Produsage.org - Produsage: Blog

Produsage and Emerging Talent

Snurb — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 12:40:45 +1100

Following up on my last post with another answer to a really sharp question from a reader of the book, in what I hope may become an occasional feature of this site: one of my LinkedIn contacts asked

Does produsage create emerging talent, or does it merely point it out? Okay, probably not a "quick" question, but my study of produsage makes me wonder if there has been any case studies on this topic. Any thoughts?
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And We're Back...

Snurb — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 23:08:01 +1100

My apologies for the site outage - the recent electrical storms in Brisbane took out our server. Everything should be back to normal now!

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Produsage and Related Events, Past and Future

Snurb — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 10:51:57 +1100

This blog has been all too quiet while I've been travelling in Europe to attend conferences in Copenhagen and Gießen, do a guest lecture in Hamburg, and conduct a number of research interviews with the team behind the German myHeimat citizen journalism project. ~~I'll add some more information about these shortly~~ I've now added the slides for the produsage-related presentations in Copenhagen, Hamburg, and Gießen (the latter two are in German, and also feature the audio of my talks) - and for my overall reports from the trip, see here (AoIR 2008 in Copenhagen), here (produsage guest lecture in Hamburg), and here (ZMI conference in Gießen).

New Impulses for Libraries: Drawing on Second Life and Produsage

Snurb — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 13:24:17 +1000

(Crossposted from snurb.info.)

I'm spending the morning at the 2008 Arts Libraries Society of Australia and New Zealand conference, at the Queensland State Library. I'm afraid I'm only here for the opening keynotes (one of which I'm giving) - my hectic schedule for this week between overseas trips doesn't give me any more time to see what else is happening.

The first keynote speaker this morning is Kathryn Greenhill from Murdoch University, presenting on the possibilities of Second Life as a platform. She begins by taking us on a flight around Info Island - the central library island in Second Life - and follows this with a quick explanation of what Second Life is and how it works. The aim here, she notes, is immersion, not just information.

Produsage Research - Further Plans, and Job Opportunities

Snurb — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:36:25 +1000

I thought I'd post a quick summary here on one further direction that my research into produsage will take over the coming years. One issue that has interested me for some time (and that I touch on throughout the book) is the problem of finding ways for 'professionals' and 'amateurs' - as inadequate these terms are - to collaborate fruitfully, rather than stand in inherent opposition to one another.

The oppositional stance is visible for example in the still persistent dismissal of citizen journalists by professional journalists in the industry; in the overly defensive response of Britannica and its commercial competitors to the rise of Wikipedia; or in the lack of engagement with or outright banning of user-generated content by many educational institutions. Against this, we're seeing the emergence of what (following Leadbeater and Miller) we might describe as Pro-Am operations - OhmyNews is a good example here, but so is the harnessing of user-generated content by Amazon or Google.

From Produsage to Produtzung: Upcoming Events in Germany

Snurb — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 09:33:17 +1000

Following on from my post about the upcoming ARLIS keynote, here are some further upcoming events. In a few weeks' time, I'm going to take produsage on the road: after my presentations at the annual Association of Internet Researchers conference, held this year in Copenhagen, I'm scheduled to present a guest lecture at the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg on 20 October, as part of their series "Aktuelle Entwicklungen im Web 2.0" ("Current Developments in Web 2.0"), and a keynote at the conference "Das Internet zwischen egalitärer Teilhabe und ökonomischer Vermachtung" ("The Internet between Egalitarian Participation and Economic Power") in Gießen on 24 October. My respondents at that conference will be Jan Schmidt (who has also organised the Hamburg gig), Mario Voigt, and Uwe Jun. (Many thanks also to Christoph Bieber and Christoph Neuberger, who made my presentation in Gießen possible.)

Upcoming ARLIS Keynote: Produsage and User-Led Curation

Snurb — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 13:13:21 +1000

There haven't been many updates to this site recently, but in the meantime, the book has done very well - many thanks to everyone who's bought it and/or accessed the reading samples and other articles on this site. Keep spreading the word!

Over the next few months there are quite a few produsage-related events coming up for me, in Australia and Europe - and I'll preview a number of them over the coming weeks. The first one of these is a keynote at the biennial conference of the Arts Libraries Society Australia/New Zealand (ARLIS/ANZ) here in Brisbane on 9 October 2008.

Smart Services CRC Finally Launched

Snurb — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 14:35:25 +1000

I'm happy to report that the Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre has finally been launched. It's taken far too long to get to this point (initial Australian federal government approval for the CRC application was received shortly before Christmas, 2006), but after a lengthy process of negotiations between the twenty or so universities, government bodies, and industry partners involved in the CRC, the Centre has finally been launched by the federal minister responsible, Senator Kim Carr, on 3 July 2008.

Produsage Book Officially Launched

Snurb — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:23:14 +1000

It's taken me a while to get back to blogging after the CCi conference a couple of weeks ago - for a full report on the sessions I attended, see my coverage at snurb.info. I'll try to post a little more regularly again now, although I'm still in that post-book slump that does tend to set in for a while after the completion of a major writing project. (I'm actually finding a good deal of my time taken up with projects related to my earlier book on citizen journalism at the moment - there's a certain ebb and flow to these things.)

CCi Conference: Brisbane, 25-27 June 2008

Snurb — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 11:55:38 +1000

I'll be spending the rest of this week at the inaugural conference of the Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi) here in Brisbane, and I'll try to live-blog as much as possible from the conference. This should be a great event - keynote speakers include Baroness Susan Greenfield, MIT's Henry Jenkins, Mark Deuze (the author of Media Work), and a number of other luminaries in the field. Henry will also be launching a number of books (including my own Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage) on Wednesday evening.

There's a strong citizen journalism stream in the conference, and my own paper operates in that field, too - titled "Beyond the Pro/Am Schism: Opportunities for Collaboration between Professional and Citizen Journalists under a Produsage Framework", it's more of an exploratory rumination on questions which I've found myself coming back to repeatedly over the past few years - from my study of organisational models for the collaborative production of online news in Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production to my work on produsage across various domains of knowledge creation in Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond, it seems to me that the great unanswered question remains how to effectively combine broad participatory (i.e. citizen) involvement and enable the recognition of expert ('professional') knowledges.

The Brownian Motion of Collective Intelligence?

Snurb — Thu, 01 May 2008 12:30:39 +1000

Some of my colleagues at QUT are involved in a new project they describe as 'cultural science' - a combination of cultural studies, economics, and other scientific methodologies, in order to arrive at a more rigorous and testable framework for the study of cultural activity. I've posted some more about this over at snurb.info, and there's now a Cultural Science Website which has more information. I've cross-posted the following blog post on the Cultural Science blog.

I was lucky enough to attend part of the Brisbane meeting which officially kickstarted the project of cultural science, and I've been trying to trace the connections from here to my own work since then. I know little about economics, but for a couple of years before switching to media studies, I trained as a physicist, and a recent blog post by Yihong Ding has made me believe that some fields of physics, too, have valuable models to contribute to cultural science. In particular, it might be worth examining the way that particle and fluid dynamics describes the transition from random interaction at a micro level to orderly and predictable behaviour at a macro level.

But first, some background: the focus of my research is on user-led collaborative content creation, or what I've come to call produsage. One of the fundamental challenges in this field is to understand the processes of collective intelligence that arise in large-scale collaborative environments, and the conditions under which they flourish best. What makes Wikipedia work, for example? What would make it work better? What enables The Wisdom of Crowds to emerge, as James Surowiecki describes it?

Nielsen Online: Produsage Trends in Australia and New Zealand

Snurb — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 12:09:25 +1000

Getting into the ANZAC Day spirit here at Produsage.org: there's an interesting news release over at Nielsen Online, detailing results of their research into user-led content generation in Australia and New Zealand. As it turns out, Internet users in both countries are already pretty active in their online participation - but a closer look at the stats released by Nielsen's market researchers also reveals that their activities remain largely limited to sharing profiles, photos and links at present, and to accessing user-led content rather than necessarily generating it.

Mark Scott's Lacklustre Vision for the Future of Our ABC

Snurb — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 09:14:52 +1000

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 channels - "a suite of six ABC TV channels", plus "at least 15 radio services."

Social Networks on Ning: A Sensible Alternative to Facebook

Snurb — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 12:04:23 +1000

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 handles what should be its central asset - the social networks that its users belong to. Social networks are defined in the first place by the term 'friend', but being friends with someone on the site is no more than a binary decision: you either are, or you're not. There's no opportunity to do what we do in our lives outside of Facebook every day - to distinguish between different types and levels of friendship: work colleagues, old school friends, family members, neighbours, ex-lovers, casual acquaintances must all be classified simply as either 'friend' or 'non-friend'. What's the use of that?

On my Facebook profile page (which I hardly ever visit), there are now some 30 friend requests waiting for me - some are genuine friends, some are students and colleagues, some are casual acquaintances or friends-of-a-friend. Overall, they have nothing more in common than that they - somehow - know (of) me. In no context other than within the artificial sociality of Facebook would anyone consider all of these people to belong to the same category. And I have no means to properly qualify the level of friendship which connects me to another person - I can't distinguish between people I've known for 20 years and people whom I've never heard of, but who may have read one of my books; I can't tell family members from colleagues at work whom I occasionally exchange ideas with.

This fundamentally ignores some of the basics of how we as humans understand the social networks we're embedded in. We don't just see everyone as our 'friends', but instead have social ties with others that are more or less strong - and for most of us, there's a pretty low upper limit on the maximum number of really close friends we have. (Perhaps it's just me, but I don't know that I'd even say that I have 30 extremely close, 'through-thick-and-thin' friends - so who are those 30 who want to befriend me on Facebook?) Which highlights the absurdity of the Facebook 'friends' system: any social network that enables any of its members to claim that they have 10,000 or more friends doesn't deserve to be called 'social network'; what the tag 'friend' in Facebook really means is no more than 'here's someone I know (of)' - and what good is that if I can't also say 'but here are my very best mates'?

Beyond Broadcasting: TV as a (Deficient) Form of Streaming Media

Snurb — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 12:47:34 +1100

Continuing the streaming media theme on snurb.info from Wednesday: the latest issue of the journal Media International Australia has now been released - "Beyond Broadcasting", edited by Graham Meikle and Sherman Young. I've contributed an article and have received permission from the editors to re-publish it here. In the article, I try to take a fresh look at television in an increasingly Internet-driven media environment.

Traditionally, the Net's equivalents to television (mainly, streaming media) have been viewed through the lens of the older technology; to some extent, streaming media has tried to mimic television's feel and format - this is visible in the user interfaces of media players like Windows and Real, and even (though perhaps with some irony intended) in brand names such as YouTube, Current.tv, or Democracy TV, the original name for the podcast feedreader Miro. I would argue that this is a case of what we could call a paleomorphising process: the tendency to shape new media technologies in keeping with older technologies. (In much the same way, it's taken decades for the mobile phone to look and feel like a mobile media and communications device, rather than simply like a wireless handset.)

ABC Digital Media Forum 2008 - Beyond Public Service Broadcasting: Produsage at the ABC

Snurb — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:16:48 +1100

This time next Friday, I'll be attending the 2008 ABC Digital Media Forum, an internal strategy conference that aims to develop innovative approaches to engaging with digital media (and importantly, digital media users) for our national broadcaster. I won't be blogging the full conference itself, as much of what will be discussed there will remain confidential for the moment, but I'm sure I'll be able at least to post my overall impressions. For some years now, the ABC has taken a markedly proactive stance towards exploring the potential of participatory new media models; it will be exciting to see what's already in the pipeline for the near future, and what may be possible a little further down the track.

I was invited to the conference by Tony Walker, Manager of the ABC's Digital Radio division (and the driving force behind the ABC Digital Futures blog), and will provide a few thoughts for a session titled "Content Production in the Age of Participation". Below is a draft of my remarks - any comments, especially from current or potential users of the ABC's services, would be very welcome...

Beyond Public Service Broadcasting: Produsage at the ABC

By Axel Bruns

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Re-Public: Who Controls the Means of Produsage?

Snurb — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 17:05:38 +1100

I'm very pleased to see that a new article of mine has just been published in the energetic Greek online journal Re-Public. Editor Pavlos Hatzopoulos invited me a little while ago to respond to a first wave of articles discussing and critiquing the emergent phenomena of the social Web, and the contributor list already includes a number key thinkers in the field, from Michel Bauwens to Trebor Scholz. In fact, I responded specifically to the opening discussion between Trebor and Paul Hartzog, which revisits the industrial-age question of "Who owns the means of production?" for the new, information-age context.

What was missing from this, from my point of view, was a concern not so much with the means of production, but with the next step in the chain - with the means that connect producers and users, the means that facilitate the interaction, collaboration, and ultimately the produsage that takes place when the producer/consumer dichotomy diminishes. This, I feel, should be the main starting-point for critique now - the question should be "Who controls the means of produsage?" In fact, its claim to exclusive ownership and control of the means of produsage within its gated community is one of the reasons why I am so concerned about the rise of Facebook, as I've noted previously.

Anyway - the article is now available on Re-Public, and reprinted below. A special thrill for me (having studied ancient Greek at school) is that Re-Public also published a (modern) Greek translation of the piece: Ποιος ελέγχει τα μέσα παραγωγής/κατανάλωσης; Cool...

Picturing Produsage

Snurb — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 11:48:02 +1100

Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage is now at the printery, on track for a release in February - and one of my last tasks for 2007 was to approve the book cover design that Peter Lang had come up with, and to start building this Website. Key to any of this was finding the appropriate graphics and artwork - images that would look good in their own right but could also stand in as a graphical representation of the collaborative, iterative, continuing processes of produsage. I wanted these images to bear some resemblance to the functional graphs of produsage processes which are used in the book, and which feature circular arrows to symbolise the repetitive nature of these processes:

Launching Produsage.org

Snurb — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 02:44:58 +1100

As I write this, the launch of Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage may still be a couple of months away, but Produsage.org is already up and running. This is a space to collect thoughts, comments, and research related to the growing phenomenon of user-led content creation across such a large range of intellectual domains - a phenomenon which I've attempted to define as produsage. For the moment, I'm necessarily still the main proponent of this concept, but I hope that, in time, many more voices will join in as we celebrate and critique developments towards a wider acceptance both of the term, and of the produsage model itself - so, welcome, and please consider making your own contributions to this site.

But let me start at the beginning: why 'produsage'?