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RE: [Air-l] More thought on 'Virtual conference'
by Matthew Allen 08 Oct '04

08 Oct '04

And can I ask if there are opinions on whether Australia is close enough to several important centres of research/scholarship (ie Singapore, Thailand, Korea and others) to provide some relief from the difficulties of long flights to Europe or the USA? (I should add that Australia's visa laws can also be quite onerous but not as bad as the USA and no fingerprinting/photos - not yet anyway) Matt Dr Matthew Allen Associate Professor Internet Studies Associate Dean Teaching and Learning, Humanities Curtin University of Technology, CRICOS 00301J Australia m.allen(a)curtin.edu.au http://smi.curtin.edu.au/netstudies/allen.htm +61 8 92663511 (v) +61 8 9266 3166 (f) Vice-President, Association of Internet Researchers http://www.aoir.org -----Original Message----- From: air-l-aoir.org-bounces(a)listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-aoir.org-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Soraj Hongladarom Sent: Friday, 8 October 2004 3:13 PM To: air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-l] More thought on 'Virtual conference' Dear all, I just would like to add my two cents on Prof. Wu's comments on virtual conferences. I used to attend several of them, but my experience is that I could not find enough time to read all the papers and to follow all the discussions sitting in my office. There are a lot of distractions -- students coming in demanding answers, committee meetings, phone calls, etc. These are the normal aspects of life in the office. But when I am away on a trip to a conference, I can leave all that away and focus on the papers being presented. And I come back feeling much freshened up. At first I thought I could focus more on the papers being presented online, but I just found myself downloading most of the papers for later reading, and the discussion aspect is limited to posting on email lists. One way to solve the issue of international travelling, visas, etc. is to hold an AoIR conference closer to home. In my and Prof. Wu's case that would be in Asia. Trip to HK for me is not as daunting as one to the US. Perhaps someone might want to propose that there be 'regional' conferences such that those in Asia could attend them. Cheers, Soraj -- Soraj Hongladarom Department of Philosophy Faculty of Arts Chulalongkorn University Bangkok 10330, Thailand Tel. +66(0)22 18 47 56; Fax +66(0)22 18 47 55 ASEAN-EU LEMLIFE Project: http://www.asean-eu-lemlife.org/ The 2nd Asia-Pacific Computing and Philosophy Conference: http://www.stc.arts.chula.ac.th/CAP/AP-CAP.html Personal: http://pioneer.chula.ac.th/~hsoraj/web/soraj.html _______________________________________________ The Air-l-aoir.org(a)listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org/airjoin.html

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Re: [Air-l] More thought on 'Virtual conference'
by Soraj Hongladarom 08 Oct '04

08 Oct '04

Dear all, I just would like to add my two cents on Prof. Wu's comments on virtual conferences. I used to attend several of them, but my experience is that I could not find enough time to read all the papers and to follow all the discussions sitting in my office. There are a lot of distractions -- students coming in demanding answers, committee meetings, phone calls, etc. These are the normal aspects of life in the office. But when I am away on a trip to a conference, I can leave all that away and focus on the papers being presented. And I come back feeling much freshened up. At first I thought I could focus more on the papers being presented online, but I just found myself downloading most of the papers for later reading, and the discussion aspect is limited to posting on email lists. One way to solve the issue of international travelling, visas, etc. is to hold an AoIR conference closer to home. In my and Prof. Wu's case that would be in Asia. Trip to HK for me is not as daunting as one to the US. Perhaps someone might want to propose that there be 'regional' conferences such that those in Asia could attend them. Cheers, Soraj -- Soraj Hongladarom Department of Philosophy Faculty of Arts Chulalongkorn University Bangkok 10330, Thailand Tel. +66(0)22 18 47 56; Fax +66(0)22 18 47 55 ASEAN-EU LEMLIFE Project: http://www.asean-eu-lemlife.org/ The 2nd Asia-Pacific Computing and Philosophy Conference: http://www.stc.arts.chula.ac.th/CAP/AP-CAP.html Personal: http://pioneer.chula.ac.th/~hsoraj/web/soraj.html

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RE: [Air-l] More thought on 'Virtual conference'
by Matthew Allen 08 Oct '04

08 Oct '04

Can I ask if people who want to participate virtually in some manner would be prepared to pay, say, 50% of the conference registration fee to do so? Or is that asking too much... Matt Dr Matthew Allen Associate Professor Internet Studies Associate Dean Teaching and Learning, Humanities Curtin University of Technology, CRICOS 00301J Australia m.allen(a)curtin.edu.au http://smi.curtin.edu.au/netstudies/allen.htm +61 8 92663511 (v) +61 8 9266 3166 (f)

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call for virtual volunteers
by T Kennedy 08 Oct '04

08 Oct '04

So, we have established that a lot of unpaid work is involved in not only putting a F2F conference together, but also one that includes some elements of virtuality in it. Yes, some of us are feeling guilty, but that still doesn't alleviate the workload that we all have. Where do we go from here? I don't think we need people running cameras per se. What about IChat or Web-Cams in sessions? What I am thinking is the session organizer can try and organize this for his/her session. If we have laptops in every presentation room, we could have IChat or Web-Cams with the laptop and projector. I don't think it is overly complicated (but I could be wrong). Have we considered sponsorship from somewhere? We have had Apple products on display before - would they be willing to contribute either some cash or hardware to the event? We don't know if we don't ask. Anyone with connections? Perhaps we can gather some people who are interested in discussing whether this will work (and if we can afford it) off the list. Even if we start off on a small scale for next year to test this all - like the keynotes or a handful of sessions. What about a call for virtual volunteers who can put some time into this? I will field the "call for virtual volunteers" - to discuss the implementation of virtuality at the next AoIR conference and then we can go from there.....if there are no takers, then that takes care of that. email me tkennedy(a)netwomen.ca ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Tracy L.M. Kennedy PhD Candidate and NetLab Research Associate Department. of Sociology University of Toronto, Ontario www.netwomen.ca/Blog tkennedy(a)netwomen.ca ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Re: RE: [Air-l] Why not make Aoir 5.0 "Virtual conference"?
by Jonathan Marshall 08 Oct '04

08 Oct '04

For what its worth the very first internet conference i went to in Perth in 1966, which was organised by *one* person with no university or business affiliation, and no source of funds other than what they could raise, broadcast live images of most speeches, and used MOOs to allow participation by people who could not turn up. Speakers responded to the MOO comments as these were projected on to a wall, and someone would type into the MOO what was being said for those who had not got the bandwith for images - fairly rare in those days. It was a great success. I have been to other small conferences since which seemed to manage to do web-broadcasts (the last one was put on by a uni department and basically organsied by a post-grad as far as i understand), but the live text worked pretty well and much more interactively. There are heaps of ways of doing this, please don't be distracted by wanting to be state of the art - primitive is good. For what its worth, the treatment given by US customs and immigration agents (or whatever) to many Australians (who are supposed to be mindless US allies) is such, that despite my wanting to go to the AOIR conference next year i'm not going to the US either. my apologies for this. However a virtual conference would be great. jon -- UTS CRICOS Provider Code: 00099F DISCLAIMER: This email message and any accompanying attachments may contain confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient, do not read, use, disseminate, distribute or copy this message or attachments. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete this message. Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender expressly, and with authority, states them to be the views the University of Technology Sydney. Before opening any attachments, please check them for viruses and defects.

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Re: [Air-l] Protection against unethical practices in search engine optimization?
by noci 08 Oct '04

08 Oct '04

hey carmen & all others, first of all, good last post of yours! couldn't have summed it up better myself, as i work in the same field and yes, i sometimes have a hard time distancing myself from scammers and spammers as our field of work is brimming with such folks, unfortunately-- now to get stuff back on track again---: you said.. "For example, a business hires a SEO (search engine optimization) company for a 3 months contract. The company performs optimization so that it has complete control over it. ----- any business owner handing over "complete control" is simply naive and acts completely irrational. customers sometimes want to hand over responsibility to you as a contractor so they can avoid making any effort themselves in the process. not actively involving the customer is a grave mistake in my opinion. "This means it can turn the results off with a click if the business has any intention of getting out of the contract at the end of 3 months." ------ again, who would risk losing control?? i've never ever heard of such behaviour, client-side that is. "This is in my book highly unethical. There is a severe lack of information in this area to educate business owners and help them make a wise decision." ------ common sense? "don't allow strangers to mess with your site uncontrolled"- sounds wise? another remark-- if you do a good job in the optimization process, you've helped the customer out in any case- even if his SE rankings don't improve dramatically. then again, knowing your chances and actually saying "well, i can't help you with your keyword range because [i.e.] on Google, that market is clogged" should be common business practice. too bad it isn't. regards, maxd

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AoIR conference venues
by Philipp Budka 07 Oct '04

07 Oct '04

Dear AoIR list members, I am participating on the list for about three years. In this period the AoIR conference took place in the Netherlands (2002), in Canada (2003), in England (2004) and will take place in the US (2005). These venues have at least two things in common: they are all countries of the north, and, apart from Holland, they are all English speaking countries. I can imagine that it is very hard to find a conference venue with the proper infrastructure, academic and financial background, etc. But wouldn't it be real international to look at Asia, Southeast Europe or Latin America for conference venues. I would love to attend an AoIR conference in Sao Paulo, Cairo or Budapest. I am sure this would send real international signals to the global internet interested community. Greetings from Vienna, Philipp -- Philipp Budka philbu(a)gmx.net Rustengasse 5/10 A-1150 Wien, Austria http://www.philbu.net http://www.lateinamerika-studien.at -- GMX ProMail mit bestem Virenschutz http://www.gmx.net/de/go/mail +++ Empfehlung der Redaktion +++ Internet Professionell 10/04 +++

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Survey software
by David Brake 07 Oct '04

07 Oct '04

I did a little research recently about survey software that is free (or free for academics) and posted the results on my weblog here: http://blog.org/archives/001183.html -- David Brake, PhD researcher in Media and Communications, London School of Economics & Political Science <http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/mPhilPhDMediaAndCommunicat…> Also see http://davidbrake.org/ (home page) and http://blog.org/ (weblog) Author of Dealing With E-Mail - <http://davidbrake.org/dealingwithemail/> gives ordering info

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deadline approaching: Melon Fellowship at Penn
by Ed Lamoureux 07 Oct '04

07 Oct '04

I believe Oct. 15 is the deadline for this application. Just in case anyone on the two lists (NMC and Aior) missed the announcement, a reminder: http://humanities.sas.upenn.edu/topics05.htm Penn Humanities Forum Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities Call for Applications, 2005–2006 Five (5) one-year residential Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships are available for untenured scholars who received or will receive their Ph.D. between December 1996 and December 2004. (You must have your degree in hand no later than December 2004 to be eligible.) The fellowship is open to all scholars, national and international, who meet application criteria. The fellowship stipend is $42,000, plus health insurance. The programs of the Penn Humanities Forum are conceived through yearly topics that invite broad interdisciplinary collaboration. We have set Word and Image as the theme for the 2005–2006 academic year. Research proposals are invited on this topic in all areas of humanistic study, except educational curriculum-building and the performing arts. Fellows teach one freshman seminar each of two terms in addition to conducting their research. Word and Image 2005–2006 Topic Director: Catriona MacLeod Associate Professor and Undergraduate Chair of German "Mixed media" culture has changed from a novelty to the norm in our day. University disciplines struggle to justify their borders. Small children outperform their media-challenged parents. The Internet, films, television, advertising, video games, and high-art hybrids (installations, performance art) demand an ever-increasing ability to decode interactions between words and images. Under the circumstances, this would seem an opportune moment to investigate the word-and-image relation. First, we must recognize that it has a past. Indeed, the connection between the verbal and visual has been fundamental to the history of several humanistic disciplines. We might revisit the ancient yet pressing debate about the respective abilities of words and images to represent. From the Renaissance “paragone” or competition among the rival arts, to the eighteenth-century “sister arts,” to Romantic ideals of synthesis and recombination, the word-image relationship has been a continuous theme of literary and art historical thought. How words and images represent and whether they enjoy a harmonious kinship, engage in border skirmishes, or seek to annihilate one another, are not merely formal matters. The history of iconoclasm alone tells us about the ideological stakes in the debate. The emotion and loyalties involved in the process of memorialization— notably, after the World Trade Center disaster—seem to demand multi-media expression. And the word-image opposition is linked to other strongly ideological binaries: masculinity versus femininity, time versus space, abstraction versus materiality, art versus nature. Our inquiry must also encompass new technologies for meshing words and images. For example, the verbal “crawler” at the bottom of the television screen occupies the same visual field as the visual footage of an entirely different news story. Here broadcast news demands that we make simultaneous sense of discontinuous media. The new information resources available via the Internet and in software applications present us with constantly mutating layerings of words and pictures. Do such media images act as supplements or “illustrations” to words, or vice versa? What relation lies between word and image, what are its claims, and how does it insert itself into our consciousness? Much contemporary art explicitly refuses traditional classification and explores intersections between media: for example, land art, installation art, video art, or (a recently coined term) “word-and-image art.” In current literature, to cite only one example, the fiction of W. G. Sebald has attracted critical attention for its interweaving of narrative and photography. Our current preoccupation with hybrid forms could helpfully be historicized: what do they have in common with the illuminated manuscript, the emblem book, the cartoon, the comic strip, or film? How has the visual entered literary genres, how have words and texts changed the way we view and “read” art—historically, or in the present? With this broad view in mind, the Penn Humanities Forum invites applications from interested scholars in all humanistic disciplines as well as Political Science, Anthropology, History of Science, Architecture, Design, and Communications. Edward Lee Lamoureux, Ph. D. Director, Multimedia Program and New Media Center Associate Professor, Speech Communication 1501 W. Bradley Bradley University Peoria IL 61625 309-677-2378 http://hilltop.bradley.edu/~ell http://gcc.bradley.edu/mm/

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Re: [Air-l] Protection against unethical practices in searchengineoptimization?
by Lee Salter 07 Oct '04

07 Oct '04

"I'd hate to think what you think of advertising, direct mail and mail order agencies, then" Erm is this a bait? Obviously advertising of any sort is just one step more unethical than the exploitative processes under which things are produced in the first place. That is, the problem of advertising is not just in the methods of manipulation (well, lying) that it employs (in less dishonest times, "advertising" was actually called "propaganda", until people realised saw its implications very clearly - even Berneys called his work propaganda), but that it mentions nothing about the production of the products it refers to. As for search engine optimisation, well, that too. Lee Salter Lecturer in Media, Communications & Journalism Edge Hill College, St Helen's Road Ormskirk, Lancashire L39 4QP Email: salterl(a)edgehill.ac.uk Tel: 01695 584374 ----------------------------------------------------- This email and any attachments are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual to whom it is addressed. Any views or opinions presented are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Edge Hill or associated companies. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender as soon as possible and delete it and all copies of it. You must not, directly or indirectly, use, disclose, distribute, print, or copy any part of this message if you are not the intended recipient. The message content of in-coming emails is automatically scanned to identify Spam and viruses otherwise Edge Hill do not actively monitor content. However, sometimes it will be necessary for Edge Hill to access business communications during staff absence. Edge Hill has taken steps to ensure that this email and any attachments are virus free. However, it is the responsibility of the recipient to ensure that it is virus free and no responsibility is accepted by Edge Hill for any loss or damage arising in any way from its use. <<<<EdgeHill>>>>

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