Milwaukee.
The final speaker in this first session at AoIR 2009 is Carol Soon, who shifts our focus to Singaporean political bloggers. Political blogging and related forms challenge conventional top-down communication flows, of course, and in doing so also undermines established entities' authority in information dissemination. What follows is a diversification of political participation in the networked public sphere - and in the Singaporean context, then, who are the key players here?

The networked public sphere can be seen as an autopoietic system,in which flows of communication and relationships are self-organising, move from the bottom up, freely within clusters and in a self-determined fashion. This challenges systems which traditionally hold more powerful positions - and hyperlink analysis can be utilised to examine the flows of information in this changing environment. Such flows may involve conventional political parties, but also civil society groups (which in Singapore particularly challenges the established system).

Milwaukee.
I've made it to the Association of Internet Researchers conference in windy Milwaukee, and promptly managed to seriously upset my stomach - so let's see how we go today. The first speaker in my first session at AoIR 2009 is Aaron S. Veenstra, whose focus is on political blogging during the 2008 US elections. He notes the emergence of what he calls 'new' new media - YouTube, Facebook, Twitter - and these have affected the way we think about political blogging, too.

Overall, too, blogging itself is increasingly difficult to define as technical definitions are dynamic and blogging genres are inconsistent at the top end and incredibly varied at the bottom end. The top tier of blogs may now be separating from the field, and liberal and conservative blogs (in the US) are growing apart; additionally, it is also important to distinguish between community and individual functions.

Cardiff.
The next speakers at Future of Journalism 2009 are Maria Grafström and Karolina Windell, whose interest is in business news and the portrayal of corporate images as influenced by the relationship between media and business, with bloggers throw in as another complication. This is connected also with research into the idea of corporate social responsibility (CSR), which has become better-known in recent years especially as a result of being promoted by the media.

The way the media have portrayed specific corporations is changing as a result; corporations are framed in different ways depending on whether a CSR perspective is included or not. To understand such different portrayal it is necessary to understand the production of business news, too, and to investigate the sources for different articles. Blogs now play a growing role in this context, and the study presented here especially examined articles about blogs in the business press (print, online, radio) as well as interviewing and surveying business journalists in Sweden.

Cardiff.
The final session at Future of Journalism 2009 starts with Stuart Allan, whose focus is on science journalism. One important question here is one of framing - a discursive strategy used to define the nature of a public event; a contested process between journalists and their sources and within news organisations. Frames determine how claims made by sources are selected (or not) as newsworthy, and influence public perception - sources are very aware of this and will try ensure that their comments are seen in the appropriate light.

Cardiff.
The second session on the second day here at Future of Journalism 2009 is the one I'm in as well - but we start with Xin Xin, whose focus is on grassroots journalism in China in the context of the country's social and technological changes. This ties into the long-standing debate on the relationship between journalism and democracy, framed traditionally mainly around established democracies - so what's the story in a rapidly transforming society like China?

Xin suggests that the progressive role of Web 2.0 technologies and citizen journalism in the authoritarian society of China should not be overstated; rather, there is the need for a realistic assessment of citizen journalism in the wider journalistic context of the country. Current issues facing China are a growing gap between rich and poor, and attendant social injustices and conflicts; these divides are opening up in the context of technological changes which have led to China now fielding the largest - and on average, youngest - online population in the world (which remains somewhat disconnected from outside sources and critical voices due to the 'great firewall of China', though), and of a tightly controlled news media environment which is also increasingly marketised.

Vienna.
The next speaker at EDEM 2009 was me, and I think it went pretty well. The third person in our session was missing, so we managed to have 30 minutes of good discussion afterwards. Here's my Powerpoint, and the full paper; I'll add the audio when I can... I've now added the audio, too.

Technorati : Australia, Digital Economy, EDEM 2009, Government 2.0, Project Democracy, blogging, democracy, e-government, participation, social media
Del.icio.us : Australia, Digital Economy, EDEM 2009, Government 2.0, Project Democracy, blogging, democracy, e-government, participation, social media

London.
The final speaker at the Transforming Audiences conference is Dumisani Moyo, whose interest is in citizen journalism in the age of digital pavement radio in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe, of course, has experienced a series of crises in recent years, which can be traced back to the democratic deficits inherited from its colonial history.

The shrinkage of communicative space in Zimbabwe has been widely documented in recent years; this was driven by legislative and other means. How have ordinary Zimbabweans adjusted and reacted to this? Media remain seen as important elements in the country's political discourse, and were noted as such in the agreement that led to the establishment of the current unity government. There has also been a rise of various forms of citizen journalism, which supported the political shifts in recent years and continues to push for further change; even here, however, professional journalists have objected to the idea of citizen journalism and see the concept as undermining their own professional roles.

London.
The next presenter at Transforming Audiences is Stine Lomborg, examining blogging as a form of collaborative produsage. She focussed on three personal Danish blogs, and examined six months' worth of posts and comments for this study, as well as interviewing the authors. The produsage angle of this study examines blog-based communication as an ongoing collaborative development of a shared text; this is combined with socio-cognitive reception theory in which genre is seen as a socially distributed cognitive architecture. The texts themselves were studied using conversation analysis.

London.
The post-lunch session at Transforming Audiences starts with a presentation by Mia Lövheim, whose study examines young (18-30 years) female A-List bloggers in Sweden. The interest here is not in link-blogging activities, but in the content created by the bloggers themselves, and the way they create identity and maintain personal relationships through these blogs; bloggers and readers in a way are co-creating the bloggers' identities here. How does this take place for A-List bloggers, though, whose popularity means that their posts are read by the established community of regular readers as well as by a much larger, more casual audience?