Showing posts with label blogwatch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogwatch. Show all posts
Monday, May 25, 2009
A site to behold
A very interesting site investigating the notion of user-led content – http://produsage.org by Axel Bruns. Especially Snurb’s blog featuring his presentation on produsage and business: blogging from next09.
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".
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".
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
From cultural convergence to analysis paralysis and beyond arts
“The Poachers and the Stormtroopers: Cultural Convergence in the Digital Age” is a fascinating study of the intersection of media and culture in the area of fandom and paves the way for Henry Jenkins’ eloquent book published in 2006 Convergence Culture: where old and new media collide. In an era when 'convergence culture' has spread across all forms of media and entertainment (fandom is no longer an underground activity) and media is in transition it is difficult to assess how creators can be financially rewarded for their creations, the notion of intellectual property and copyright are ‘punitive models’ that are inadequate to deal with the contemporary media environment. Corporates e.g. Star Wars/ LucasArts have had to negotiate a balance with fandom enthusiasm and investment in production and protecting intellectual property.
Jenkins’ paradigm for understanding media change spans franchises (corporates top-down) and grassroots level (bottom-up) as media producers as well as consumers. “This book is about the relationship between three contexts – media convergence, participatory culture and collective intelligence,” he writes. He discusses the migratory experience of audiences who will go ‘almost anywhere’ to find the entertainment experience they desire – and the unpredictability of the appropriation of cultural images and their circulation – in a complex media environment which depends on active participation “by a new set of rules nobody really fully understands”. Convergence is not simply a technological term. Jenkins covers the notion of divergence as part of the same phenomenon, and while his focus is on popular culture, he understands that the lines between this and politics have already blurred (Obama’s election campaign is a prime example).
As Pool predicted before Jenkins, convergence does not imply stability, rather as media cultures compete and diversify, it is predicated on tension with change. Jenkins’ aim is to understand some of the ways in which convergence is impacting on popular culture in America, “in particular the ways in which it is impacting on the relationship between media audiences, producers and content.” He describes us as living within a ‘convergence culture’ which will lie somewhere between the world ‘without gatekeepers’ and the world with ‘too tightly controlled gatekeepers’. A world where audiences empowered with new technologies are part of the landscape and producers will be rewarded for embracing participatory culture.
I found Douglas Bowman’s ‘abrupt exit’ (The Sunday Age, Business syndicated from the New York Times) from Google very well-handled by the designer who explained on his blog that when user data wholly dictates the engineering of a site, it leaves little room for designer innovation (is this an example of ‘analysis paralysis’?). The question is how textured the feedback is and whether reactive data when taken to an extreme, is the most useful in building web design. Certainly, Bowman is not suggesting that designers should ignore user feedback which he states informs valuable insights.
The website I’ve been following Arts Hub has become slightly more streamlined but has not improved aesthetically. News is divided into latest reviews, views and profiles with the first and last being free content. It still carries advertisements including the easy stray click to Deakin University on the right hand side. It is a straightforward click on reviews to ‘free content’, but ‘premium content’ – e.g. latest Australian news takes the user to the beginning of the article with only one line displayed before it asks you to sign in or join now. I guess it’s the balancing act of piquing interest as discussed last week. Partial feed is not saleable, however, just look at the presentation of Crikey's new aggregated content.
Arts Hub has a flash through of top stories that seems to be regularly updated but features many media releases. It is optimising business opportunities and resolving copyright issues (although Fairfax has attempted to claim copyright over headlines and bylines) by making the user click through directly to other publications to see full stories from national or international publications (the view remains clunky and aesthetically unappealing with the summary, link and comment box). It features an arts directory with many entries ‘that have not yet provided a profile’. CEO Lisa Watts was announced in early April. Under events, classifieds and arts directory users are invited to browse or lodge an advertisement. It is offering a free 60 day trial for companies. It is encouraging members to keep in touch with Facebook page (for latest giveaways) or Twitter in its e-bulletin. Central to driving its subscriptions are employment and volunteering opportunities, residencies and auditions etc. However, it does not sort employment opportunities from voluntary and other opportunities for members except to offer a volunteer search for the user actively seeking voluntary positions or a breakdown of industry sectors. It offers a browse job function without specific organisational details to all users. Arts Hub charges for job and volunteer listings.
Having looked at mediabistro.com, although overwhelmed, I find the content much more tantalising and it’s skew more creative than Arts Hub, while it targets a broader, more textured demographic and showcases more interesting offers.
Jenkins’ paradigm for understanding media change spans franchises (corporates top-down) and grassroots level (bottom-up) as media producers as well as consumers. “This book is about the relationship between three contexts – media convergence, participatory culture and collective intelligence,” he writes. He discusses the migratory experience of audiences who will go ‘almost anywhere’ to find the entertainment experience they desire – and the unpredictability of the appropriation of cultural images and their circulation – in a complex media environment which depends on active participation “by a new set of rules nobody really fully understands”. Convergence is not simply a technological term. Jenkins covers the notion of divergence as part of the same phenomenon, and while his focus is on popular culture, he understands that the lines between this and politics have already blurred (Obama’s election campaign is a prime example).
As Pool predicted before Jenkins, convergence does not imply stability, rather as media cultures compete and diversify, it is predicated on tension with change. Jenkins’ aim is to understand some of the ways in which convergence is impacting on popular culture in America, “in particular the ways in which it is impacting on the relationship between media audiences, producers and content.” He describes us as living within a ‘convergence culture’ which will lie somewhere between the world ‘without gatekeepers’ and the world with ‘too tightly controlled gatekeepers’. A world where audiences empowered with new technologies are part of the landscape and producers will be rewarded for embracing participatory culture.
I found Douglas Bowman’s ‘abrupt exit’ (The Sunday Age, Business syndicated from the New York Times) from Google very well-handled by the designer who explained on his blog that when user data wholly dictates the engineering of a site, it leaves little room for designer innovation (is this an example of ‘analysis paralysis’?). The question is how textured the feedback is and whether reactive data when taken to an extreme, is the most useful in building web design. Certainly, Bowman is not suggesting that designers should ignore user feedback which he states informs valuable insights.
The website I’ve been following Arts Hub has become slightly more streamlined but has not improved aesthetically. News is divided into latest reviews, views and profiles with the first and last being free content. It still carries advertisements including the easy stray click to Deakin University on the right hand side. It is a straightforward click on reviews to ‘free content’, but ‘premium content’ – e.g. latest Australian news takes the user to the beginning of the article with only one line displayed before it asks you to sign in or join now. I guess it’s the balancing act of piquing interest as discussed last week. Partial feed is not saleable, however, just look at the presentation of Crikey's new aggregated content.
Arts Hub has a flash through of top stories that seems to be regularly updated but features many media releases. It is optimising business opportunities and resolving copyright issues (although Fairfax has attempted to claim copyright over headlines and bylines) by making the user click through directly to other publications to see full stories from national or international publications (the view remains clunky and aesthetically unappealing with the summary, link and comment box). It features an arts directory with many entries ‘that have not yet provided a profile’. CEO Lisa Watts was announced in early April. Under events, classifieds and arts directory users are invited to browse or lodge an advertisement. It is offering a free 60 day trial for companies. It is encouraging members to keep in touch with Facebook page (for latest giveaways) or Twitter in its e-bulletin. Central to driving its subscriptions are employment and volunteering opportunities, residencies and auditions etc. However, it does not sort employment opportunities from voluntary and other opportunities for members except to offer a volunteer search for the user actively seeking voluntary positions or a breakdown of industry sectors. It offers a browse job function without specific organisational details to all users. Arts Hub charges for job and volunteer listings.
Having looked at mediabistro.com, although overwhelmed, I find the content much more tantalising and it’s skew more creative than Arts Hub, while it targets a broader, more textured demographic and showcases more interesting offers.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Bloblet's 2014
Bloblet’s take on EPIC 2014 reflects much of my response to the piece. I too find the 'doomsday' tone of voice and music irritating but apt for the post-apocalyptic setting in which it posits the world of journalism.
And as Sloan would readily accede this is not a so much a prophecy about an all-encompassing online world information system as a tool to engage consideration of journalism in a state of flux. Google’s extended reach is clearly topical – renewed talks between Microsoft and Yahoo! to provide a viable alternative search engine were reported in this week’s Age Business section syndicated from the Guardian.
In these critical economic times, with media monopolies contracting and carrying more organisational-biased comment, and diversifying if they’re savvy – online media needs to be seen as a serious route. Moby Capital, which owns Tolo TV Afghanistan’s most popular television station, is an example of ‘independent’ media (since last May broadcasting also to North America and Europe) increasingly present online (ironically thanks to aggregation) and further diversified into a growing chain of internet coffee shops.
The New York Times example may illustrate that speculations like EPIC 2014/2015 are necessarily simplistic, but the growing collaborative media model is not.
In the global environment, Google aggregated news is usurping control and power of print media ironically while engaging print media content and 'traditional' print advertisers to do so. Print media’s tardiness to embrace the potential of the internet and to realise income opportunities (combined with the unwieldy and often localised pathway of copyright law) has allowed the information superhighway to increasingly displace print media.
In perhaps the greatest irony Rupert Murdoch, one of the world's biggest media moguls, argues that content is becoming more 'quantitative than qualitative', meanwhile shrinking newsrooms of his dailies and Fox News in a formalised content sharing portal that will see copy 'shared' from New York to London to Sydney. Certainly newsprint is becoming leaner with the global push for free content.
Like Wikipedia, content may be largely user-generated with abundant resources but a paucity of focussed research/rigourous editorial processes leading to questionable accuracy and to the infiltration of bias. If content is paid for according to demand i.e. popularity (GoogleZON) and customised to demographics, preferences and interests it has potential to become incredibly insular and trivialised as well as unimaginably powerful and nuanced for those prepared to sift and scrutinise voluminous content from a range of sources. It may also be susceptible to 'technical glitches' and/or 'hoaxes' that skew rankings.
EPIC is a very credible paradigm, if a little too easily bought into.
And as Sloan would readily accede this is not a so much a prophecy about an all-encompassing online world information system as a tool to engage consideration of journalism in a state of flux. Google’s extended reach is clearly topical – renewed talks between Microsoft and Yahoo! to provide a viable alternative search engine were reported in this week’s Age Business section syndicated from the Guardian.
In these critical economic times, with media monopolies contracting and carrying more organisational-biased comment, and diversifying if they’re savvy – online media needs to be seen as a serious route. Moby Capital, which owns Tolo TV Afghanistan’s most popular television station, is an example of ‘independent’ media (since last May broadcasting also to North America and Europe) increasingly present online (ironically thanks to aggregation) and further diversified into a growing chain of internet coffee shops.
The New York Times example may illustrate that speculations like EPIC 2014/2015 are necessarily simplistic, but the growing collaborative media model is not.
In the global environment, Google aggregated news is usurping control and power of print media ironically while engaging print media content and 'traditional' print advertisers to do so. Print media’s tardiness to embrace the potential of the internet and to realise income opportunities (combined with the unwieldy and often localised pathway of copyright law) has allowed the information superhighway to increasingly displace print media.
In perhaps the greatest irony Rupert Murdoch, one of the world's biggest media moguls, argues that content is becoming more 'quantitative than qualitative', meanwhile shrinking newsrooms of his dailies and Fox News in a formalised content sharing portal that will see copy 'shared' from New York to London to Sydney. Certainly newsprint is becoming leaner with the global push for free content.
Like Wikipedia, content may be largely user-generated with abundant resources but a paucity of focussed research/rigourous editorial processes leading to questionable accuracy and to the infiltration of bias. If content is paid for according to demand i.e. popularity (GoogleZON) and customised to demographics, preferences and interests it has potential to become incredibly insular and trivialised as well as unimaginably powerful and nuanced for those prepared to sift and scrutinise voluminous content from a range of sources. It may also be susceptible to 'technical glitches' and/or 'hoaxes' that skew rankings.
EPIC is a very credible paradigm, if a little too easily bought into.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Made It
Given my tardy entrance into cyberspace, I think my crafty friends will understand why the first site I reference is Made It – an Australian handmade site, not quite as sexy as Etsy. A bit more cool is Geeorgie Love. One of my favourites sites michigirl is embarking on a technofashion venture on michigirl.tumblr.com.
Check out the knockout world of wearable art at worldofwearableart.com.
Some of the world's leading photographers are posting at black star rising. Probably more powerful in terms of popularity though not imagery is Delta Goodrem's forum.
Closer to my dramatic sensibility is Alison Croggon's wonderful blog Theatre Notes or for dynamic entertainment look up thevine.com.au
Check out the knockout world of wearable art at worldofwearableart.com.
Some of the world's leading photographers are posting at black star rising. Probably more powerful in terms of popularity though not imagery is Delta Goodrem's forum.
Closer to my dramatic sensibility is Alison Croggon's wonderful blog Theatre Notes or for dynamic entertainment look up thevine.com.au
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