In a twist of weird coincidence, two people asked me exactly the same questions which I have never (as far as I remember) been asked before: How do you keep up to date with current literature in your field? A highly relevant question, to which the honest answer is that I keep track by reading blogs and reading master theses' by clever students that spend more time scouting the marked than I do. On occasion, however, I do come across something myself, by chance, such as the book, the review of which have just been published the Cyberculture Studies website, which David Silver of AoIR have kept alive and kicking for 10 years now!Review of Mobile Media: Content and Services for Wireless Communication
(Groebel, Noam, Feldmann). THe review itself also contains some interesting looking references.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 21:14 (0) comments

Somewhere in between all the admin of this week, I managed to write a short article with my own honest opinions on what makes a weblog readable and what commercial and corporate websites should consider before publishing a weblog. The articles is published as part of the weekly? monthly? newsletter of the Danish Communication Association (Dansk Kommunikationsforening) - I thought it could be interesting to get in touch with their user base and look forward to if I get any response on the article.
DKF - Hvordan man skaber en genbesøgelig weblog.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 17:26 (2) comments

A Persistent Conversation Workshop and Minitrack, on Hawaii, in January 2006, with abstract submission March 31th. Definitely worth thinking about!
# posted by Lisbeth at: 10:48 (0) comments

I have just had a group of students write about Arla's weblogs. Now two of my students are going to write a MA thesis, comparing Arla's weblogs with an American dairy company weblog. It's interesting to see how the corporate world assimilates the blog genre in practive, but alas, very little academic literature have been published on corporate weblogs so far (to my knowledge).

But I did come across these today:

THE VOICE OF THE BLOG: THE ATTITUDES AND EXPERIENCES OF SMALL BUSINESS BLOGGERS USING BLOGS AS A MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS TOOL

Organizational Blogs and the Human Voice: Relational Strategies and Relational Outcomes


Generel reference:
Scobleizers Corporate Weblog Manifesto might come in handy.

State of the blogosphere: Corporate Bloggers

Some blogs about corporate blogs:
Swedish Fredrik Wackå's Guide to Corporate Blogging (with a list of European Companies that blog). Another list is Louic Le Meur's - he's trying to keep track of the European Blogosphere through a wiki, on the Danish subpage you can find a few links to corporate blogs.
and local Trine-Maria Kristensen's Hovedet på Bloggen.

Two Danish Business School students have handed in an MA-thesis about corporate blogging, focusing on the employee weblogs. Read more about the thesis on their blog, which continues to be updated.

Jonas from RUC (Roskilde University Center) is also writing a MA-thesis about corporate weblogs, and blogging about it.

And, last but not least, another group of ITU students are just about to finish a MA thesis on corporate weblogs, also focusing on Arla. They have been writing a blog, documenting their findings and thoughts: Guld4'eren (in Danish)
# posted by Lisbeth at: 14:57 (6) comments

MobileHCI2006: "covers the analysis, design, evaluation and application of human-computer interaction techniques and approaches for all mobile computing devices, software and services."
# posted by Lisbeth at: 14:38 (0) comments

One of my groups of Master Thesis students are going to write about viral marketing for young people, a quite interesting subject I think. Also in relation to the MIL project, Im involved in, I'd really like to know more about what have actually been written about childrens use of new media and how the way, they form and think about social networks are about to change as an affec of the existence of internet and mobile media. In this context, the work of Valentine Holloway looks quite promising: Cyberkids: Children in the Information Age. Sonia Livingstone has also done some interesting work and I have also ordered these articles: Stéphane Cantin,Michel Boivin: "Change and stability in children’s social network and self-perceptions during transition from elementary to junior high school.(2004) & Nick Bingham, Gill Valentine, Sarah L Holloway: "Where do you want to go tomorrow? Connecting children and the Internet".

Some of the user tests, the students involved in MIL have done, seem to imply that young people (in this case age 15-24, but test groups have been high school students) are in fact not very interested in using mobile media to get _new_ friends. It matters more to them to maintain existing social networks and friendships. Is that true - or do young people really like to gain _new_ friends via mobile media or the internet? If you know of any research into this question, Id love to hear about it!
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:42 (0) comments

- Managing and co-teaching (50%) a 12-week course with 82 students, 1 co-teacher and 4 instructors
- Managing and supervising approx 11 students involved in an external co-operation project (MIL)
- Supervising (main supervisor and support-supervisor) 11 MA-theses (encompassing 17 students) and 1 16-week project - 3 will be handed in March 1st, though.

And if you wonder if I cant say no - I have already turned down about 4 MA projects and several smaller projects. When I signed up for the course and when I started saying yes to more MA students, I thought the course would have around 50-60 students max. - however the study administration continues to let students into the course until monday. Last term only 2 students engaged in the MIL project etc - so it is just bloody difficult to plan your exact workload in advance.

Nevertheless I have insisted on setting 2 days apart for research when I work at home. This means that most days at ITU, I will either have wall-to-wall supervision or be busy preparing classes - not much time for enlightning academic talks with colleagues in the corridor. That's the life of a 2006 university teacher for you.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:21 (3) comments

On this website, you can print out a sheet of cards to give to people who speak too loud on their mobile phones about too private things in public spaces. Via Emme.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 15:45 (0) comments

Tonight I have spent updating my cv and updating the weblog. Links to the right are now up to date (you will for instance find a link to the course Im currently teaching on "Webdesign & Web Communication"), and links to the left (to researchers and fellow bloggers) updated, tidied up and purged as to reflect the blogs I currently read. This all came out of my discovering that there had been a mix of two of my weblogs, so the archives were messed up, which meant I needed to republish everything anyway. This happened because I found out that I couldnt update my cv with talks and references to my appearance in the media, without tidy weblog archives. Basically my weblog is my memory, and the bigger the archives grow, the more I find myself using the search facility to remind me what I've done in the past. It's only slightly scary ;).
# posted by Lisbeth at: 23:28 (0) comments

Via Andreas at Asynkron: a link to the winners of theDanish Internet Award 2006. In Danish only. The winner of the main price is the "game" "Ombygningsspillet" (The Redecoration Game) which I eagerly played for a while. Heck, you could win d.kr. 100.000 to redecorate/refurnish your house with. The objective of the game was to fix, paint, do the plumming, electricity, furniture in 4 rooms in an imaginary 2D apartment - and by doing this raising the sell value of the apartment. Like in real life, all this redecorating costed a lot of money, so you had to take out loans and pay the mortgage. The game was related to one of the home decorating "reality shows" on Danish tv. It worked well for most of the time, also as a simulation, and with small nice details, like the fact that you could leave a note for your "neighbours" (another player) and this way get in touch with other players. However, the simulation was somewhat out-of-proportions: once you had bought the materials for a room and hired 1 out of 3 available workers to do the hard work for you, it took about 4-7 real life days before they got their work done (which is fine, because that probably mimicks real life to a certain degree). However, you were also asked to pay your mortgage approx once a week (!) which had me broke several times during the game. In Denmark you'd normally pay your mortgage once every 3rd month.. So they had implemented two different game times, that didnt go well together, and that eventually made me give up on the game. But deservedly, nevertheless, that they won - because it shows that by actively involving users in a simulation, you get them to think about "serious" issues like loan types, house prices etc in a much more engaged way than any standard banner commercial could do.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 11:54 (1) comments

In Denmark, a few weeks ago, the Ministry of Culture launched the "Cultural Canon" of Denmark. 7 committees consisting of "experts" in their field nominated 10 works of "art" (theatre, film, visual art, music, architecture etc) that everybody should know if they want to know the milestones in Danish culture. Im not going into the debate about whether such a canon is a good idea or not, but just want to point to an off-spawn project of the canon, to which I was asked to contribute.

Tom Ahlberg, editor of the websize Søndag Aften (sunday evening) (and in an earlier Major of Culture in Copenhagen (kulturborgmester), thought that we should have a canon that pointed towards the future, not towards the past. He tried to get official funding for a project examing the potential digital canon, but the application was rejected. However, he couldnt forget the idea, so after the official cultural canon was released, he contacted 7 people working with the digital arts(and culture) in Denmark and asked us for some nominations. The idea was to have a "canon" that all the stake holders in Danish Cultural Politics should know, so they could give more qualified support to the digital culture (I think). I.e. a canon not for the people, but for the politicians... Our suggestions have now been collated and presented at the website. So here goes:

The (Danish) Digital Canon - it's in javascript, so if this link doesnt work, find the link at the bottom of the intropage to the digital canon.

If you are curious, my nominations were
The Remix-function at Digte.dk
Blogger.com (obviously ;))
Samorost
Implementation (as an example of a distributed narrative)
The Cloudmakers (the collective sleuth that came of out the alternative reality game A.I.
"The tag"/"tagging"

- see my grounds for these nominations at the website. Obviously I could have nominated more works, had I had more time (we had a pretty short deadline). Would have liked to nominate a game or two as well, but thought that other person in our ad hoc commitee would do that. For a variety of reasons, this didnt pan out. Right now, I'd probably nominate World of Warcraft, since I spend as many as my leisure hours as possible in there!
# posted by Lisbeth at: 11:54 (1) comments

During the last year, I have been giving quite few interviews, "expert comments" etc to the Danish Media, and there probably is "positive circle of information" here, in that the more media refer to me, the more journalists I get contacted by. Normally, when I feel qualified to give an interview or donate a comment, I do it because I consider it my "duty" as researcher to make sure that my/our research is also communicated to a broader public - and because I find that it is important to make the broader public aware of the fact, that we do other stuff than programming at the "IT University", i.e. that we also do research in communication, games, aesthetics etc.

Most journalists do a good job, and really work hard at understanding a subject they dont necessarily know very much about and we maintain a good relationship. Almost everybody get back to me when I (based on previous bad experiences) as a rule ask them to let me see how they quote me, before they publish their piece of writing and understand that I reserve the right to change the quotes. So it is fortunately a very rare occurance, when I have an experience such as that of a few years back reading an article entirely based on info I fed a journalist, but in which Im wasnt given any credit at all. It happens once in a while that journalists talk to me, and I give them some pointers to interesting websites and my name doesnt get into the article, and that's ok, becuase these people normally make it explicitly that this is the way of things.

But I have NEVER before experienced that I suddenly appear in a newspaper article and is mentioned by name several times as an interviewee, without being informed about it in advance. Even worse that I only discover this because ITU's PR officer sends me the link to the article and takes it for granted that I know of it. At a closer look, the article in question , printed in Amagerbladet/Dragørbladet (a regional weekly newspaper) this week is verbatim the exact same article as appeared in the December/January issue of the ladies magazine IN which I was willingly interviewed for.

Well, it turns out that Maria on her own blog explicitly mentions the fact that she reuses the material, and the fact that she has checked she has the right to do this with the Danish Association of Journalists. The writer holds all copyrights to the article. OK - I accept that. Nevertheless, I think it is bad style not to mention the reuse of the article to the people involved, because since I am mentioned upfront in the article, it looks like I gave the interview to her for this paper, and that might principally have some repercussions for me (in principle, because it is a pretty harmless article, but we are talking general principles here..)

So what do I want to say with this? Basically, that disregarding this journalist's legal rights, I feel a bit abused, and that I wanted to let other researchers know, that it is apparently absolutely okay, that (update: freelance) journalists reuse articles in which you appear other places without giving you notice and without having to mention the first place of publication (unlike academic standards). It is perhaps legal, but not very ethical, IMHO, and a journalist acquaintance I have, confirms that. All I want is to be informed in advance and be given the chance to tell the journalist that of course it is okay (or, again, in principle, "no, I dont really think it is a good idea" even if I cant affect the outcome) - it cant be that troublesome to do that, can it?

Readers, what do you think? Am I overreacting here?

Update: Maria has given an apology in the comments. And it is actually Dragør-bladet, though the URL links to Amagerbladet. I'm sure she never meant to cause any annoyance, so read this post as a personal outburst more than anything else. Nevertheless I've been taught by this in the future to remember to remind freelance journalists please to inform me, if they reuse material, just as a general principle.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 23:40 (3) comments

Today is my first day of class this term. Im managing and co-teaching a course on Webdesign and Webcommunication and Im pretty obsessed with getting the students to think in a multimodal way in this course; it shouldn't be just about designing nice webpages or writing readable text chunks. For my presentation, I came across this handy site: The Recordist - Free Sound Effects.

PS. The nice "girlie" design for our course homepage (linked above) is made by Gitte Stoltenberg, my co-teacher :).
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:41 (1) comments