of Blogs for now.  

More Updates...

Phew. More Drupal updates today, and I think I have most of it under control now. In the process I've added a Creative Commons licencing scheme, a blogroll, direct access to the content categories, and a few other goodies. Still no news on the monitored sites list (using Drupal's Weblinks module); I've manually added a list of sites to the right sidebar for the time being.

Other updates also continue. Today was the start of week three of semester, but I'm already having to update unit outlines for next semester (when I'm again teaching the Creative Industries unit at QUT, as well as New Media Technologies). NMT (in which students produce the M/Cyclopedia of New Media) still requires more development; I'm exploring ways to translate the wiki knowledge structure of the M/Cyclopedia into the unit content structure and delivery. How do you teach new media without falling into the trap of providing a simplified linear history of new media - how do you show the complex interconnected nature of new media concepts and issues instead (and enable students to explore them for themselves)?

Blogs in Research and Teaching

Trebor Scholz and I have now finished editing the transcript of the Webcam interview we did last Thursday, for his WebCamTalk 1.0 Series on the use of new media technologies in education. Editing this has been an interesting process - due to some difficulties we had an audio recording only of my part of the interview, without Trebor's questions. As a result, we've done a major edit which extended and rearranged the interview considerably, and I think it's all the better for it; the transcript is now posted on Trebor's New Media and Arts Education site (as well as on the next page in this blog entry). For good measure, though, there is also an edited audio version of the talk for download (MP3, 23MB) which has me talking for 40 minutes and is yet another take on the original interview (a streaming media version of the same audio is also here). This remixing of what actually happened in the interview somehow seems very appropriate for a chat about the potential of new media technologies...

Blog Demographics

Doing more work revising my book manuscript today. I've incorporated some recent findings by the Pew Internet & American Life Project which Steve Jones pointed out to me - in fact, they just released a new update on blogging (in the U.S.) a few days ago...

The State of Blogging shows a 57% increase in blog readership over the course of 2004; at the same time, they also found that

for all the excitement about blogs and the media coverage of them, blogs have not yet become recognized by a majority of internet users. Only 38% of all internet users know what a blog is. The rest are not sure what the term ‘blog’ means.

(I'd suggest that while many users in that rest may have visited blogs, they have regarded them as online diaries, community fora, or news Websites rather than as blogs.)

So This Is 2005

Hmm, reading about blogs always makes me want to write another entry myself. Unfortunately I don't get around to it nearly as often as I should.

I've had some very good news in the meantime: my series editor for Peter Lang, Steve Jones, likes the manuscript for the Gatewatching book that I delivered at the end of November. A few minor corrections and additions to be made, but things should go smoothly from here. I'll try and I've updated the relevant pages on this site, too. I've also received a nice endorsement for the back cover from John Hartley:

It's journalism, Jim, but not as we know it. "Gatewatching," "multiperspectival editing," the "produser." Strange new terms -- but as Axel Bruns shows in this impressive account of online news media, the underlying issues remain very much as Herbert Gans described them a generation ago. In a democracy everyone has a right to practice journalism. Users are beginning to shape the oddly named collaborative instruments on the internet into a new chorus, giving a new voice to democracy. Axel Bruns shows us why and how we all need to learn the tune.
John Hartley, Queensland University of Technology.

Ubiquitous Online News, Framing the Net, and Webcasting

An Early Start...The last day of AoIR 2004 has dawned on us. I've had the bad luck to have been given the 8.30 a.m. timeslot for my own paper - standing in an empty theatre at the moment waiting for people to finish their breakfast and make their way here. The session I'm in - ostensibly on 'online news and journalism/Internet vs. traditional media' - contains a pretty eclectic bunch of papers, so we'll see how many will show up in the end… They have ten more minutes.

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