I was very excited to hear last night that a book that I will be contributing to has got the go ahead from Peter Lang Publishing, New York. Tenatively titled"Uses of Blogs" it will be edited by Axel Bruns and Joanne Jacobs. A full list of the contributors is set out below but first some info from the proposal:
As an edited collection of scholarly articles by experts and practitioners in their fields, Uses of Blogs offers a broad range of perspectives on current and emerging uses of blogs. While there are considerable connections between many of the themes addressed in these articles, and between the individual contributors (demonstrating the social networking facilitated by the blogosphere network), these articles will be grouped into a number of key categories which address key uses of blogs from both practical – blogs in research, blogs in business – and conceptual – blogs and identity, blogs and community – perspectives. Each of these categories are framed by a brief piece introducing the articles and providing a wider context.
There is a clear need to interrogate the range of blogging styles used by different disciplines and cultural groups and to develop a lexicon to articulate the most effective blogging mechanisms for different contexts. Examples of how blogs are already being used can provide some insight into how they can be further developed for particular industry sectors. The use of blogs in generating competitive advantage, and their application as knowledge management tools is crucial to understanding the relevance of blogs for a range of professional organisations as well as community groups. Drawing on the experience of blogging pioneers and researchers from a variety of professional and community contexts, this book documents the growth of blogs online and provides a detailed scholarly analysis of successful and powerful blogging uses.
Organised by discipline as well as by concept, it will examine the utility and limitations of blogging styles and blogging practices. The psychology, politics and sociology of blogs is set against the utility, profitability and convenience of the practice, so that clear guidelines emerge as to the future direction of blogs in industrial and personal contexts. In essence, this book records the current state of play for blogging, and provides a snapshot of various professional applications of blogs as a means of informing businesses and individuals of how to derive value from this wave of personalised publishing.
My contribution will be on public relations (and corporate communications more broadly) and I will be looking at the question of whether blogs are another tool for professional communicators or will they have a larger, transformative impact. Anyone who reads this blog will be unsurprised by this theme :-)
One of the great things about this proposal is that it brings together experts from the USa, England and Norway as well as a strong Australian contingent and across many disciplines. I feel quite chuffed about being included in the list below:
Contributors
* John Quiggin: Professor John Quiggin is a Federation Fellow in Economics and Political Science at the University of Queensland. Professor Quiggin is prominent both as a research economist and as a commentator on Australian economic policy. He has published over 700 research articles, books and reports in fields including environmental economics, risk analysis, production economics, and the theory of economic growth. Professor Quiggin has been an active contributor to Australian public debate in a wide range of media. He is a regular columnist for the Australian Financial Review, to which he also contributes review and feature articles. He was one of the first Australian academics to present publications on a website. In 2002, he commenced publication of a weblog providing daily comments on a wide range of topics.
* Trevor Cook is a director at Jackson Wells Morris, one of Australia’s best known public relations companies (he joined the firm in 1996). Trevor’s Corporate Engagement is one of the most prominent PR blogs in the world and the first of its kind in Australia. In July 2004, Trevor initiated and helped to organise Global PR Blog Week 1.0. He has published half a dozen articles on blogging for AFR, Boss, New Matilda and the Walkley magazine. Trevor joined JWM from the federal public service where he was a senior executive involved in promoting workplace reform and best practice. He was Chief of Staff to John Dawkins (then Education Minister) and also advised Simon Crean. At JWM, he has consulted to dozens of companies and organisations including Mission Australia, Tenix, Insurance Council of Australia, McDonalds, Boral, Qantas, Telstra, MLC, National Rail, Lend Lease, NRMA.
* Jill Walker is an associate professor at the Department of Humanistic Informatics at the University of Bergen in Norway. With a background in the theories of hypertext fiction and electronic literature, Jill is currently researching the ways in which many contemporary narratives are distributed across weblogs and other genres and media. She started writing her research weblog, jill/txt, in October 2001, and co-wrote the first academic paper on weblogs in 2002. Her weblog is still an important part of her research practice, and it has also been an important tool for reflection in the process of finishing a PhD and becoming a professional researcher.
* Alex Halavais directs the graduate program in informatics at the University at Buffalo. His research generally examines the role of collaboration and social networks online. A significant part of this work, beginning in 1999, has related to the social effects of blogging.
* Brian Fitzgerald is Head of the School of Law at Queensland University of Technology. Brian holds postgraduate law degrees from Oxford University and Harvard University. He is co-editor of one of Australia's leading texts on E-Commerce, Software and the Internet – Going Digital 2000 – and has published articles on Law and the Internet, Technology Law and Intellectual Property Law in Australia, the United States, Europe and Japan. Professor Fitzgerald is also working with Ian Oi of Blakes in Sydney and Tom Cochrane, DVC of Information Services at QUT, to lead the further development of the Creative Commons project in Australia. Creative Commons is an international initiative which is attempting to reconceptualize the way we think about and create and share intellectual property, particularly in a creative context.
* Ian Oi is special counsel at Blake Dawson Waldron Lawyers in the Intellectual Property & Communications Group, which focuses on information technology, communications, e-commerce and cyberspace matters. In this role Ian acts for a broad range of customers (including governmental organisations) and suppliers in the public and private sectors, particularly in relation to government procurement and information technology and telecommunications outsourcing transactions. Ian has given numerous presentations on information technology related topics and written several well regarded papers on matters such as moral rights, copyright and computer law. He is a member of the NSW Society for Computers and the Law, the Australian Copyright Council and the Legal Forum of the Australian Information Industries Association.
* Jane B. Singer is an assistant professor of journalism in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa, USA. Her teaching and research interests involve online journalism, particularly the ways in which journalists are adapting to the Internet and other interactive communication technologies. Recent work has explored newsroom convergence, online political coverage and journalistic blogs.
* Dr Axel Bruns teaches and conducts research about online publishing, electronic creative writing, online communities, creative industries, and popular music in the Creative Industries Faculty of Queensland University of Techology, Brisbane, Australia. He is a founding editor of the premier online academic publication M/C – Media and Culture, and of dotlit: The Online Journal of Creative Writing . He holds a PhD in media and cultural studies from the University of Queensland. His doctoral thesis was recently converted into a book which analyses a major new genre of online news, information and discussion Websites including Indymedia, Slashdot, and the growing range of Weblogs and provides wide, systematic perspective on gatewatching and open news. This book, Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production, is forthcoming from Peter Lang, New York, in 2005.
* James Farmer is a lecturer in Education Design at Deakin University, the author of the weblog “incorporated subversion” and the founder of IncSub, an organisation providing hosting, design and support to the learning and development community. He has written widely in the area of emerging technologies and their application in education and has worked extensively with educators around the world designing and supporting the use of aggregation, blogs, wikis and Community Management Systems. He lives and works mostly in Melbourne, Australia and is co-organiser of the 2005 Blogtalk Downunder conference .
* Jeremy Williams ( and blog here) is Associate Professor and Director, Instruction and Assessment, at Universitas 21. He is responsible for the oversight of all aspects of instruction and assessment. Prior to his appointment at Universitas 21 Global, Dr Williams was Teaching Fellow and Associate Professor in Economics at Brisbane Graduate School of Business, Queensland University of Technology, where he held the position of MBA Director. A pioneer and specialist in the development of online curricula and assessment, Dr Williams' main research interest in the e-learning area is the development of authentic assessment and ways in which assessment might be contextualised to promote greater student engagement and deeper learning. Dr Williams has a PhD in economics, economic history and politics from the University of New England, the focus of his thesis being the political economy of Singapore. While maintaining an interest in the political economy of East Asia, Dr Williams has turned his attention in more recent times to the question of business and sustainable development. He is currently working on a book in this area to be published by Thomson in 2005 entitled ‘Redefining Economics: An Economic Analysis of Sustainable Development’.
* Jean Burgess is based at the Creative Industries Research and Applications Centre (CIRAC), Queensland University of Technology, where she is undertaking a PhD on the relationship between new media, creativity and cultural participation. She lectures in the fields of new media, cultural studies, and popular music studies at the University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology.
* Gerard Goggin is an ARC Australian Research Fellow in the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland, who has published widely on the Internet, new media, and disability . He is editor of Virtual Nation: The Internet in Australia (University of NSW Press, 2004), co-author of Digital Disability: The Construction of Disability in New Media (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003) and Disability in Australia: Exposing a Social Apartheid (UNSW Press, 2005), and is writing a book on mobile phone culture (Routledge, 2006).
* Dr Melissa Gregg runs a blog and is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland. Her research combines interests in cultural politics, feminism, and critical theory, with an emphasis on intellectual history. Melissa is currently working on a book entitled Addressing Cultural Studies: Affect, Politics and The Academy. Her work has recently appeared in Cultural Studies, Cultural Studies Review and Antithesis.
* Dr Paul Hodkinson is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Surrey. His research interests focus on the relationship between media, commerce and collective forms of identity. Such issues are explored via a comprehensive reworking of the notion of subculture in his book, Goth: Identity, Style and Subculture (2002, Berg), a publication which gave rise to national media reviews and interviews. He has also published various journal papers and chapters focused upon the implications of different forms of media use for patterns of identity and community among young people.
* Joanne Jacobs is presently on leave from her position as Lecturer in the MBA program at the Brisbane Graduate School of Business at Queensland University of Technology, while she acts as a private information and communications technology consultant. Her consultancy practice involves business analysis of information technology management strategies for organisations across the government and private sectors, as well as media communications, public relations and knowledge management. As a lecturer at QUT, Joanne teaches in e-commerce and related disciplines, and has headed University Working Parties on technology issues associated with assessment. She was also selected to be Faculty Chair of the Online Teaching and Learning Group for the Faculty of Business in 2004. Until December 2001 she was a lecturer and webmaestro at the National Centre for Australian Studies in the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University (Clayton), where she taught in undergraduate and graduate media & communications.
You're right to feel quite chuffed (never heard "chuffed" before, but I like it), congratulations!
Hey, wait a minute! Not all of the contributors have blogs of their own? How can they write about blogs without writing blogs?
Posted by: Bren | 16 March 2005 at 08:44 AM
How can anyone write about a blog without having one of their own? I guess sports writers manage okay without being professional athletes, or owning a team, so the non-blogging contributors will just have to use their powers or research, analysis and observation.
Congrats, Trevor. I am a regular reader, and appreciate insight from the far side (from Canada) of the Pacific Rim.
Posted by: Eric E | 20 March 2005 at 01:20 PM