I'm very happy to announce that my latest article on produsage has now been published, in the (German-language) reader developed from the Prosumer Revisited conference which I attended earlier this year. Obviously, I argue in the book chapter that the 'prosumer' is no longer a useful term to describe the changes in participation and content creation which are occurring today, and the chapter provides a concise overview of produsage, or Produtzung, as an alternative. Probably a little more clearly than I did in my conference presentation itself!

I'm delighted to note that three new reviews of my book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage - by Verena Laschinger, Alan Razee, and Erin Stark - have been published over at the Resource Centre for Cybercultural Studies. RCCS editor David Silver kindly also asked me to provide a response to these reviews, which point to a number of further avenues for research into the produsage phenomenon that I hope many of us who work in this field will pursue.

Looking back, my stay at the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg during May and June this year was exceptionally productive. In addition to the various conferences at which I presented, I also conducted a range of interviews with German media - and the latest of these, for Polar, the voluminous twice-annual magazine for political philosophy and culture, has now been published. I was interviewed for the magazine by Jan Engelmann of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, which is aligned with the German Greens party.

Here's an extended version of the interview, slightly longer than what was published in Polar. It's in German, of course - try Google Translate for a rough translation to other languages?

"In der Open-Source-Demokratie wartet man keine Einladung ab"

Bloß zuschauen war gestern. Im Web 2.0 entwickeln Leute gemeinsam freie Software, redigieren Texte in Wikipedia oder beraten auf Blogs die Sicherheitslücken von Windows. Könnte diese Beteiligungslust auch der Politik zugute kommen? Ja, wenn man die Philosophie der Netzkulturen ernst nimmt und schrittweise in das institutionelle System integriert, sagt der in Australien arbeitende Medienforscher Axel Bruns in einem E-Mail-Interview mit Jan Engelmann.

Conference season is upon us again: I'm shortly flying out to Europe to present a number of produsage-related papers at conferences in England, Austria, and Wales. The first of these is likely to be the most immediately interesting one for Produsage.org readers: at Transforming Audiences in London, I'll be presenting a paper that is more or less an English-language version of my presentation at Prosumer Revisited in March; I'll be critiquing Alvin Toffler's concept of the 'prosumer', and suggesting produsage as a more appropriate replacement that takes into account the very different affordances of today's participatory online technologies. In preparation for the conference, I've now made the Powerpoint available on this site, and all things going well I'll also add the audio of the presentation soon after the conference. the audio is now online, too.

Another outcome from my participation in the next09 conference in Hamburg in May this year - an interview with Ilona Koglin for the German design, advertising and media industry magazine Page has now been published, in their August issue. From their story:

Neue Wege

Der Markt ächzt unter der internationalen Finanz- und Wirtschaftkrise. Das ruft nicht nur die Globalisierungs- und Konsumkritiker auf den Plan, sondern scheint auch diejenigen zu bestätigen, die schon seit Jahren neue Gechäftsmodelle à la Crowdsourcing propagieren. Dr. Axel Bruns, der an der Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane zu Smart Services und Social Media forscht, gehört dazu. Er spricht von creative destruction: "Im Untergang von Modellen steckt immer auch die Chance für die Entstehung neuer." Auch wenn keiner genau weiß, welchen Verlauf unser Wirtschaftssystem in den nächsten Jahrzehnten nehmen wird - Bruns glaubt daran, dass Marken und Unternehmen in Zukunft nicht mehr Produkte verkaufen, sonder nur mehr die Plattformen, Tools, Produktionsstätten, Basistechnologien liefern und die Distribution übernehmen. Zukünftig werde die Community die Produkte online entwickeln.

Another very positive review of Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond has been published, this time in issue 53 of the quarterly Australian magazine Screen Education. (Full disclaimer: the author, Michael Dezuanni, is a colleague at QUT, though in a different faculty.)

Axel Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage

Peter Lang, New York, 2008

At the 2006 ATOM National Media Education conference, Queensland University of Technology's Axel Bruns gave a very well received presentation called Teaching the Produsers: Preparing students for User-Led Content Production, which can still be accessed in digital form on his blog at <http://snurb.info/node/604>. It will come as no surprise to anyone who has seen the presentation that Bruns' new book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage, provides an excellent theorisation of what is increasingly being referred to as participatory culture - the cultures and affordances of Web 2.0 that allow individuals to be producers as well as users of media content.

There's a nice series by Vasilis Kostakis on peer governance in Wikipedia over at the P2P Foundation blog at the moment, starting with a double interview with P2P Foundation founder Michel Bauwens and me. Parts two and three are here and here.

Much of this focusses on the interminable debate between 'inclusionists' and 'deletionists'. For the most part, I love Paul Hartzog's statement that they "strike me as if they were two rival groups of musicians, sneering at and insulting one another, while they pluck at their lyres as Wikipedia burns down all around them" - yes, the debate really couldn't matter much less, but at the same time I also really don't see much evidence of Rome/Wikipedia burning. Certainly compared to, say, Encarta...

Over the past few months, I've been busy exploring the potential for sustainable corporate approaches to engaging with produsage - this is what I've discussed for example in my recent presentations at next09 (in English) and the Alcatel-Lucent Foundation / Hans-Bredow-Institut conference in Hamburg (in German), for example. Too many businesses still seem to believe that they can simply scoop the cream off the top of the various spaces for user-led content creation, without understanding the inevitable negative repercussions which result from any perception by users that they're just being exploited as cheap labour.

Quite a few of the ideas presented in those conference papers (and the associated interviews) draw substantially on my work with Mark Bahnisch in the Smart Services CRC, and so it's very timely that our first report for the CRC has now also been released. The report provides an overview of the state of the art in social media, and focusses especially on the dynamics of user community participation in social media sites; as part of this, we're also looking at a number of leading social media sites (and one or two 'interesting failures'), particularly in three key areas: news and views, products and places, and networking and dating.

The next09 conference last week was very interesting (but, at one and a half days, too short!), and very well organised - one of the benefits of a PR company organising a research/industry conference, I guess. A particularly welcome addition was the participation of German video sharing platform Sevenload , who are now also beginning to post videos of presentations and interviews during the conference. For the full stream, check out Sevenload's next09 channel (or search for 'next09') - but feel free to skip right over Andrew Keen's rant...

Hamburg.
Readers of the Produsage.org blog - you might be interested to know that over the next couple of days I'm liveblogging from the next09 conference - a major media and creative industries conference in Germany. I'm also presenting some early results from my research in the Smart Services CRC here tomorrow, under the title "Produsage and Business". Tune in - we've just started with a keynote by Jeff Jarvis!