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It's been a long time between drinks, but over at ABC Online they've just posted the latest Club Bloggery article by Jason, Barry, and me - and we've also reposted it at Gatewatching, as usual. This time, we're reflecting on recent revelations that Liberal Party staffers in Victoria ran a blog to discredit their own leader - from party premises...

Baillieu and the Blogs of War

By Jason Wilson, Axel Bruns and Barry Saunders

I'm crossposting this from Gatewatching.org, where a discussion about the influence of Australian political bloggers on wider political processes that was kicked off by Jason Wilson's recent posts on Tim Blair's move to the Daily Telegraph and Christian Kerr's summary dismissal of Ozblogistan's political combattants in The Australian has prompted me to finally post up some more information about the research we're currently engaged in at QUT, in collaboration with our excellent colleagues at the University St. Gallen in Switzerland. I'm also attaching a detailed discussion paper which documents our methodological model in some more detail - we'd love to get further feedback on this, from fellow researchers and interested bloggers alike. (For a more condensed version of this material, please see our paper for the ISEA 2008 conference in Singapore.)

This is weird.

OK, I understand the logic behind Nigerian email spam: if you copy, paste, and email the same plea for help (and bank account details) often enough, you're going to find someone gullible enough to send them to you - even today, when most of us are all too well aware of these emails and know how to spot them the moment they drop into our inbox (if they don't get spamfiltered out before then anyway). I also see how, before this kind of spam started accounting for a sizeable percentage of all email sent and received, and especially before email became a major means of communication in the first place, people might still have fallen for similar messages from faraway countries when they received them in letter form.

But this? A hand-written letter from Uganda, basically containing the same standard text ("I warmly greet you in God's name", and all that), snail-mailed to my office address? Surely today, with the benefit of our added experience of spam scams, the hit/miss ratio just wouldn't make it worth the effort - spam emails are cheap and literally send themselves, but with handwritten letters you also have to cover the cost of manually writing and (air-) mailing them?

We're getting ever closer to the tenth anniversary of M/C Journal's launch in July 1998. To celebrate, the University of Queensland's Peta Mitchell and M/C founder P. David Marshall will team up to edit our mid-year issue, 'publish'. What's the future for academic publishing? How do we assess quality? Contributions to the editors, please...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - 28 Apr. 2008

M/C - Media and Culture
http://www.media-culture.org.au/
is calling for contributors to the 'publish' issue of

M/C Journal
http://journal.media-culture.org.au/

M/C Journal is looking for new contributors. M/C is a crossover journal between the popular and the academic, and a …

There's a quiet revolution underway - a revolution that could result in the birth of an entirely new academic discipline. Spearheaded by John Hartley and Stuart Cunningham in QUT's Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi), and in collaboration with an international group of high-profile researchers, they're investigating the potential for joining elements of cultural studies, evolutionary economics, anthropology, and other disciplines in a new field called cultural science.

Somewhat overshadowed by the extensive if occasionally perfunctory coverage of the 2020 Summit in Canberra has been ABC Managing Director Mark Scott's own ideas paper, "The ABC in the Digital Age - Towards 2020" which was released last Thursday.

Scott also posted a kind of executive summary of the paper to the ABC's 2020 Unleashed site: here, he resorts to time-honoured platitudes about how in future "we will be saturated with choices about what to watch, listen to and experience; it will be like trying to hold back the ocean with a broom." (Huh?) His solution: more …

A quick addendum to my last Gatewatching post, which discussed why in the face of a journalistic environment more concerned with scoring points than reporting on the issues of the day it's not such a bad idea if politicians choose to converse with citizens outside of the media glare: from what I've seen so far, quite a few of the journalists reporting on the 2020 Summit have similarly succumbed to the temptation to file lazy stories poking fun at summit procedures rather than investing the time necessary to inform the rest of the country about what's actually being discussed …

(Crossposted from Gatewatching.org.)

There's been a bit of discussion amongst political bloggers about a post by PollieGraph's Rachel Hills which pointed out that Liberal leadership contender Malcolm Turnbull had her - and other journalists - on 'limited profile' on Facebook, because of her status as a writer for New Matilda (also noted over at Larvatus Prodeo). Some of the discussion about this has been fairly predictable - with the Libs plumbing untold lows in their approval ratings, it's easy to engage in some gratuitous pollie-bashing - but for once, I have to say that Turnbull's decision to keep the media at arms' length from any online discussion with voters seems like a pretty smart move to me.

(Crossposted from Produsage.org.)

As I've said before, I'm no fan of Facebook - in fact, I think that ultimately, it is no more than a poor caricature of what social networking can be and do. Clearly, that's not stopped the site's rapid growth, but as Facebook users themselves have had more time to come to terms with the environment they're now operating in, I think it's in good part responsible for the fact that in some key territories, Facebook usage numbers have now plateaued and even declined.

The main problem here is with the thoughtlessness with which Facebook …

So, the Vibewire e-Festival of Ideas is over. I really enjoyed the discussion over the past week, and I've just posted some final thoughts for what it's worth.

Our discussion of democracy and social dynamics reminds me of the work of French author Pierre Lévy. In his book Collective Intelligence, he suggests that