Biography:

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 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.