Dr. Axel Bruns

Dr Axel Bruns is a Senior Lecturer in the Creative Industries-Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. He is Project Leader for Social Media in the Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre, and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi).

He is the author of "Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage" (2008) and "Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production" (2005), and the editor of "Uses of Blogs" with Joanne Jacobs (2006; all released by Peter Lang, New York). His book "Gatewatching" was nominated for the 2006 Communications Policy Research Award at Fordham University's Donald McGannon Communication Research Center, and he contributes to the Gatewatching.org group blog with Jason Wilson and Barry Saunders.

Bruns has coined the term produsage to better describe the current paradigm shift towards user-led forms of collaborative content creation which are proving to have an increasing impact on media, economy, law, social practices, and democracy itself. Produsage provides a new approach to conceptualising these phenomena by avoiding the traditional assumptions associated with industrial-age production models. His study of these environments builds on his work in the area of participatory or citizen journalism and blogging. In 2007, Bruns was a visiting scholar at the University of Leeds and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he further investigated the impact of produsage on democracy, citizenship, and the media. For more information about the produsage concept, see Produsage.org.

In 1997, Bruns was a co-founder of the premier online academic publisher M/C – Media and Culture, which publishes "M/C Journal", "M/C Reviews", "M/C Dialogue", and the "M/Cyclopedia of New Media", and he continues to serve as M/C's General Editor. In 2000, he also co-founded "dotlit: The Online Journal of Creative Writing", with Donna Lee Brien and Philip Neilsen from QUT's Creative Writing and Cultural Studies discipline. Bruns was the Web developer responsible for QUT's streaming media station EMIT, which began Webcasting in 2002.

Bruns's research interests are in produsage, blogging, citizen journalism, online publishing, virtual communities, creative industries, creative hypertext writing, and popular music studies. He has published a variety of articles in these fields, many of which can be found at his Website, snurb.info, and at Gatewatching.org and Produsage.org.