Axel Bruns

Who is Axel Bruns?

Dr Axel Bruns is an Associate Professor in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation.

Bruns is the author of Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage and Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production, the editor of Uses of Blogs with Joanne Jacobs and the co-editor of New Media Dynamics

In 1997, Bruns was a co-founder of the premier online academic publisher M/C - Media and Culture, which publishes M/C Journal and M/C Reviews, and he continues to serve as M/C's General Editor. In 2000, he co-founded dotlit: The Online Journal of Creative Writing

After a brief period studying physics in his native Germany, Bruns’ research focus changed to Media and Cultural studies. He completed a PhD at the University of Queensland in 2002 that analysed the emerging Website genre of Resource Centre Sites such as indymedia and Slashdot. Bruns found that ‘Resource Centre Site produsers engage in an adaptation of both traditional journalistic gatekeeping methodologies and librarianly resource collection approaches to the Web environment: in the absence of gates to keep online, they have become 'gatewatchers', observing the publication of news and information in other sources and publicising its existence through their own sites.’