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My first session on this second day of the Association of Internet Researchers conference 2005 in Chicago is on the 'Internal Dynamics of Online Spaces'.

Janet Armentor-Cota: Uses of Web Chat

Janet Armentor-Cota from Syracuse University is the first speaker, presenting on the dynamics of a Web chat community. The paper she presents here is coming out of her dissertation, and looks at a Northeast (U.S.) romance chat room. Web chat, of course, is usually real time, multi-participant, and consists of messages of short length, with almost constant traffic around the clock. Web chat is also a multimedia phenomenon and can incorporate images and audio and video streams. So, how do processes and structures of multimedia technologies organise the chat space, and what processes occur here?

The next session at AoIR 2005 is on 'Emerging Research Methods for Analysing Civic Engagement'. Kenneth Farrall from the University of Pennsylvania makes a start. His paper is co-authored with Michael delli Carpini.

Kenneth Farrall: Web Graph Analysis

Kenneth begins by outlining perceptions of the Internet as alternatively a tool for revitalising democracy, or for furthering its decline. There are various approaches to analysing its role in this, from content analysis and user surveys to social network analysis, which appears to be a very useful technique for analysing user engagement in the Internet. But such analysis is difficult in an Internet context as social network associations online are highly fluid, and Kenneth suggests that content analysis may be useful to address such problems. 

The first of the afternoon sessions this Thursday at AoIR 2005 is on 'Participation and Trust in Online Communities'. Andrew Cox from the University of Sheffield is the first presenter. 

Andrew Cox: The Parameters of an Online Community

Andrew's work looked at the links and knowledge sharing amongst people working in different organisations and across different organisational jurisdictions - in this case, the Web developers working for universities. There are a number of online spaces available to them, some used, some not, as well as various conferences. in the UK, they continue to use listservs as a key tool, and in the U.S., the main equivalent uwebd is also listserv-based, and has seen a continuing importance (even though we might consider mailing-lists as a somewhat old-fashioned CMC tool by now). There has been some decrease in list membership in recent years, however, declining by some 5% per annum since 2003. It is also interesting that some 25% of list members have turned off mail delivery of the list (presumably accessing the list via the Web?). And there is ongoing churn of members (new members joining, old members dropping out). List traffic is around 120 per month, and again this has declined gradually in recent years.

The first keynote speaker at AoIR 2005 is Ang Peng Hwa from the Singapore Internet Research Centre (SIRC) at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore - nice to see someone else who's come a long way to be here... He notes that this is an important time to do Internet research, and in particular to do work on Internet governance. He begins by outlining some of the background to Internet governance issues: originally, there was relatively little government interest in this issue, up to and including the 1998 International Forum on the White Paper (IFWP) on Net governance in various locations. Of 45 governments invited, only three attended the Singapore meeting of the IFWP - India, Singapore, and Malaysia -, for example.

Well, the 2005 Association of Internet Researchers conference is finally underway. We start the Thursday morning 'Civic Engagement' session at with a paper by Irene Ramos-Vielba on the use of political blogs in Portugal and Spain, and their potential contribution to democracy.

Irene Ramos-Vielba: Political Blogs in Spain and Portugal

Blogs have of course be recognised in the Anglo-Saxon context already, so how does this play out elsewhere? Are blogs creating an authentic political sphere for deliberation and political action? Journalism and politics are of course two of the key fields which have been affected by blogs as they comment on and promote discussion on political issues - but what is the contribution made? A polarisation between civil pessimists and civil optimists has now perhaps been overcome - we are no longer prediction either a utopia or dystopia that is likely to be brought about by blogs. Rather, what emerges is perhaps an additional political sphere which allows for communal and multidirectional exchange, and may enhance the democratic process.

(Chicago) The one thing which sets the United States apart from anywhere else in the world is this, of course: donuts. I noticed this when I first visited Boston two years ago, and so the first thing I did after I arrived here was to wander down to Dunkin' Donuts to reacquaint myself with this national specialty (well, the first thing I did after a day spent wandering downtown Toronto, which left me with large blisters on both feet, and a very short night was sleep, actually). Donuts in the U.S. aren't the boring, stale, cinnamon-flavoured dough-rings you get elsewhere, but fresh, soft, and available in all manner of exciting flavours. Today I picked a glazed chocolate and a butternut donut for lunch, and wandered down to Linkin, er, Lincoln Park on the Chicago waterfront for an afternoon stroll.

As you might have noticed, the red box that's currently at the top of my blog has grown a little more today - I can now confirm a couple more events as part of my iDC residency in New York (even though these events themselves won't be in NYC...). David Marshall has invited me to participate in a panel discussion at Northeastern University in Boston (12 October, 12 noon), and Mark Tribe has asked me to present my 'Understanding the Produser' lecture at Brown University in Providence (12 October, 5 p.m.), so I'll be doing a bit of a New England railway roundtrip that day.

(Toronto) Well, after all the excitement of the Creative Places + Spaces conference over the last couple of days, today is my day off in Toronto, and I've used it to wander all over town. Toronto is an extremely easy place to get around in, and it's impossible to get lost - the city is neatly divided into a western and an eastern half by Yonge Street, which runs from the lakeshore all the way through town, and on, all up for around 1900km in total! Other than that, the place feels like a bit of a mixed bag to me - big modern shopping centres, office buildings, and hotels are interspersed with dingy strips of shops and a lot of building sites, with little sense of a real centre; the city is also somewhat disconnected from its lakeshore by the rail line and Gardiner Expressway, as well as a large number of parking lots around the baseball and hockey stadiums. And even on Yonge St, as soon as you get just slightly away from the big shopping centres almost every other shop seems to be a sex shop - Torontonians must be a randy lot...

Well, it's the final session of this very exciting conference. Charles Landry and Pier Giorgio di Cicco will do the wrap-up. Charles reflects on the process of starting a revolution - from the individual idea to the broad movement. It is an extended transformative moment, but the question is whether it will linger long and lastingly, so that a legacy is created. He suggests that the resolution has already started, as the many projects mentioned along the way over the last couple of days show - and these are the generators for further action.

And finally we're in the last plenary session for the conference, on the power of new ideas. This is a panel deliberately of people aged 40 or under, to demonstrate that there is a strong future in this creative industries area. This is facilitated by the multitalented Canadian cultural entrepreneur Sharon Lewis, who now introduces the speakers.

Peter MacLeod: Towards Creative Security

Peter MacLeod makes a start; he is the principal of The Planning Desk in Vancouver. He has recently returned from a tour of Canada to investigate the civic infrastructure of the nation, and suggests that both risk and resolution are inherently political ideas. In addition to creative risk, there also is a need for creative security, in analogy to social security: states exist to mitigate risk (especially risk of violence), which is why the violence seen in New Orleans recently was so alarming, and states are indeed perhaps only relevant for the security they provide. However, government has fallen into a rut, always dealing with the same political problems, and the idea that government is a problem and necessarily inept has become all too prevalent.