CCI's Director of Research, John Hartley, currently in London, has been invited by David Lammy, Minister for Higher Education and Intellectual Property, to the launch of a new research agenda which aims to provide robust evidence and policy insight into the economic value of Intellectual Property (IP).

Australia's most successful YouTuber, Natalie Tran, is not a stripper, a file sharing pirate or a cyber bully as popular wisdom about the nature of YouTube might have you think.

YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture, by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green analyses the most successful videos with some surprising results. This analysis of the most popular, most viewed, and most discussed YouTube clips found that it’s not just videos about cyber-bullying or bizarre accidents that top the charts.

Calling anybody who's ever used a computer: set your creativity loose on the world of music, literature, art and video that is free to play with, remix and manipulate.

Pooling Ideas is an exciting competition being run by Creative Commons Australia, ABC Pool and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation as part of the Ideas Festival (a major initiative of the Queensland Government). It aims to get the digital artist in all of us up and running by inviting people to create their own remix works based around the theme "we are what we share".

John Hartley is organising a high-level research workshop, jointly funded by FEAST (Forum on European-Australian Science & Technology research), to develop the dialogue between evolutionary economics, complexity theory and game theory (on the one hand) and creative industries, innovation policy and cultural studies (on the other).

The stream of publications arising from work to date, including those by the postdoctoral team, will increase in 2008.

Several research contracts with end-users were fulfilled during 2007. These include an agreement with Auran Games (Brisbane) to enable John Banks to undertake ethnographic research on the development and launch of a new MMOG (massively multiplayer online game) called Fury. With others in the CCI Hartley contributed to a technical research report for NESTA, the UK National Endowment for Science Technology & the Arts, to establish more accurate measures for the creative industries (including creative occupations embedded in other economic sectors). He also undertook research for David Jones Ltd on the use of child models in advertising and marketing.

In March 2007 John Hartley convened a research symposium on digital literacy with financial assistance from the ARC Cultural Research Network and State Library of Queensland. International keynote speaker Sir Ken Robinson and 30 other speakers interacted with over 100 researchers. We presented the Federation Fellow program and held a special workshop on creative innovation and education for the State Minister for Education and the Arts, the Hon. Rod Welford. The proceedings of this event are available as audio files online and are being edited for publication in Media International Australia.

John Hartley has been awarded a new ARC Linkage (LP0777006) on the uses of romance, with an APDI for Dr Kelly McWilliam (who had previously worked on the CCI’s New Literacy, New Audiences project), and a new ARC Discovery (DP0879596) on television in popular memory and nation-building in Australia. Both of these have extended the reach and the practical applications of the FF research.