Blogs

Singapore.
I'm spending the next few days at the ISEA 2008 conference in steamy Singapore. My last ISEA was 2004 in Helsinki and Tallinn (and on the cruise ship to Helsinki), an experience which will be very hard to top - but I'm sure the local organisers have a great deal of interesting events in store for us, too. ISEA - the International Symposium on Electronic Art - is always a strange beast: a wild mixture of new media artists and performers, free culture and open source activists, and more conventional new media researchers (like me). Well, we'll see...

Some ten and a half years ago, David Marshall - then lecturing in the English Department at the University of Queensland - had an idea. Academics around Australia, and around the world, were still coming to terms with this new-fangled thing, the Web, but publishing academic work was more often than not still linked to the slow processes of print publishing - so, David suggested, wouldn't it be great to set up a new, purely online journal that would combine rigorous academic peer review with the speed and reach that only Web-based publishing could provide. "Why not organise each issue around a one-word theme?", he asked.

(Cross-posted from Produsage.org.)

I'm happy to report that the Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre has finally been launched. It's taken far too long to get to this point (initial Australian federal government approval for the CRC application was received shortly before Christmas, 2006), but after a lengthy process of negotiations between the twenty or so universities, government bodies, and industry partners involved in the CRC, the Centre has finally been launched by the federal minister responsible, Senator Kim Carr, on 3 July 2008.

Make no mistake - with funding totalling some $120 million over its seven-year timeframe, this is a very significant development for the Australian digital services industry, as the range of partners involved in the Centre also documents. The Centre will conduct research and development across a range of domains, from financial services through education to mobile media, building on the work of its predecessor, the Smart Internet CRC.

It looks like I received my copy of the book even before the author herself did, but with the excitement of the CCi conference last week, I haven't got around to acknowledging it yet: Jill Walker Rettberg's book Blogging is now out. Congratulations!

Jill, of course, is one of the world's best-known academic bloggers, and so I was very pleased to offer an endorsement for the back cover. Here's what I wrote:

Brisbane.
The final session here at the CCi conference is billed as a copyright perspectives panel in the context of user-led content creation on Web 2.0. The panel begins with Oli Wilson from New Zealand indie band Knives at Noon and Otago University. Knives at Noon released its EP online under a Creative Commons 3.0 (BY-NC-SA) licence, free to share and remix for non-commercial purposes. The band was somewhat unhappy with the content of the EP itself, but wanted this creative material not to be wasted - they hoped that it would take on a life of its own by releasing it online as a ProTools source file (roughly following Linus Torvalds's logic in releasing the initial Linux kernel). Release in this format also allowed users to access the individual components of their tracks, not just the mixed end product - and it suited the band's creative philosophy.

Brisbane.
The post-lunch sessions on this last day of the CCi conference take a somewhat more legal angle. The keynote speaker here is Graham Vickery from the OECD, which has just published a set of high-level recommendations related to making public sector information more publicly accessible, as appropriate to the emerging participative Web environment. The OECD is interested in the economic framework for this new environment (for example, online games, music, publishing, film, video, advertising, and news distribution) in order to identify what aspects (of value chains, business models, etc.) are shared across these environments.

Brisbane.
The CCi conference is slowly drawing to a close - the next plenary is billed as a CCi Advisory Board discussion drawing together some of the threads from the three days of conferencing, and setting the agenda for future developments at the CCi. Henry Jenkins is the chair for this session.

Henry begins by opening the floor, and Kerry Raymond begins. She notes the relative absence of IT researchers at the conference, and thinks more IT people should attend conferences such as this - there is a need to break down institutional and disciplinary silos. Bob Hodge adds that there is a lot of revolutionary rhetoric here, but that the idea of a revolution needs to be further theorised - is this really a revolution or a more gradual change. A speaker from the Queensland government (didn't hear the name) would like to see further questioning of future directions - is where we going where we want to be going?

Brisbane.
The next plenary session at the CCi conference responds to Mark Deuze's talk - John-Paul Marin from SBS and Tony Walker (blogger at ABC Digital Futures and the ABC's Manager of Digital Radio) will share their own experiences of operating in the new, user-led, media environment that Mark has sketched out.

Brisbane.
The third and last day of the CCi conference starts with a keynote by the fabulous Mark Deuze, author of Media Work. He begins by pointing to Henry Jenkins's work on convergence culture, and reminds us of the magnitude of that trend. Why is this happening, what is the context for this - how do media professionals work in this environment?

Media organisations are very well positioned to make sense of this from a production perspective - they are well placed to find new ways to tell stories across multiple (new) platforms, but in doing so reproduce mainly what they did before. We need to move forward beyond this approach, though: how do we start from scratch in developing new content forms and forms of participation which are native to the new (media) environment, characterised as it is by niche communities and diverse interests? (Mark's upcoming book Beyond Journalism tells this story for the journalistic environment.)

Brisbane.
The last speaker on this second day of the CCi conference is John Quiggin. His interest is in the impact of the amateurisation of content production on innovation policy. John begins by noting the outgoing 20th century model of technical innovation, which involved publicly funded pure research (with a public good rationale), followed by private sector R&D (creating patents and IP with some direct subsidy) and finally the marketing of new products to end users. He contrasts this with the 19th century model of cultural innovation, where individual artists created cultural works (protected by copyright) to be delivered through cultural institutions (often under public funding, outside of the commercial mass media).