Axel Bruns

Dr Axel Bruns is an Associate Professor in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and a Senior Researcher in the Smart Services CRC. 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 research Website is snurb.info, and he also 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. For more information about the produsage concept, see Produsage.org.

In 1997, Bruns was a co-founder of the 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. He is a member of the executive of the Association of Internet Researchers.