conference highlights Thursday

I had done my pre-conference homework, browsing through the presentation-abstracts and marking the sessions I wanted to attend. I'm not going to write a summary of all the presentations I enjoyed - it would hardly be very interesting for anybody else (though it would be a good opportunity for me to recapture the conference).

A few highlights though: I met Jaz Hee-jeong Choi on Wednesday, and I was happy to see that she was presenting in the first session I'd marked of as interesting. Jaz talked about the multimedia blog system Cyworld which has a very dominant position in South Korea. Very cool, and Jaz has a pleasant way of presenting. She's funny too.

I also liked the 'social uses and consequences' panel (12.45-14.15) about citizen journalism and user-generated content. I have somewhat reluctantly used Toeffler's concept of prosumer (producer + consumer) in my own work, but I might consider using Axel Brun's concept of 'produsage' (production + usage) instead. He later told me he wanted to avoid the consumer-aspect all-together. Otherwise the panel sort of confirmed that my own thinking is very much in line with how others think about active and producing audience.

Congrats to Anja Bechmann Petersen for receiving the award for the best graduate paper! I know from her previous work that it was probably well deserved. Anja presented her paper 'Internet and cross media productions' in one of the final sessions on Thursday together with Oscar Westlund. They both gave very well structured presentations. Anja's PhD-project has similarities to my collegue Ivar-John Erdahl's PhD-project, as they both study how media organisations work to produce content for different media platforms (both of them indicate a general lack of using the potentials of the Internet).

Technorati tag: aoir2006