First blogger to win Australian prize

Blogger Alison Croggon of Theatre Notes, mentioned in my second blog as ‘my taste’ in blogs is the first blogger to win the Pascall Prize for excellence in arts journalism, the sole award for arts criticism in Australia. The prize is $15,000, and for background on the prize and Alison’s forthright and inclusive approach to ‘curation of a public conversation’ (per prize judges) see her invaluable Theatre Notes. The Age reports that Alison is ‘particularly pleased because the award “validates what blogs can be.”’ Note her vivid disclosure of who she is, what she does, the ‘financial’ status of her blog and her use of a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Official Twitter coverage of the Future Summit is an important comment on the increasing popularity of this medium as a seriously interactive and a ‘real-time’ connection for the future, although I find the notion of a conference paper being reduced to a tweet of 140 characters challenging. See the Age report.

San Francisco Chronicle considers ‘how much information is too much in cyberspace’ as syndicated to the Age, a question that will develop and transform as we move rapidly into the future.

Meanwhile Professor Todd Gitlin's keynote presentation at the University of Westminster, London's Journalism in Crisis Conference entitled "A Surfeit of Crises: Circulation, Revenue, Attention, Authority and Deference," makes for good reading. Professor Terry Flew's presentation this week in Chicago offers another perspective on changes in media "The Citizen's Voice: Albert Hirschman's Exit, Voice and Loyalty and its Contribution to Media Citizenship Debates".