I reckon I have been missing in action, fact is, I had to prepare my contribution to the Cross Media Storytelling Conference in lovely Mechelen, and yes, I did go to Mechelen, endless thanks to Annet Daems who organized the event (and invited me, thank you again) and Lieven and Sandra and Stijn and a lot of really nice people from the Katholieke Hogeschool.

A brief overview of the conference: much more online journalism and “citizen’s media” than I would have expected; my personal highlights:

Nico Carpentier, who spoke in depth about the different notions of participation, and how they all depend ultimately on power relationships, and the difference between participation and interaction (very compelling, although I didn’t really see the connection with cross media);

Greg Hayes,who pointed out how cross media users are not “users”, just audience anymore, they are participants, and how the future of cross media lies in collaborative storytelling and “live”, real-time, storytelling;

Erwin Jansen of These Days, highlighting the invasion of content in the advertising domain and presenting a number of very entertaining case studies, like the nonstopfernando campaign for AE airlines and the Coca Cola - Sue a Friend campaign;

Stef Wouters, talking about cross media storytelling - it was the first (well, the second, as Greg was on the first day) that I heard a coherent discourse about it;

Stan Van Engelen, presenting In Europa, a cross media documentary extending as a TV series, radio broadcasts, website and a lot of user generated content.

and of course my presentation “Marketing Cross Media: Towards a Narrative Interpretation of Experience(s)” - not sure it was my best performance ever as it was a bit of a last minute call, but it was the first unveiling of one of my academic topics, experience theory, something I will explore further on in future papers in the hope one day they will earn me a scholarship or some kind of job.

I was sorry to miss all the “journalism” presentations, it isn’t completely my topic but from personal conversations they seemed very stimulating, talking about the figure of the online mediator as the future of journalism and

The conference offered the service (is it a service? I am still not sure) of a blog with a lot of pictures, also working as a social network, made by the students, good work.