Lex Ferenda

I appreciate that this is mentioned in various places on the Internet but i haven’t said it here, so…

Next week will be my last week at the University of East Anglia, where I have been since August 2008.  UEA has been a great place to work and the development of media@uea has been particularly fun to be involved in – and I will certainly miss my colleagues in the UEA Law School and elsewhere in the university.

Next month, I’ll take up a new post at the University of Edinburgh, as ‘Lecturer in the Law of Digital Media’.  I’ll be joining a great group of people, including those in the SCRIPT centre, and teaching on various courses, including the distance learning LLM programmes.  I’m looking forward to it, and will post more about what I’m doing up north over the course of the summer.

It has now been pointed out to me by three different people that this blog isn’t updated as often as it used to be (and the Inforrm Blog moved me to the Less Active category of its blogroll!).  This lack of activity is not unprecedented by any means (see for example this post at the end of May), but it’s a fair comment.  Indeed, I have been thinking about time allocation and blogging, mostly in the context of a report that I am writing as part of a professional development project.  Over the coming summer, I’ll be doing some further calculation on timing – in particular, how to reserve time for blogging within the teaching year.  Not easy!

In the meantime, I have a handful of incomplete posts – some are now too stale, but others are on the way.  During June, I posted two papers here, one being the publication in IJLIT about domain names (here) and the other being the work-in-progress on video-on-demand (all those hyphens, here).  June also included two further personal highlights, though.  The first was the viva for the PhD thesis I submitted in 2009  (discussed here).  As I posted through non-blogging means (Twitter and Facebook), it went well, and I passed subject to minor corrections.  If anyone’s interested, I’m happy to share some reflections on the viva and preparing for it.  The other highlight was my first visit to Gikii since 2007.  Gikii is an annual workshop like no other, and I attended the first version in 2006 and presented at 2007 (that presentation about net neutrality and cats).  But haven’t missed the last two years, I was particularly pleased to be able to get up to Edinburgh to attend the second day of the workshop and to talk about Google.  And that will be the subject of a post shortly after this one.

Meanwhile, I do post links through my public Twitter feed, @macsithigh (although I haven’t over the last couple of busy weeks, with the exception of live coverage of Gikii, again discussed in the next post).  Do follow me, if you are interested.  I don’t talk about my breakfast.  Unless it’s comes in virtual form and is the subject of a legal dispute.

Happy new year/decade! The various fixes and upgrades to this blog are more or less in place – one ongoing task will be to ‘tag’ all the posts, as I’ve finally given up on a dual system of categories and tags and will just use tags for everything. I will continue to blog (probably a few posts per week), with a tighter focus. I’ll be posting various quick comments on issues of Internet and media law (and related topics), as well as some ideas and early versions of academic work (and coverage of conferences and events I attend, where possible), and the occasional slightly off-piste post on teaching, research and working in a university more generally. In terms of other things, I’ll also have a weekly post on other things, but more on that next week. Thank you to those who commented on my December post and others who responded via email.

I started using Twitter early last year, and went through various phases of using and not using it. I do find it useful as a reader, although the way in which a feed can be dominated (at a random moment) by memes and major events does put me off. I never really advertised my presence, and I’m quite selective in that I block any ‘follows’ from spammers/aggregators/etc so as to preserve the ability to go ‘private’ in the future if I choose to go that way. For now, I’m going to be using it for posting links to interesting stories – again with a strong focus on Internet/media and linked into the use I make of this blog. If you’d like to see these links, then I hope you can follow @macsithigh – if it’s useful, I may post lists of links here too.

In the sidebars (particular note for those watching via RSS), you’ll find a partial blogroll (just a selection of links – I don’t intend to compile a comprehensive list), recent Twitter updates, a random selection of books from my office shelves (powered by the fabulous Librarything), and other things yet to be added.

Is this thing on? Hi. I’ll be doing some work on this blog over the Christmas / New Year period – some overdue design and maintenance issues, restoring a blogroll, and so on – but also finding a way to plan for blogging within the busier weeks of the semester, and also finding the balance between blogging and other forms of communication such as T*****r. I haven’t managed to post all that much in 2009 and would like to change that in 2010, and I still have mixed views about Twitter, which I’ve used as a bit of a linkblog, though in bursts of activity followed by periods of radio silence. Given the relationship between Lex Ferenda and my thesis between 2006 and 2009, I’ll also be doing some thinking about the purpose of ‘academic blogging’ in terms of my current job and the types of topics that could be covered here. I’d be grateful for any comments – what would you like to see more or less of? What level of detail do readers and commenters like to find?

Or thesis, to be more accurate…

Convergence and the right to communicate:
assessing the application of media law to the Internet

My PhD thesis is now completed, printed, bound and ready to be submitted to Trinity College Dublin. (There will of course be a defence or viva voce examination at a date to be determined, so this is not the end of the road, but somewhere on the final furlong, to mix my metaphors). I’m very grateful to Lex Ferenda readers for comments and feedback and for tolerating so many very early drafts of what hopefully became much more polished paragraphs. I’m also very happy, after (just under) four years, to have a big brick of a thesis sitting beside me and staring back at me as if to say ‘are you happy now?’

I’m not making the full text available on the Web at this stage (although I will do so, probably through something like the open-acccess Tara project, after it has been examined). However, you can download the summary and table of contents here, and see a representation of the text in Wordle form below!