Im off on holiday for the next 4 weeks or so. Mostly afk, so dont expect postings here, but you can look for the occasional pic in the moblog. When I return, I will move a fair part of my office into boxes, and move to another institution for the next year. From August 1st, I will spending one year on research leave at the Center for Design Research (Center for Designforskning), as associate research professor. The plan is to return to the ITU at the end of this year. Blog continues as ever - after the holiday. Meanwhile, enjoy the sun wherever you are!
# posted by Lisbeth at: 22:57 (0) comments

Some time this spring I came up with this matrix in order to make it more easy to discuss blogs with my students - and I would like to use it in a later paper. I found that I really need some kind of tool that could help students and me place a given blog, not on a scale, but in a matrix that displayed 2 important aspects of the blog: the degree to which the discourse of the blog is personal or impersonal (examplified by f.i. the use of "I think" versus the use of "There is", subjective feelings vs. objective professional opinions expressed), and the degree to which the blog is used as personal publication tool (monologic, low degree of outward links to other bloggers and people) or intended to function as a form of social software (establishing and maintaining relations with other bloggers or types of organisations, "dialogic", high amount of outward links). Blogs can be highly personal and monologic, personal and aimed at networking and socialising, impersonal and monologic (a knowledge portal and link filter with no discussion), or impersonal and aimed at networking (for instance a political blog with a lot of discussion of "professional" political issues with voters).

However, as blogs change over time, it is important to include the development process of a blog in the mapping too. There might be blogs which are imporsonal in the beginning, but become more personal over time, or the opposite.

Below is an image of the matrix, with an exemplary blog "mapped" onto it.

Do you think it is useful? What should be changed?


# posted by Lisbeth at: 12:13 (2) comments

...completely smashed after a long day and night's trip home from San Diego, the Danish Ministry of Science announced their plans for the future of Danish Universities. Talks of mergers (integrating smaller universities and research institutes into bigger universities) have been going on for some time now. The IT University, my workplace, did, in the first response to the government suggest that ITU became the leader of one big Danish IT University or remained independant. This is apparently not the Danish Governments intention. Though it is unclear how or when or finally if, the press release today states that it is the "intention" that ITU becomes a part of the University of Copenhagen.

I will hold my breath and see what happens, it seems that there is currently not much more people outside management can do. But I do hope that the future of ITU holds the possibility of continuing as some form of independant institution, I believe we have built and created an unique environment which would be lost, if we were to be absorbed by various traditional departments of a more traditional university.
- Meanwhile I will still most likely be going on leave from ITU for a year, pursuing a temporary research position elsewhere, this has been in the cards and planned for a while, and has nothing to do with the above initiative. Will keep you posted.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 16:50 (0) comments

Well, as a matter of fact Im already in Hollywood, I just forgot to blog it, before I left. It's the first day of the ACE2006 conference, and Im sitting in the backrow next to Markus Montola, listening to a paper on how to distinugish between human players and bots through traffic checking. It appears we have landed ourselves in a rather tech oriented conference. Mirjam Eladhari and Staffan Bjørk is here too, so there is a nice little community of lost games researchers with a humanities background around, and most likely I will meet more along the way :). And there is an interesting section this afternoon on mobile entertainment development coming up, that looks good.

Staying at the Bel Age hotel, just around the corner from Santa Monica boulevard where gay couples of both gender promenade happily hand-in-hand (nice to see that are places in the world where gay couples can really do that, despite the socalled openness of Copenhagen, gay couples rarely display any relational affection in public spaces) & I can see palms from the balcony of my suite, neonsigns and fancy looking buildings - Rodeo drive is not far away either. Im only here for a short while, but Im bound for an experience, no doubt about that!

Oh and the reason why Im here is also to present a full paper titled "Death Matters - Understanding Gameworld Experiences".

Back at ITU/Cph next week, where more exams beckons. Will take a short weekend break in San Diego, where a very close of friend is now living.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 20:28 (0) comments

An interesting thing is going on at the blog section Comment is free on the Guardian website. Good commenters have been picked to blog, and now they are competing to win a blogging contest (one person out each week) and get a blog alongside the Guardian's professional (journalist) bloggers. Ali McNab is in the competition and apparently doing good, with this post so far the day's most active with 260+ comments. See more here: 'Big Blogger' to pick next Guardian columnist.

I wonder if this competition is indicative of a "new" trend: competitive blogging to get into the established media - rather than blogging as something that exists outside the established media, and as an activity fuelled by personal interests, not the need to "win" any honour. Probably it is a natural outcome of an increasingly blog-populated www-world - we will need activities like competitions (based on reader voters) to help us pick the bloggers, we really want to read.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:32 (0) comments

I think mainly like a femail, acoording to this test: Sex I.D. - find out how your mind works. Apparently, Im half way in between the 0% gender brain and the 100% female brain, just like the average of all other women taking this test. As I suspected, Im not really good at rotating 3D objects, I do pretty good on the map side (angels), remembering objects, can read moods, and come up with a lot of words to describe another word. No big surprises all in all, but now my brain gender is almost scientifically proved - or?
# posted by Lisbeth at: 16:33 (3) comments

I gave a talk yesterday to Dansk Magisterforenings Kommunikationsnetværk (the communication candidates network section of the Danish University Candidates Association) which in advance somewhat incorrectly I had titled "Da brugeren blev journalist" (When the user became a journalist") - more rightly, I probably should have called it "Bruger-involverende kommunikation på net og trends inden for bruger-genereret indhold på nettet" (Participatory journalism & Trends in User-Generated Content Development Online). I have been wanting to look more closely at this field for a while, so it was a great opportunity to catch up on some reading and website harvesting. Here are some links to sites and articles I referred to in the talk - and some I never had the chance to mention or look more closely at, but which look really interesting.

I can warmly recommend Nip's article on "the second phase of participatory journalism", she has some very useful distinctions between different forms of "user-input- and generated journalism". Sadly you cant get it online if your institution dont have a subscription for the Journal of Journalism Studies, without paying for it (which I then did), so if you are a poor researcher or student in need of it, contact me.

Joyce N.M. Nip, 2006: Exploring the Second Phase of Online Journalism

Willis & Bowman, 2003: We Media: How audiences are shaping the future of news and information (especially the section: Rules of Participation)

Steve Outing: The 11 layers of Citizen Journalism (at Poynter.org)

Ilpo Koskinen: Mobile Multimedia and Beyond: Uses and Social Consequences

Tanni Haas, 2005: From “Public Journalism” to the “Public's Journalism”? Rhetoric and reality in the discourse on weblogs

BBC: How mobiles changed the news(video feature)

Did London bombings turn citizen journalists into citizen paparazzi? (USC Annenberg, Online Journalism Review, good links to sites which documented the London Bombings)

Jaron Lanier: DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism (interesting critique of the wiki movement - and I love this quote: The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we're devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots)

Kelly McBride: The Problem with Citizen Journalism (feature at Poynter.org)

Examples:
Scripting News, September 11, 2001
Lightning Field photo blog, September 11, 2001
Danish Tsuanami portal by unknown user
Politikens Tsunami user-stories site
VG Nett Tsunami section (Verdens Gang Online, Norwegian Newspaper)
The Londonist Group Blog, July 7th
July 7 London Bombings Wikipedia entry
Indymedia.dk
Flix.dk
Blogs on Politics in Denmark Portal
Xtrablog, blog service offered by Danish newspaper, Fyns Stiftstidende
Urbanblog, blog service offered by free newspaper Urban.
Forsvarskommandoens weblog: Hvad synes I om vores film... (The Danish Military Defense Weblog: What do you think about our movie?)
Arlas weblogs
Josh Leo's Vlog: Me and Sen. Edwards (thanks to Andreas Haugstrup and Jon Froda for making me aware of this initiative during their vlog lecture earlier this month. People could write questions to Sen. Edwards, that he would then answer in a vlog)

Hands-on:
Klastrup, 2006: Hvordan man skaber en genbesøgelig weblog

Set up your own wiki: The Danish Wikipedia - and Wiki-how-to in English

Amy Bruckman, 1996: Finding One's Own in Cyberspace (it's old, but still useful to get people started on thinking about the nature of their community)

Amy Jo Kim: Community Building on the Web (Peachpit 2000)
# posted by Lisbeth at: 14:18 (1) comments