User-generated content and the changing news cycle

Blogs represent a major development in media consumption and practice.  The Pew Center in the United States reported in mid-2005 that about eight million Americans had created blogs and 32 million read them.  That's equivalent to two-thirds the number of people who read a daily newspaper during a week, a challenging giguew in the context of dwindling circulations.  Blogs represent the start of the 'personal media' revolution, but are only the tip of a range of new media developments.  This paper describes the blog phenomenon and notes its arrival via a series of major new stories.  It suggests we are seeing the emergence of a new news cycle, as blogs and other internet-based media usurp broadcast's role in breaking news.  The paper describes a range of emerging digital journalism forms that make up the 'personal media' revolution.  These include blogs delivered via mobile phones (moblogs); video-based blogs (v-logs); newspapers' use of podcasting to deliver content; and wikis, or peer-generated online content. The media's reaction to this new form of content is described, and the other concludes by looking at the forces driving this new form of journalism.

Where is the business model for citizen journalism?

Citizen journalism is not stealing much of the audience from traditional journalism. To date, it has failed to find a viable business model in the sense that it does not pay for itself. Yet it threatens traditional journalism because it has the potential to fragment audiences. That means that traditional journalism is going to have to revise its values and practices. The most likely scenario is a coming together of professional journalism and user-generated content and comment. Even so, the same dilemma confronts all forms of journalism: how to access financial support for "quality ".

Gatekeepers : going, going, gone -the challenge of citizenship journalism to traditional practice

Commentators believe that the reporting of the London bombings of July 2005 ushered in a new era of the citizen joumalist. News outlets in Britain were  flooded with emails and mobile phone pictures. But with the sheer quantity of material heading into the editor's inbox, how can we be sure of its veracity? This paper looks at The Herald Sun. The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Daily Telegraph and The Adelaide Advertiser to investigate the current systems in place for checking incoming leads and material. The paper raises questions regarding the reliability of current systems and puts forward the possibility that new approaches and systems may be needed to meet the new challenges. The paper further explores if newspapers are still acting as gatekeepers of the traditional system or if they are letting the gate swing ajar in response to  changed circumstances.

Using MediaWiki as an efficient data repository and ubiquitous learning tool : an Australian example

The functionality of MediaWiki ensures it is a valuable learning repository for sharing and storing information. Constructivist learning can be promoted alongside a wiki repository and various wireless u-learning tools such as mobile phones and digital cameras, to encourage students to gather and share a range of primary and secondary information in a variety of subject areas. This paper outlines one initiative adopted at an Australian University specialising in distance education, which uses a MediaWiki as the primary method for content delivery. Over a period of three-years, the Drugs, Crime and Society wiki has evolved into an organic information repository for storing and accessing current research, press and drug agency material that supplements core themes examined in each topic of the curriculum. A constructivist approach has been employed to encourage students to engage in a range of assessable and non-assessable information sharing activities. The paper also demonstrates how the Drugs, Crime and Society wiki can be accessed through various wireless u-learning technologies, which enables students undertaking field placements to add and share primary information with other students and practitioners working in the drugs field.

Hats of affect : a study of affect, achievements and hats in Team Fortress 2

An iconic staple of the First-Person Shooter genre, Team Fortress 2 , is popular for its chaotic action, distinguished by its painterly aesthetics, and made unique by the introduction of hats as rewards for its players. This study investigates the intersection of virtual millinery items, player achievements, user generated content and the implications for online gamer personas as they are connected to the digital distribution platform, Steam. The article examines the iterations of affect involved in the design and play of a game no longer imagined by its publisher, the Valve Corporation, as a distinct commodity but rather a commercial community service.

Social media in the classroom : a simple yet complex hybrid environment for students

This article reports on part of the author’s PhD action research study. It examines the complexity of features that social media and Web 2.0 offer when combined with face-to-face teaching and learning. Action research was used to help redesign the learning programs of thirteen Middle Years classes over an eighteen month period. These learning programs took advantage of the unique communicative methods offered by social media and provided spaces such as blogs, groups and discussion forums. Students developed their own identity when working online, made online friends, left comments for peers and uploaded content which included publishing, peer reviewing and self assessment. The research highlighted the simplicity in the creation and exchange of user-generated content and interaction while identifying a complex depth behind such interaction. Designing learning programs using social media enabled the students to be active and valued participants in the learning process and a ‘hybrid’ learning environment

Sport and social media research: a review

The emergence of social media has profoundly impacted the delivery and consumption of sport. In the current review we analysed the existing body of knowledge of social media in the field of sport management from a service-dominant logic perspective, with an emphasis on relationship marketing. We reviewed 70 journal articles published in English-language sport management journals, which investigated new media technologies facilitating interactivity and co-creation that allow for the development and sharing of user-generated content among and between brands and individuals (i.e., social media). Three categories of social media research were identified: strategic, operational, and user-focussed. The findings of the review demonstrate that social media research in sport management aligns with service-dominant logic and illustrates the role of social media in cultivating relationships among and between brands and individuals. Interaction and engagement play a crucial role in cultivating these relationships. Discussion of each category, opportunities for future research as well as suggestions for theoretical approaches, research design and context are advanced.

Remixing to design learning: social media and peer-to-peer interaction

Social and participatory media offer opportunities to interact and share user-generated content. After some investigation and research, the authors are in their initial stages of using such media to provide a pathway for thinking about learning design in higher education. Using the concept of remixing, the authors aim to creatively blend and manipulate ideas to build a sustainable approach to course/program enhancement. Remixing is touted as one of the most important practices within the field of open educational resources, but it is not mainstream practice in educational thinking or design. This article highlights the authors’ approach and uses their pre-service teacher education program and their previous high school study as an example of remixing. The high school study involved the integration of social and participatory media into the face-to-face classroom; Author 1 was the practitioner researcher in the high school study. This article articulates the use of online social environments at the high school level to highlight concepts of sharing and remixing as a creative and social approach to designing learning in higher education. It also attempts to consider this within a course-wide approach.

Sport and social media research: a review

The emergence of social media has profoundly impacted the delivery and consumption of sport. In the current review we analysed the existing body of knowledge of social media in the field of sport management from a service-dominant logic perspective, with an emphasis on relationship marketing. We reviewed 70 journal articles published in English-language sport management journals, which investigated new media technologies facilitating interactivity and co-creation that allow for the development and sharing of user-generated content among and between brands and individuals (i.e., social media). Three categories of social media research were identified: strategic, operational, and user-focussed. The findings of the review demonstrate that social media research in sport management aligns with service-dominant logic and illustrates the role of social media in cultivating relationships among and between brands and individuals. Interaction and engagement play a crucial role in cultivating these relationships. Discussion of each category, opportunities for future research as well as suggestions for theoretical approaches, research design and context are advanced.

Guardian: game of editions

In 2013 The Guardian launched its third online iteration as 'Guardian Australia' - complementing "Guardian US' and Guardian UK'. Via these three digital editions the Guardian has expanded its global readership, which is one of its strategies to strengthen its future viability in the digital and mobile news sphere. The Guardian's journalists, while gathering news from around the world, now report in to the different news hubs. In the three main newsrooms, the journalists also create particular stories for their niche audiences in Australia, the USA and the UK. This paper examines the editorial content the Guardian has created on the back of digital disruption. Two months' worth of 'Editor's Picks' from across the three platforms are analysed to reveal how much the Guardian is promoting new, distinctive, locally created content versus how much it draws on material written by journalists from the other editions. This content is compared to data derived from interviewing those in charge of the three editions (Editor in chief Kath Viner, Guardian Australia Editor Emily Wilson and Guardian US Editor Lee Glendinning) plus interviews with other senior managers of the news organisation. In mid-2015 a fourth online edition of the Guardian began rolling out - Guardian International. This edition is not geo-specific and will instead promote and aggregate international news gathered from the other editions on its digital 'front page'. In January 2016 the Guardian announced it planned to cut annual costs by £53.6m due to rising losses: a move that will almost certainly involve staff redundancies. Later in the same month, Guardian Australia's editor, Emily Wilson, said in a public forum that the operations in Sydney and New York would be 'completely insulated' from these cuts. This paper explores the Guardian's global digital strategy during this difficult era for media that straddle the legacy and digital worlds.

Remixing as a creative and social approach to learning design

This paper discusses the concepts of remixing and morphing in learning design. In particular, it focuses on how the authors used approaches and findings from a high school action research study to inform their work in higher education. This was done in an attempt to build authentic and active student learning experiences that align with the needs of the 21st Century, and they argue that remixing offers a creative and social approach to the designing of learning. The high school study embedded social and participatory media into the face-to-face classroom. This opened up opportunities for students to interact and share user-generated content. The authors discuss how they have used the approaches and findings from this high school study in their work in teacher education and pre-service teacher education, as well in as learning design in the Business and Law Faculty. The authors' university has a strategic plan that identifies the world as globally connected, with new ideas available at the touch of a button and innovation 'anywhere' and at 'any time' and this paper supports that agenda. Using the concept of remixing the authors build on their previous work in learning design and make explicit the sharing nature within a remix approach. The use of the concept of remix is demonstrated within a bigger picture of what is sometimes called 'course-wide' thinking. The authors argue that this work contributes evidence and analysis that can inform course designers, practitioner-researchers and the work of academics, from across disciplines, to design courses that recognise and support active student learning.

Living the good life : how content providers can better conceptualize the content requirements of the ubiquitous technology user

Content provision via ubiquitous technology platforms such as smart mobile phones and personal digital assistants raises interesting practical and research challenges. Many current theoretical frameworks and models are based on assumptions which may not necessarily be valid in the case of ubiquitous technologies, which users employ in a variety of contexts and for different reasons. In this research-in-progress paper we explore how content providers can better conceptualize the content requirements of ubiquitous technology users. We introduce the principle of Continuous Quality of Life Optimization as a theoretical concept to understand the content requirements of these users. We put forth a number of propositions to guide further research and provide details about our own research approach, in which we are exploring ubiquitous content provision from the perspective of content providers.

Watermarking protocol for protecting user's right in content based image retrieval

Content based image retrieval (CBIR) is a technique to search for images relevant to the user’s query from an image collection.In last decade, most attention has been paid to improve the retrieval performance. However, there is no significant effort to investigate the security concerning in CBIR. Under the query by example (QBE) paradigm, the user supplies an image as a query and the system returns a set of retrieved results. If the query image includes user’s private information, an untrusted server provider of CBIR may distribute it illegally, which leads to the user’s right problem. In this paper, we propose an interactive watermarking protocol to address this problem. A watermark is inserted into the query image by the user in encrypted domain without knowing the exact content. The server provider of CBIR will get the watermarked query image and uses it to perform image retrieval. In case where the user finds an unauthorized copy, a watermark in the unauthorized copy will be used as evidence to prove that the user’s legal right is infringed by the server provider.

Toward highly available, self-healing, adaptable, grid-like and user friendly nondedicated clusters

The human body was used to illustrate an Autonomic Computing system that possesses self-knowledge, self-configuration, self-optimization, self-healing, and self-protection, knowledge of its environment and user friendliness properties. Autonomic Computing was identified by IBM as one of the Grand Challenges. Many researchers and research groups have responded positively to the challenge by initiating research around one or two of the characteristics
identified by IBM as the requirements for Autonomic Computing. One of the areas that could benefit from the comprehensive approach created by the Autonomic Computing vision is parallel processing on nondedicated clusters. This paper shows a general design of services and initial implementation of a system that moves parallel processing on clusters to the computing mainstream using the Autonomic Computing vision.

A classification for content adaptation system

Content adaptation is an attractive solution for the ever growing desktop based Web content delivered to the user via heterogeneous devices, in order to provide acceptable experience while surfing the Web. Bridging the mismatch between the rich content and the user device's resources (display, processing, navigation, network bandwidth, media support) without user intervention requires a proactive behavior. While content adaptation poses multitude of benefits, without proper strategies, adaptation will not be truly optimized. There have been many projects focused on content adaptation that have been designed with different goals and approaches. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive classification for content adaptation system. The classification is used to group the approaches applied in the implementation of existing content adaptation system. Survey on some content adaptation systems also been provided. We also present the research spectrum in content adaptation and discuss the challenges.