Mapping Australia's blogosphere - identifying key influencers for communicators

If you're seeking to communicate with Australians it is wise to step beyond traditional media channels and investigate how to engage through Australia's blossoming blogosphere.

The Australian blogosphere is the collective term for the entire ecosystem of Australian blogs - how they interconnect, how ideas (memes) spread and how links allow audiences to flow between them.

Dr Axel Bruns, an Associate Professor in the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology, is currently researching the extent of Australia's blogosphere and the connections between individual blogs.

To achieve this he is using a range of computer-assisted tracking and mapping tools to build a visual map of our national blogosphere, mapping close to 3.4 million links and 8,300 blogs (which he acknowledges is highly incomplete).

He has been using data collected during the Federal election campaign, allowing him to particularly observe the flow of ideas across politically-orientated blogs - allowing him to test some interesting hypotheses.

Alongside this he's mapped distinct clusters of blogs based on their topics - light green for politics, red for parenting, yellow for food blogs, green for arts and crafts and light blue for design and style.

Taking the colours and looking at the connections and relative sizes of the different blogs it becomes possible to identify the most important connectors and influencers - the blogs that a communicator would wish to build strong relationships with.

I've included an image of this work below (marking where my blog 'lives').

To learn more about Dr Brun's work, check out his blog, Mapping Online Publics and particularly the posts, First Steps in Mapping the Australian Blogosphere and Mapping the Australian Blogosphere Some More.

Map of the Australian Blogosphere - view a larger version in this PDF

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Australian Government sets default copyright to Creative Commons by Attribution

Yesterday was a historic day for Australian intellectual property rights.

Ann Steward, the Australian Government CIO, announced that the Australian Attorney-General's Department had released an amended Statement of Intellectual Property Principles for Australian Government Agencies.

The amended version endorsed one of the Gov 2.0 Taskforce's recommendations - that the default copyright position for public sector information be CC BY rather than the existing Crown Copyright, which has been in place for over a hundred years.

This change is likely to get little media attention or fanfare, however it denotes a seismic shift in Australian government. From now on almost all information that is released publicly by the government will be legally reusable, modifiable and mashup-able by citizens and corporations without the need to pay money or ask for legal permission.

This unlocks a potential enormous economic driver for Australia. In the UK the value of open data has been estimated at 6 billion pounds per year, although it might take some time to realise gains like this.

Also historic - though maybe less so - is that this major shift in government policy was announced on a blog.

So what is Creative Commons licensing?
It is a form of copyright that is more liberal and flexible than old-style copyright regimes, however still allows organisations and individuals to manage the reuse of their intellectual property.

Creative Commons is recognised in over thirty countries and has already become the default position for UK government data. The US, New Zealand and Canada have also made steps towards adopting Creative Commons as their default government copyright license and the OECD has recommended that public sector data be made public in a raw and reusable form, licensed under standard open content licenses and priced as close as possible to zero.

More information is at the Creative Commons Australia website.

And what does it mean for federal government agencies?
When releasing future public sector information into the public domain, federal government agencies must use a default position of a CC BY (Creative Commons By Attribution) license. They may only use a more restrictive license after a process of ‘due diligence and on a case-by-case basis’.

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The media140 #OzPolitics Tweetbook

I felt that it would be useful to compile the online discussions during media140 #OzPolitics into a single work, a permanent record that could be reread, referenced and reconsidered.

So over the long weekend, with assistance from PeopleBrowsr, the support of Julie Posetti and permission from FirstDogOnMoon and Mike Stuchbery to reuse some of their material, I compiled the following Tweetbook.

You are welcome to read, print, share and comment.

media140 #OzPolitics Tweetbook

By the way - as far as I know this is the first conference Tweetbook created in Australia. It is based on the very useful Open Government and Innovations Conference Tweetbook from their conference in Washington in July 2009.

I hope the media140 #OzPolitics Tweetbook will also serve as an inspirational model for future Australian conferences and events.

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Stats on articles and posts for #Groggate

Some people know that I've been tracking the posts and articles published online discussing the outing of the author of the Grog's Gamut blog by The Australian.

EDIT - due to updates to the spreadsheet below the figures presented in this section of the post are only valid at the original time of publication. Please refer to the spreadsheet for the latest figures.

So far I have listed 112 posts and articles on the topic (including this one) - although a few only touch on it peripherally.

I have also been mapping these articles into a Google spreadsheet to look at some of the interesting statistics behind the debate.

For instance, News Limited is responsible for 12.5% of the articles on the topic, Crikey for 8.9%, the ABC for 5.4% and Fairfax for 3.6% (excluding any duplication across publications). In fact a total of 32.1% of the articles have been written by commercial news sources.

It also appears that very few authors were anonymous, despite certain claims in mainstream media articles about a prevailing culture of anonymous blogging online.

57.1% of authors were named outright in their articles and posts. Another 29.5% used partial names or pseudonyms, but provided various pieces of personal information. In most cases their names could be uncovered without much research or effort.

The remaining 13.4% were indeed anonymous - totally unnamed in their articles and posts.

However of this group 4 articles, or 3.6%, were in mainstream and online commercial media publications (such as The Australian and Crikey) where no author name was provided. These are sometimes termed 'editorials', but are anonymous all the same.

Here's a few examples:

• The Australian - A storm on the internet: Why should web writers escape scrutiny and responsibility? (and yes I see the irony) 
•  Crikey - The Oz’s Bolt loose … science of pop-news …

Only the remaining 11 articles or 9.8%, were totally anonymous. This includes two articles from Mumbrella, which I only excluded from being a commercial publication as it is industry specific and doesn't charge subscribers as Crikey does (sorry Tim!)

On that basis,

• Of the 36 commercial articles and posts, 4 were anonymous - 11% of the total
• Of the 76 professional and personal articles and posts 11 were anonymous - 14.5% of the total.

That's a very small statistical difference in the scheme of things.

I recommend having a play with the data - any interesting insights please share via comments below.

The link to the public spreadsheet is here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0Ap1exl80wB8OdE96TkhYT2U2UDNCUV9KaXVRS1FoNnc&output=html

Use the tabs at top to navigate to the statistics and legend (explaining the terms I've used)

Or simply look at the figures below:

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GovHack returns - as part of Amped

Last year Australia's Gov 2.0 Taskforce initiated the GovHack event, produced by Web Directions, to showcase what could be done with open government data.

This year I'm glad to see that GovHack is returning - as part of Amped, a free 10 hour hack day, in Sydney's PowerHouse Museum on Sat 16th of October.

Whether you're a web designer or developer, interaction designer, graphic designer, project manager, writer, or just someone who has has an interesting idea, Amped is an opportunity to strut your stuff and create something of value.

Amped is fully catered, will have expert mentors on hand. The grand prize for the best hack is a trip for the winning team to Tokyo's Web Directions East.

RSVP at the Amped website.

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