Happy New Year from MediaCommons

I’m taking advantage of today’s palindromic date (01022010, which is kinda nifty) to send a brief message with warm wishes for the new year to all of the members of the MediaCommons community.

2009 was an exciting year for us — we launched our user profile system, which we hope to develop into a research-oriented social network bringing together scholars across media studies related fields, and we launched MediaCommons Press with the open peer review of my own book project, Planned Obsolescence. We’ve got more exciting projects forthcoming in 2010, so we hope you’ll get involved.

How? Well, you might:

… build your user profile. If you’re registered on the site, just log in or click on “My account” at top right, and then edit your profile to your heart’s content. The profile system allows you to aggregate writing that you do across the web, by adding in the feed from your blog, your Twitter stream, your Facebook updates, your Netflix queue, and much more. You can also create a rich list of your scholarly interests and import citations for your publications — and that last is most important, as we’re creating a rich bibliography that students and scholars in media studies will be able to use both to find key texts and to find potential collaborators.

… start a blog here. Every user account comes with its own blog; just click “Post” at upper right to, well, post. Links to recent blog posts appear in the block on the MediaCommons front page, and some get promoted to featured status, appearing on the front page of the site itself.

… plan a theme week for In Media Res. The call for curators is circulating via email, as well as on the IMR Facebook page. Contact the editors for more information.

… participate in the open review of Planned Obsolescence, as well as of the projects we’ll be publishing in the coming months. The peer-to-peer review process that we’re working toward, which will link the discussion in our CommentPress-based texts to the user profile system, will allow us to create the kind of community-oriented open review system that Planned Obsolescence argues for.

… propose a project of your own. MediaCommons is actively seeking new opportunities, so let us know what you’d like to work on here. These can be single- or multi-author publications reviewed through MediaCommons Press, or ongoing “journals” published through MediaCommons itself. We’d love to see proposals and to discuss the possibilities with you.

… help us develop the site itself. The core of MediaCommons is the Drupal platform, which has a rich developer community, but we’re always looking for new solutions and ideas for making the site even more powerful and user-friendly. What ideas for site features do you have — and even better, how might you help us develop them?

We look forward to continuing to work with you to make MediaCommons an even richer scholarly network in 2010.