I just finished a lot of work identifying the participants in the WebCred conference. Perhaps I shouldn't call it the "webcred conference" since I have a lot more faith in the commitment to quality research and analysis from the broad base of people who blog, than I do from the single threaded well capitalized media outlets. The corporate influence, the inability to sort revenue stream from mission has pretty well eroded my faith in a lot of pint media and certainly all broadcast media. My work here was by and large an effort to objectively flesh out information on everybody on the participant list. Sitting here on the farm near Madison, Wisconsin, I'm pretty much a country boy trying to make sense of you all.
Here are links to the posts I assembled in order to provide more information on the conference attendees than was on the participant list at the conference blog site:
... click here for participants whose last names begin with A and B.
... click here for participants whose last names begin with C through shining G.
... click here for participants whose last names begin with H through K.
...click here for participants whose last names begin with L through Q.
...click here for participants whose last names begin with R through S.
...click here for participants whose last names begin with T through Z.
Now that I've finished that work, what will I do with it? First, I thought some simple-minded head counts might be interesting. The ALA is a cosponsor and there are two librarians and an IT person represented from that arena. One of the librarians doesn't appear to have a blog.
The conference title is Blogging, Journalism, and Credibility. The first two nouns in this string are easy. A Venn diagram of the participants will show us that of the forty-eight people on the list, x are journalists, y are bloggers, and z are neither. There will be overlap between x and y. Big whoop. Blogging is more and more a medium for journalism, the op-ed relationship has long been recognized and accepted, the "objective," "ethical journalism" perspective is longer in coming and the gaming that goes on by people like Teachout, whether conscious or ditzoid will have an effect on the mass media credibility index of bloggers as sources perhaps, but ultimately truth will out.
Call me Pollyanna.
So what's the gender breakdown? 13 women out of 48 participants. Other counting we might do would be academia, funding organization, working journalists, tech folks. How about a doers versus learners breakdown in both web publishing and trad-journo production?
I think there are some interesting answers in the information I pulled together, but I wonder what are the interesting questions?
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