Apropos this week's seminar, you might find it interesting to follow the "Peter phenomenon" - aka geriatric1927 (http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=geriatric1927). This raises interesting sociological aspects of vlogging, questions about demographics, and is also just a plain interesting event in the interplay between "internet celebrity," the role of the "old media," and the emergence of new forms of communities and social relations (who are perhaps hankering after that oldest and simplest of things: a familial narrative from elder members of a community.) Needless to say geriatric1927 has some very interesting things to say - worth following. Pay attention especially to the "video responses" and various spin-off videos that users have created: this is a "dialogue" in video and represents the emergence of a powerful "web2" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2) phenomenon.

One of the objectives of this unit is to examine how a collaborative enterprise like this vlog (and website, in general, if they can be dissociated) can both exist and subsist within [a] Institutional guidelines (UWA) [b] Creative Commons Guidelines [c] personal Intellectual Property guidelines.

As a participant in this community (and the site admin) I thought it would be appropriate that I keep a weekly blog as well - with some reflection upon how we're going, issues that arise and a few gentle reminders. Hopefully the first issue that I can provoke in your minds is that concerning appropriate content and issues of privacy - for yourself and others (we'll keep an eye on that cluster map on the top left hand corner and I'm tracking access through Google Analytics - which is very informative.) Whilst I don't want to assume a censorship role in this - that's the very last thing I would want to engage in - I do think that we need to establish some sort of code of ethics and practices regarding blogging and vlogging - something that we can all adhere to (more or less) and that we can evolve through discussion and, significantly, practice.

Hi All,

Your accounts have now been enabled on this site and you should have received an email with your username and password login details. If you haven't then I will post them on the webCT iGen site for you. Please keep them confidential. Any abuse of access will severely compromise your ability to participate effectively in this unit - we must be very careful about spammers and unwarrented access.

Before you start your proposal look around the "blogosphere" or "vlogosphere" (eg. http://community.vlogmap.org/ ) to get some inspiration - there's lots of good (and not so good) stuff out there.

Hi All,Timetable details will be uploaded over the next few days - some will not appear until Thursday morning and others by next week - due to unforseen delays in the website services being resolved.More details in this weeks seminar.

Hi Everyone,

This is my first post to the iGeneration site and I'm still working through some of the technical processes whereby we can manage the content that you will be submitting during the course of this semester (semester 2, 2006).

Drupal is a very powerful content management system, and will give you great insight into how to establish your own videoblogging facility as well as ask some serious questions about how "participatory culture" can be conformed by those who enact it.

You will need to understand that the site itself is dynamic - a work in progess - that only gets richer and more interesting the more we all actively work with it.

Looking forward to meeting everyone this Thursday (27/7/06) afternoon and seeing where we can go from there.

Important note: as this is essentially a cutting-edge experiment in how to run a unit using new and opensource software technologies (not to mention that you might want to use mobile phones) - there will be a few hiccups along the way - so I can only ask you to be patient and to pitch in yourself to help iron-out the bugs. Patience and participation is most definitely a virtue.