Blogs and Blogging

And we're on to the last session of the day, which continues the blogging theme. I should probably note that not all papers at this conference are concerned with blogs - there are some eight or nine sessions running simultaneously here, themed around many other topics; as always, the topics I cover here are only the ones I was most interested in and do not necessarily represent the overall intellectual thrust of the conference accurately. (I'm sure the other bloggers here will present a very different version of AoIR 2004 in their blogs, even if admittedly many of them have also attended most of the blogging-related sessions…)

Back after lunch now, and we're in the next session on blogs and related media forms. Karen Gustafson makes the start, speaking on blogs and the creation of community, especially on political blog sites. She has selected four high-ranking political blogs to study, including Instapundit and others. They have a range of ideological positions and are themselves influential amongst blogs. However, this is of course a very narrow subset of all blogs.

We've now moved on to the next keynote, by Nina Wakeford from INCITE at the University of Surrey; I saw her keynote at ISEA2004, of course, but I think this one is on a different topic. I also just ran in to fibreculture's own David Teh - good to see another familiar face!

Nina considers how we might think about ubiquity - through developments of ubicomp, and through analogous social and cultural activities; also, how might we intervene in already existing ubiquity work? A guiding example is the 'gaydar', a new technology for gay men to find one another through mobile devices. What exactly is it that ubiquitous computing promises, what technologies may it replace?

The View from My Room, Complete with CowsI'm starting to get a bit frustrated with my lack of connectivity here. Not only is there no wireless, but there's also no way to plug into the cable-based network; I ended up buying a phone card for £3 in order to be able to connect via dial-up, but that didn't work either… And to make matters worse, now my mobile is on the blink too, and locks up every time I try to do anything. Argh!

Yay, I've run into a fellow blogger, Lilia Efimova (and we've commiserated about not being able to do live blogging of this conference, in the absence of direct Internet access). Interesting to discuss approaches to coping with this.

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.

Finally met Jill Walker during the break! Now on to the next panel - but it's very dark in here so I'll apologise in advance for any typing errors. Mary Flanagan and Ken Perlin are presenting on their RAPUNSEL project. The motivation is that very few of the programmers and other IT professionals in the US are women (7%), so the project is to develop a game to attract girls to the area. The main drop-off point for interest amongst girls is around middle school, but they are and remain very interested in online gaming (over 60% of the gamers in Sims Online are women). The project builds on this by using 'computer clubhouses' in poor and ethnically diverse neighbourhoods in New York (which are sponsored by Intel). The combination of everyday desires and technology enables the expression of a possible world (building on Deleuze). So how can hacker and middle-schooler cultures be connected in this way?

Looks like the word is out - Jean Burgess mentioned my blogging of this conference on Jill Walker's blog, which also covers the conference...

We're back for the second day of ISEA2004 at Lume. Unfortunately I got here a little late (some good discussions on the tram and after with people from Sarai), so I think I might have missed a speaker or two of this session called "Uncovering Histories of Electronic Writing".

I participated in a show on blogging on ABC Radio National this evening - Australia Talks Back with Sandy McCutcheon.