A Plethora of Podcasts...

Whew! I have been totally pulled into administrivia for the past few weeks and have had very little time to focus on the blog, but I am starting to dig my way back out and have lots of cool stuff planned for the next few weeks. While I have been focused elsewhere, there have been a surge of new podcasts of CMS colloquium events or of my talks around the country which might be of interest to my regular readers. I figured I would take a day out just to catch up with these and make sure they got to the attention of anyone who might be interested. For those of you interested in our work on creative industries, Forrester Research has posted highlights of their Consumer Forum 2007, including some short segments from my conversation with Josh Bernoff, but also some very interesting segments involving Playboy's Christie Heffner, MTV's Christina Norman, Microsoft's Robert J. Bach, Brightcove's Jeremy Allaire, and Ze Frank, among others. It's a good place to go if you want to get in the mood for our Futures of Entertainment 2 conference which is coming up in just a few weeks.

I participated several weeks ago in a really outstanding conference at the University of Utah. It's theme was "Frontiers of New Media: Historical and Cultural Explorations of Region, Identity, and Power in the Development of New Communications Technologies" and it featured some outstanding papers by a range of folks from Media Studies, Technology Studies, and history, dealing with everything from the introduction of the telegraph and the telephone to contemporary digital practices. I was honored to be asked to give the keynote address at this event and spoke about some of the contradictions in the "moral economy of 'web 2.0'." This talk was based on an essay which Joshua Green and I authored for a forthcoming collection on creative industries and is essentially the same presentation as I made a week or so ago at the Association of Internet Researchers in Vancouver. You can listen to the podcast of the Utah version here. While you are visiting the site, check out some of the other sessions. This was a consistently strong conference and offers you some glimpses into some of the best contemporary work in media history.

Bill Densmore was nice enough to record and post the audio from my recent keynote address at the recent conference, "Creating and Learning in a Media Saturated Culture," which was organized by Home Inc. and hosted at MIT by our program. Here, I was trying to explain some of the governing ideas behind our New Media Literacies initiative, having things to say about Soulja Boy, Herman Melville, Digital Natives, and Cosplay, among other topics.

Meanwhile, the Program has played host to a range of interesting guests and as always, we are posting podcasts of these events as soon as possible. Here's some you might have missed:

Andrew Slack of the Harry Potter Alliance talked to our students about the ways his organization fuses fandom and activism. We are hoping to feature an interview here on the blog with Slack about his work before much longer.

Industry and cultural analyst B. Joseph Pine II shared some of his most recent thinking about "Technology and Media in the Experience Economy."

The Communication Forum and the Center for Future Civic Media hosted an event around the key question, "What is Civic Media?"

Media Strategist Lee Hunt shared with us his perspectives on the "best practices" in contemporary branded entertainment.

The MIT Communications Forum hosted a discussion on the nature of "Collective Intelligence" with Thomas Malone (The Future of Work) and others associated with his new Center on Collective Intelligence.

Coming Soon: Katie Salens on games and education.