Rather, the call for proposals for the next BlogTalk conference, which will be held in Cork, Ireland, on March 3rd/4th 2008 has been published. Main organizers are Thomas N. Burg and John Breslin; Tom Raftery and me will serve as co-chairs.

Overview

Following the international success of previous BlogTalk events in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006, the next BlogTalk - to be held in Cork, Ireland - is continuing with its focus on social software, while remaining committed to the diverse cultures, practices and tools of our emerging networked society. The conference is designed to maintain a sustainable dialog between developers, innovative academics and scholars who study social software, practitioners and administrators in corporate and educational settings, and other general members of the social software community.

We invite you to submit a proposal for presentation at the BlogTalk 2008 conference. Possible areas include, but are not limited to:

• Forms and consequences of emerging social software practices
• Social software in enterprise and educational environments
• The political impact of social software
• Applications, prototypes, concepts and standards

Participants and proposal categories

Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the conference, audiences will come from different fields of practice and will have different professional backgrounds. We strongly encourage proposals to bridge these cultural differences and to be understandable for all groups alike. Along those lines, we will offer three different submission categories:

• Academic
• Developer
• Practitioner

For academics, BlogTalk is an ideal conference for presenting and exchanging research work from current and future social software projects at an international level. For developers, the conference is a great opportunity to fly ideas, visions and prototypes in front of a distinguished audience of peers, to discuss, to link-up and to learn (developers may choose to give a practical demonstration rather than a formal presentation if they so wish). For practitioners, this is a venue to discuss use cases for social software and to report on any results you may have with like-minded individuals.

Submitting your proposals

Please upload your submission along with some personal information at http://www.easychair.org/blogtalk2008/. You will receive a confirmation of the arrival of your submission within three working days. The submission deadline is November 16th, 2007. The length of the proposal should be between 200 and 500 words. BlogTalk is a peer reviewed conference.

Timeline and important dates

Proposal submission deadline: November 16th, 2007

Notification of acceptance or rejection: December 7th, 2007

Paper version due: January 7th, 2008

Presentations and abstracts on website due: February 7th, 2008

(We will work hard to endow a fund for supporting travel costs. As soon as we review all of the papers we will be able to announce more details.)

Schmidt, Jan (2007): Blogging Practices: An analytical framework. In: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Vol. 12, Nr. 4. Available online: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/schmidt.html

Whohoo - what an honor! Here’s the abstract:

This article proposes a general model to analyze and compare different uses of the blog format. Based on ideas from sociological structuration theory, as well as on existing blog research, it argues that individual usage episodes are framed by three structural dimensions of rules, relations, and code, which in turn are constantly (re)produced in social action. As a result, “communities of blogging practices” emerge—that is, groups of people who share certain routines and expectations about the use of blogs as a tool for information, identity, and relationship management. This analytical framework can be the basis for systematic comparative and longitudinal studies that will further understanding of similarities and differences in blogging practices.

Regular followers of my german work might be familiar with most of the arguments and the conceptual model proposed in the article, but I’m really happy that my approach to blogging is now available to an international audience, too. Originally, my submission also included empirical findings from the “Wie ich blogge?!”-survey, but two reviewers and editor Susan C. Herring suggested to separate the two parts. Since I didn’t want to wait another couple of months for the empirical findings to be selected for another journal, I decided to publish them within the working paper series of our Research Centre: “Blogging practices in the German-speaking blogosphere. Findings from the “Wie ich blogge?!”-survey“.

Btw, the new JCMC issue includes also a “mini-section” on blogging with three additional papers

• Anonymity and Self-Disclosure on Weblogs - Hua Qian and Craig R. Scott
• Psychological and Social Influences on Blog Writing: An Online Survey of Blog Authors in Japan - Asako Miura and Kiyomi Yamashita
• Gender Differences in British Blogging - Sarah Pedersen and Caroline Macafee

as well as an paper on Facebook which I already cited a couple of times as a conference presentation:

• The Benefits of Facebook “Friends:” Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Networks - Nicole B. Ellison, Charles Steinfield, and Cliff Lampe

Call for Participation/Papers

Workshop “What is missing in Social Software? Current collaborative practices in social software”

September 24, 2007

in conjunction with the 10th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Limerick, Ireland, September 24-28, 2007.

MOTIVATION AND BACKGROUND

Social software - often connected to older forms of computer mediated communication (CMC) and newer discussion about online communities - concentrates on the link-up between social entities in digital social networks and their interaction. Group systems contain and group social entities. The general topic of the workshop is to start the discussion about the following questions: How does social software relate to the domain of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and what are current collaborative practices in social software.

The use of new digital media tools such as blogs, wikis, tagging and other communicative or multimedia assets create new challenges for the domain of computer-supported cooperative work. Typical social software hosts serves typically million of users dedicated to one digital medium like digital images, digital videos, and digital audio or specialised on one service like (micro-)blogging, social networking, or bookmark sharing. New challenges for engineering and design of cooperative systems are raised by the new business models possible through the availaibility of social software like user-generated content, collective intelligence phenomena, and syndication but also new threads like loosing control on private data and complete transparency of human acting.

Nevertheless, new generation of groupware tools incorporate social software features and well established research results from CSCW are to be revisited in the light of social software like to realize awareness in the presence of millions of users or how social software will be appropriated in organizations.

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

The workshop focuses on current collaborative work practices in social software. The workshop seeks for quality contributions that propose solutions to the issues identified above. It aims to bring together scientists and engineers who work on designing and/or developing social software, as well as practitioners using them in corporate settings. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) the following:

* Social roles and Leadership in Social Software
* Social norms, Social Control and Deviant Behaviour in Social Software
* Trust, Distrust and Visibility in Social Software
* Security, Data Protection and Privacy in Social Software
* Appropriation of Social Software in Organizations
* Visualisation and Awareness in Social Software
* Design and Collaborative Media
* Digital Democracy, Digital Rights, Digital Divide

WORKSHOP STRUCTURE

Prospective workshop participants will be requested to post a working paper up to 2000 words) on the workshop wiki ( http://socialsoftwareecscw07.wikispaces.com/), describing their research topic, the methods employed, and their preliminary results/findings. Participants will be asked to present their papers at the workshop, and every series of presentations will be followed by discussions. The papers have to be posted on the workshop wiki by the 25th of June 2007 and the notification of acceptance will be given on July 2, 2007. Commenting on peers’ papers will be encouraged. All accepted contributions are invited to be presented at the workshop by at least one of the authors. Workshop attendees may also register for the main ECSCW conference.

We will have presentations in the morning, a long lunch with a walk into the town of Limerick and a discussion with wiki use in the afternoon.

Costs of the workshop will be 70 EUR.

IMPORTANT DATES

* Deadline: 26 June 2007
* E-mail or wiki URL: mailto: klamma@cs.rwth-aachen.de or
http://socialsoftwareecscw07.wikispaces.com/Submissions
* Notification: 2 July 2007

ORGANIZATION

* Ralf Klamma (RWTH Aachen University),
* Sebastian Fiedler (Centre for Social Innovation, Vienna),
* Jan Schmidt (Bamberg University),
* Ton Zijlstra (Proven Partners),
* Gabriela Avram (University of Limerick)

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE (tentative)

* Thomas Becker, Buhl Data Service (GER)
* Yiwei Cao, RWTH Aachen University (GER) (confirmed)
* Anja Ebersbach, University of Konstanz (GER) (confirmed)
* Karsten Ehms, Siemens Corporate Technologies (GER)
* Tom Erickson, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center (USA)
* Barbara Kieslinger, Center for Social Innovation (AUT) (confirmed)
* Stephan Lukosch, Fernuniversität Hagen (GER) (confirmed)
* Mathias Lux, University of Klagenfurt (AUT) (confirmed)
* Peter Scott, Open University (UK)
* Marc Spaniol, RWTH Aachen University (GER) (confirmed)
* Marc Smith, Microsoft Research (USA)
* Martin Wolpers, KU Leuven (BEL) (confirmed)
* Volker Wulf, University of Siegen (GER) (confirmed)

CALL FOR PAPERS

MindTrek Conference | Social Media Stream
October 3-4, 2007 | Tampere, Finland
http://www.mindtrek.org/

DEADLINES
Deadline for submission abstracts: August 6, 2007
Notification of acceptance to authors: August 23, 2007
Registration to the conference ends: September 17, 2007
Conference: October 3–4, 2007 | Online publication: December 2007

We are happy to invite you to MindTrek Conference in October 3–4.
MindTrek is a two-day conference to explore current and emerging topics
of social media and the participatory culture of Internet.
This is the call for the Social Media Stream of the conference.

Please, send your extended abstract (max 1 000 words) for a review.
Reviewers evaluate submissions on the basis of significance and originality.

Abstracts should base on academic research, tested business solutions,
case studies, pilot results or innovative future scenarios.

The goal is to build up better knowledge about social media
(blogs, wikis, tags, feeds, media sharing and networking sites etc.).

MindTrek association publishes selected abstracts
in the conference proceedings and online. You will also
have the option to continue your abstract into full paper.
These papers will be published online after the event.

MindTrek was established in 1997. It has attracted
delegates and presenters from many fields including education,
business, government, and media to discuss their experiences
with media and web technologies. According to estimation,
the conference will bring together 500 participants this year.

The stream will be interdisciplinary: We invite presentations
from social science, business studies, computer and web science
and related disciplines. Hopefully, the conference will strengthen
further the network of social media researchers
from different countries.

POSSIBLE TOPICS

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
* Media and journalism transforming
* Online community networking and development
* Social capital, participatory economy, business models
* Online activism, including online campaigning
* Participatory design, mediators
* Filtering and folksonomy

CONFERENCE COMMITTEE

Conference Chair, director Jarmo Viteli
MindTrek Association, Hypermedia Laboratory (UTA)

Organising Committee
* Karsten D. Wolf, University of Bremen
* Artur Lugmayr, Tampere University of Technology
* Esa Sirkkunen, University of Tampere
* Katri Lietsala, University of Tampere

CONFERENCE VENUE

MindTrek takes place at Hotel Scandic Rosendahl,
in Tampere, Finland. The organiser of the conference
has booked quota for the conference delegates
from this hotel. Please, look for more information
on accommodation and registration later from our website.
Note that the participation fee does not include
the accommodation.

ACTIVITIES

The stream is open to all conference participants to join.
Every participant with the accepted abstract will have
their own presentation slot. On Wednesday evening,
MindTrek Award Party (included to the conference fee)
motivates further discussions and networking.

On Thursday, the stream continues with fabus
which means open participatory group work.
Participants and volunteer fabu coordinators
will create together the program for these
unconferencing sessions of the second day.

SUBMISSION

Please, send your abstract with our e-form:
www.mindtrek.org. Check also registration
and program details later from the website.

Conference fee is 190 euros (+ VAT) for 2 days.
Fee includes the whole conference
(also the other streams on open source,
ubiquitous media and games),
lunches for both days and the invitation
to the MindTrek Award Party.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Social Media Stream
Katri Lietsala, skype katri.lietsala
Esa Sirkkunen, tel. +358 (0)3 215 6424
firstname.lastname@uta.fi

MindTrek Conference
Jukka Matikainen, +358 (0)40 5336 379, firstname.lastname@mindtrek.org
www.mindtrek.org

Burg, Thomas N. / Schmidt, Jan (Eds.): BlogTalks Reloaded. Social Software - research & cases. Norderstedt: Books on Demand. 2007.

The book compiles ten papers from the “BlogTalk reloaded” conference held in last october. It took Thomas and me quite a while to get the book done & out, and we send apologies to all authors for the delay. I will put the author’s copies in the mail later this week (we have contributors from places like Brazil, US, Australia and some european countries); all other people interested in the book should have a look at the Table of contents (including links to online copies of some papers) and consider ordering it through Libri.de or at Amazon.de.

Tonight I’m going to read all of them

Schmidt, Jan: Social Software: Facilitating information-, identity- and relationship managament. In: Burg, Thomas N.  / Jan Schmidt (Eds.): BlogTalks Reloaded. Social Software -  Research and Cases. Vienna/Norderstedt: Books on Demand. 2007.  31-49.

The volume contains a short preface by Thomas, an overview by him and my, and ten papers by a truly global group of authors (just look at the countries on the cover..) on various aspects of social software. I’m especially glad that we have pretty diverse perspectives, since people from academia, from a more business-/consulting-oriented background as well as from software development contributed to the volume. You can find a table of contents over here at the BlogTalk wiki, and we sent preprint-pdfs to the various authors, so they might decide to share them with you… I definitely will, just wait for the next posting…

Burg, Thomas N. / Jan Schmidt (Eds.): BlogTalks Reloaded. Social Software - Research and Cases. Vienna/Norderstedt: Books on demand.