EuroITV2009 is a forum for professionals not only from Europe, but from all over the world who are interested in, work with and do research on all aspects of interactive television. The conference will be held in the lively university town of Leuven, Belgium on 3, 4 and 5 June 2009.

The theme of the 7th European Interactive TV Conference is ‘Networked Television’. Interactive television is becoming one piece in a bigger puzzle of different interconnected devices. This not only has technical implications, but also impacts users and television viewers.

Blogger Wars: How the New Media are Changing the Presidential Contest
Panel Discussion and Debate: What’s Hot and What’s Not!
Host: Ned Lamont, adjunct professor of political science and philosophy, CCSU
Panelists:
Dan Gerstein – political communication consultant and communication director for Joe Lieberman
Colin McEnroe – talk show host on WTIC and columnist for the Hartford Courant
Mark Pazniokas – reporter for the Hartford Courant
Tim Tagaris – internet campaign manager for Chris Dodd and Ned Lamont
Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2008, 11:00 AM
Philbrick-Camp Room, Student Center

Of course, I always think of better answers to questions after the fact, and when Professor Ersinghaus asked about the difference in blog traffic I don’t feel like I had a satisfactory answer. CT Bob and I (not to mention all of the other local blogs) had amazing levels of traffic last year during the campaign, especially while the CT-Senate race was the only major political story in the country. One reason we had so much traffic is that the more work that we put into our sites, the more traffic we pulled in. That explains how we got things going, and how we keep things going, but it doesn’t explain the wicked high traffic from last year. I don’t think the eyeballs disappeared, I think they just moved on to the next big thing, whatever it happened to be.

My question was this: was there a cause and effect relationship between national and local “traditional” media coverage and increase in traffic given that weblogs themselves have become a “subject” of the news? It’s not that great of a question. But here’s the premise. Major contemporary/traditional media still caricatures the weblog. CNN has a segment called blog watch where a speaker brings the watcher up to speed on issues covered on a “kind of” weblog. This method marginalizes and excludes weblogs hence marginalizing and excluding the people behind them (Exclude? you ask. Sure, there are more than one kind of weblog). I find the segment inane because it turns the world of the weblog into something to “watch.” What Blog Wars makes clear to some extent is the participatory nature of the weblog. A “traditional” aspect of the weblog is that many people may read them but don’t “participate” in them or manage their own. Blog Wars featured Daily Kos, a hybrid format weblog, emphasizing community participation through polls, comments, and yes, its adverts. It could be argued that Kos, like Second Life, derives its strength through its participants, not by Markos Zúniga and its contributing editors.

Traditional media tends to restrict new media to “a thing” on the Internet. We here at this weblog believe that things on the Internet are complicated systems designed by people not just things to “watch.”

The 2007 Boston Cyberarts Festival takes place April 20-May 6 at museums, galleries, theatres, universities, and public spaces in and around the Boston area. The Festival is the first and largest collaboration of artists working in new technologies in all media in North America, encompassing visual arts, dance, music, electronic literature, web art, and public art.

Organizers Politecnico di Milano have announced Learning with Games (LG2007), a conference focused on serious games scheduled to take place from September 24-26 at France’s Grand Hotel Mercure Sophia Country Club and Sophia Antipolis Science Park.

The Integrated Media Association’s 2007 conference is scheduled for February 20-24 in Boston with lots of big ideas to consider for the future of broadcast networks and media.

As we reach the end of 2006, the “Echo-Boom” in online service continues unabated–and from what we can see, the processes may actually be accelerating.

Most of the expansion can be traced directly to four basic factors:

• First, the continuing roll-out of broadband connections, allowing increased use of complex online applications;

• Second, the emergence of massive communities, involving both interaction and individual expression; and,

• Third, increasing acceptance of and confidence in online financial transactions, allowing for a steady expansion of online retail; and

• Fourth, the movement of online marketing dollars .

These advances are interwoven with a sweeping change in approach, often called “Web 2.0,” which views “The Web [as] a platform, a foundation upon which thousands of new forms of business would emerge.” This shift in thinking focused practitioners on the inherent power of networks where radical decentralization and “the wisdom of the masses” could produce impressive results–like Wikipedia or open source software–that rival the products created within traditional proprietary, centralized systems. For more on this see Ellyssa Kroski’s excellent analysis of the “Hype and Hullabaloo of Web 2.0″.)