Well, I can't say New York City exactly put its best face forward for me - it's been alternately drizzly, rainy, windy, or just plain miserable here at least as far as the weather was concerned. With the talks on Tuesday and the Boston/Providence and Philadelphia trips on Wednesday and Friday, Thursday was my only 'off' day here, but it wasn't exactly great for sightseeing. In fact, around mid-day it rained so hard that I had to buy a pair of jeans because my other trousers were soaking wet... (Well, the other reason was that on the flight to the U.S. my old jeans developed what here they'd probably call a 'wardrobe malfunction', putting me in danger of mooning people each time I bent over.)

(Buffalo) Well, after 24 hours on progressively smaller planes I'm finally here in Buffalo, arriving late last night. An eventless flight on Qantas and American Airlines - a nice sunrise over the Californian coastline flying into LAX, and luckily none of the landing gear problems that occurred so dramatically and telegenically on a JetBlue flight at the same airport just a few days ago. Flying across the U.S. by daylight for the first time I was struck by the vast and barren expanses of land still left more or less untouched especially in the West (this would have been Arizona in particular, I guess) - perhaps its just me, but you don't think about America in such terms these days... Of course I also couldn't help but think 'Google Earth' at the same time - will have to revisit some of the sites along the way later (was that the Las Vegas or Phoenix speedway I saw from the air?).

I'm now starting work on my Wikinews article, for the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Chicago in October, and possible later publication in the 'News and the Net: Convergences and Divergences' issue of the journal Scan, edited by Chris Atton and Graham Meikle. I've sent a questionnaire about the Wikinews experience to my contact there, but if any other Wikinewsians happen to read this, your views would also be very much appreciated. Reply through comments, or email me.

My postgraduate coursework student Qiongli Wu pointed me to the Trendwatching site the other day - very interesting stuff. This ties right in with much creative industries theory, and especially points to the rise in user-led content production which is also at the heart of the open news and blogging phenomena I write about in my Gatewatching book. Of course in watching for new trends in this field the Trendwatching team are involved in a form of gatewatching - and what's more, they've even set up a world-wide network of what they call 'springspotters' to help them carry out this task.

I spent most of yesterday working on the final draft of my book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production. The proofread manuscript arrived back from Peter Lang in New York earlier this week, and so I went through the thing one last time to apply the requested changes - nothing too serious (a few last remnants of Australian spelling and a few minor formatting issues), but a fairly tedious and time-consuming process nonetheless. Had to change printers at the last minute as well as the one in my office developed an annoying smudging problem, but finally now the whole lot is printed (and Peter Lang will scan these pages for printing the book) and the completed package has started the return journey around the world. According to Fedex it should arrive there in ten hours, and if all goes well this would mean the book can go to the printers this coming week!

Well, my article for Online Opinion is, erm, online now, retitled "Online 'Produsers' Dish Up the News". (It was first posted here as [weblink:164].) Look forward to seeing the comments.