In just over a week, I'm off to Europe for the first of a number of conference trips [6] this year; as always, I'll try to blog my progress as I go. My first stop is the WebSci '09 [7] conference, where I'm presenting a poster on the background to our blog mapping project (which has already produced papers at the AoIR [8] and ISEA [9] conferences last year, with more to come). Should be interesting, even if it's a lot more (computer and social) science-y than what I'd usually attend. And, they've got Tim Berners-Lee [10] as a keynote speaker - no doubt in honour of yet another anniversary, and one which I didn't even mention in my post the other day [11]: yes, the Web, too, first happened 20 years ago (or at least that's when Sir Tim first proposed his hypertext transfer protocol)!.

After WebSci, I'm off to Frankfurt, for the (German-language) Prosumer Revisited [12] conference, whose organisers Birgit Blättel-Mink and Kai-Uwe Hellmann have kindly invited me to speak there. My personal highlight of that conference will be a presentation by the great Eric von Hippel [13], I think. My contribution will be to offer the concept of produsage [14] as an alternative to Toffler's prosumer, which acknowledges consumers' knowledge about the products they're using but doesn't offer them sufficient agency as users and content creators.

While I'm there, I'll also drop by the wonderfully named Sino-German School of Governance at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management [15] to visit fellow Cultural Scientist [16] (heh!) Carsten Herrmann-Pillath and give a guest lecture to his students. So, if you happen to be in Athens or Frankfurt during the second half of March, drop by - and if not, expect the usual conference blogging here.

And coming up later in the year: a six-week research residency at the fabulous Hans-Bredow-Institut [17] in Hamburg in May/June, with excursions to the next09 [18] conference in Hamburg (hence the logo in the sidebar), COST298 [19] in Copenhagen, and EuroITV [20] in Leuven, as well as a presentation at the HBI's in-house conference. More on all that later!

Technorati : Prosumer Revisited [21], WebSci '09 [22], blog mapping [23], cultural science [24], produsage [25], travel [26]
Del.icio.us : Prosumer Revisited [27], WebSci '09 [28], blog mapping [29], cultural science [30], produsage [31], travel [32]