Smart Services CRC scholarships in New Media Services

The Smart Services CRC is a $120 million, commercially focused collaborative research initiative, developing innovation, foresight and productivity improvements for the services sector. Services are the largest sector of the economy representing approximately 80% of Australia’s GDP and 85% of employment. Within the services industries Smart Services’ initial programs are customer-focused with outcomes translatable across the whole services sector. Initial research outcomes and demonstrators have been associated with the digital media, finance and government sectors.

In order to achieve these goals, Smart Services CRC is supporting research higher degree students at PhD and Masters level through scholarships, top-ups and in-kind support for research, travel, conferences etc. As a partner in Smart Services CRC, the Queensland University of Technology is offering scholarship packages for 2010. Research higher degree students with CRC scholarships will have access to the full range of resources offered by QUT (access to equipment and facilities, Grants-in-Aid, teaching opportunities etc.), as well as the opportunity to work with leading industry partners in the media, finance and government sectors on projects of direct real-world relevance through Smart Services CRC.

The New Media Services program at QUT is focused on research questions such as:

• What are innovative business models for new media? Can international case studies identify new opportunities for media service industries in an era of Web 2.0 that goes beyond the mass communications model?
• What new opportunities for news are enabled by digital media, including computational journalism, news visualization and citizen journalism?
• What opportunities exist to “harness the hive” of social media in advertising, marketing and integrated marketing communication?
• Can the development of digital communities and the nurturing of digital ecosystems be applied across the service industries?

Led by the Creative Industries Faculty and the Faculty of Business, the New Media Services program provides the opportunity to work collaboratively with industry partners across the media and government sectors on aligning research activity with industry goals and strategies in the emergent digital media environment.

The following topics are of interest to supervisors in the New Media Services research project team:

Professor Terry Flew (Creative Industries Faculty, QUT)

1. Innovative business models for new media;
2. Digital futures for news media;
3. Mobile and digital media content production.

Associate Professor Axel Bruns (Creative Industries Faculty, QUT)

1. Drivers and motivations for users to participate in social media Websites;
2. Future developments in online social media and social networking;
3. Business models for social media sites.

Dr. Christy Collis (Creative Industries Faculty, QUT)

1. Emerging uses and users of locative mobile media;
2. Audiences and markets for online, mobile, and cross-platform media.

Dr. Christina Spurgeon (Creative Industries Faculty, QUT)

1. Researching and developing brand communities and content;
2. Commercializing co-creative media.

Dr. Edwina Luck (School of Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations, Faculty of Business, QUT)

1. Future drivers of participation within virtual social media
2. The role of ‘electronic word-of-mouth’ in product and service marketing
3. Hyper-targeting and advertising within virtual social networks

Dr. Larry Neale (School of Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations, Faculty of Business, QUT)

1. Social media and information search
2. Delivering digital customer service

Smart Services CRC is a research and development partnership between 12 major industry players and six Australian universities, funded by the private sector and governments under the Australian Government’s Cooperative Research Centre program. Its aim is the creation of research-enabled commercial outcomes for its partners.

For more information on scholarships at QUT, go here.

Application forms for Smart Services CRC scholarships can be found here.

Information for prospective research students in the Faculty of Business can be found here.

Information for prospective research students in the Creative Industries Faculty can be found here.

Is small media the future of big media?

Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch develops an interesting proposition. What if the best 50 writers at the New York Times left the NYT, and developed their own lost cost, low overheads online start-up? Would their readership follow them? Would investors be interested?

Like everyone else I’ve watched the print media world fall apart over the last few years. The poster child for that industry is the New York Times, of course, and their many missteps in recent memory have been well chronicled. In early 2008 Marc Andreessen started a New York Times Deathwatch, and the company’s financial performance has degraded since then.

I keep wondering what would happen if the top 10% of the writers at the NYTimes just…walked out. I know it’s crazy, but let’s just explore this a bit for the heck of it.

Today the company is worth just a little over $1 billion. As recently as five years ago it was worth nearly 5x that much. You have to go back to the early 1980s to see a lower stock price.

I certainly don’t think the NYTimes is going to be shutting down any time soon. The company still pulls in nearly $3 billion a year in revenue, down just 10% or so from 2005. But massive overhead, and more than 9,300 employees, make profitability an increasingly difficult goal for The Gray Lady. Her age is showing.

Full article here.

Review of New Media in New Media and Society

Following on from a blogging idea form my friend Mark Deuze, I have decided to start including reviews of my books on my blog.

The first is a review of New Media: An Introduction by Helen Kennedy from the University of Leeds. This review appeared in New Media and Society, Vol. 11 No. 3, May 2009.

The full text can be accessed from here, but a sample is provided below.

Flew’s text is an interesting, introductory overview – not the definitive
overview, for such a text does not exist. It is broad in reach. After the
introduction, the first three chapters attempt to define the key concepts to,
key approaches in, and key writers about, new media. In the remaining
chapters, Flew addresses what he sees as central issues in new media today.
These include social networking, participatory culture, gaming, citizen
journalism, creative industries, the global knowledge economy and the law–
policy–governance triangle.

How do you choose 20 key concepts in new media? Like Flew, I would
include convergence, cyberspace, networks, participation and virtuality, but
I am not convinced that all inclusions belong here. Also, how do you do
justice to these important concepts in less than a page? While many authors
have dedicated whole books to the topic of participation, Flew settles for a
couple of paragraphs (although admittedly he does dedicate a whole chapter
later in the book to participatory media cultures). The result is that these
brief summaries are very dense and some of them, such as the section on
surveillance, need a lot of unpacking.

Similarly, the chapter addressing approaches to new media mentions only
five. Flew defines these as: beyond hype and counter-hype; approaches to
technological change; social psychology; technology and culture; and political
economy and cultural studies (this last approach is arguably not one but two
different approaches). Many more exist; or at least, different categorizations
and classifications could be brought to bear. The same could be said for his
list of 10 key theorists. His choice is interesting and I am glad to see that
Tiziana Terranova has made it to the list for her work on the politics of
network cultures, but my choices (and probably everyone else’s working in
the field) would be at least a little bit different.

...

The discussion of the technologies and modes of production of new
media, found in the introduction to this book, is a welcome change. Other
new media overviews fail to attend to the means by which new media
products are made and, as a result, the production process in the ‘circuit of
culture’ (defined by du Gay et al. (1997) as constituted by representation,
identity, production, consumption and regulation), is left out and
understandings of new media are subsequently limited. In this sense, Flew’s
interest in creative industries approaches makes a valuable contribution in the
field of new media.

If this review contains some gripes, they are not really major ones. The
book is an interesting read and it engages with a broad range of contemporary
debates. It is a thorough and comprehensive volume, shaped inevitably by
the author’s own interests in relation to the canon-free field of new media. I
might have written it differently, but then, I did not write it.

Why New Media is Dead

Why New Media is Dead

This presentation is about how the BBC is responding to the Web 2.0 environment, particularly through its 'Backstage' initiative.

Why New Media is Dead

view presentation (tags: newmedia media bbc backstage)

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The future of the Internet

I am doing a guest lecture tomorrow for Axel Bruns' New Media Technologies class on 'Approaches to New Media'.

Assessing Implications Of New Media

view presentation (tags: history mcluhan media new)

Guest lecture for Axel Bruns' New Media Technologies unit, 4 August 2008


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As a part of it, I am considering Jonathan Zittrain's The Future of the Internet, and how to stop it. To be a crowd pleaser for a Monday morning class, I will use an interview he did with Stephen Colbert to illustrate his argument.



I am also using the recent piece by Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic Monthly titled "Is Google making us stupid: What the Internet is doing to our brains", as an item to discuss in tutorials.