Web Cred... the players (T through Z)

Blogging, journalism, and credibility... this week's conference at Harvard will be blogged and webcast, and I understand there will be an IRC channel.  Those of us with an interest in the conversation will certainly have a chance to listen in.  This series of blog postings is aimed at helping those who attend (and I mean that in the broader sense, since physical attendance is limited) know a little more about who is talking and writing.  I'm attacking this in alpha order. Or really reverse-blog-alpha order.

... 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.

<disclosure> The following WebCred Program information includes material from many sources, from Wikipedia and Googling around to focused use of the High Beam Executive Search, a service that's reasonably inexpensive but that I get free because I pestered CBO Chris Locke. </disclosure>

Here we are at the end of the alphabet, last names starting with T through Z.  These are the kids who suffered discrimination-discrimination in their early school days.  For every authority figure who tried to avoid it, there were more who simply copped out and arranged things in alphabetical order.  These folks had plenty of time to meditate while waiting in line (or for the New Yorkers, on line, although they weren't online yet , most of them, because this was the analog voice telco era and all they could do was figure out a way to pass the time while the Aaronsons and the Adamses and the Bunburys got the best desserts and the best seats and the most recess and... well, I guess you get my drift.  I'm wondering if this alpha-discrimination discrimination is what gives this last section of the alphabet such a preponderance of bloggers?

Zephyr Teachout - Ms. Teachout's blog, Zonkette, relates,"I'm currently a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet, Law and Society, where I hope to write about the internet and comparative collective action solutions. I worked as Howard Dean's Director of Online Organizing in 2003-2004, and consulted for America Coming Together. I also ran very a small college organizing effort with Mitch Kapor. I graduated from Duke Law School in 1999, and in 2001, I co-founded The Fair Trial Initiative, a non-profit that trains lawyers for death penalty trial work. I also represented two clients on death row, and was involved in some interesting class action cases -- an amicus brief on behalf of vegetarians for the McDonalds' Veggie Fries case, and an effort to get North Carolina's Governor disqualified from making clemency decisions in cases where he had been the prosecutor. I have a masters in political science from Duke, and studied for my Ph.D for a while, with a focus on game theory, collective action, and comparative politics: my masters’ thesis was about Eritrea, Ethiopia, and a Game theoretic explanation for "successful" secessions. I do very sporadic consulting on community and list-building online and have no current clients."  Zonkette is now two weeks old, and to her credit, unlike Wonkette from whence the name, Ms. Teachout has expressed little or no interest in anal intercourse or penis jokes.

Susan Tifft - Susan Tifft is the Eugene C. Patterson Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University's Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy. She is the co-author, with her husband Alex Jones, of The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times (Little Brown, 1999), which won the A.M. Sperber Award for Exceptional Achievement in Writing and Research and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography. Her first biography, also co-authored with Jones, was The Patriarch: The Rise and Fall of the Bingham Dynasty, an acclaimed biography of the family behind the Louisville newspapers (Summit Books, 1991).

If Professor Tifft blogs, she does so in a manner that has eluded my slapdash research.  (We had to fire all the grad student research assistants last night because they appeared to be enjoying themselves.)

Before becoming a journalist, Tifft was a press secretary for the Federal Election Commission and the 1980 Democratic National Convention and a speechwriter for the Carter-Mondale campaign. She also served as director of public affairs for the Urban Institute. From 1982 to 1991 she was a national writer and associate editor for TIME Magazine, where she wrote major articles on politics, economics, foreign affairs and education. She has a master's degree in public administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. She divides her time between Durham, N.C., and New York City, where she lives on the Upper West Side.

I used to say I wanted Doc Searls' job, but having learned about Professor Tifft, my ambition has changed.

Joe Trippi - Zephyr Teachout's old boss. Joe Trippi heralded on the cover of The New Republic as the man who "reinvented campaigning" was born in California and began his political career working on Edward M. Kennedy's presidential campaign in 1980. His work in presidential politics continued with the campaigns of Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, Richard Gephardt and most recently Howard Dean.  If you are a Democrat running for president, you might want to consider this man's track record before hiring him.  Trippi blogs at JoeTrippi.com

Jimmy Wales - the brilliance, the energy, the inspiration behind Wikipedia, a superb online resource.  He blogs here from time to time.  No relation to Outlaw Josey Wales, but an Ayn Rand devotee, so probably a Clint Eastwood fan as well.

David Weinberger - David makes genius look easy. Author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined, and co-author of the cluetrain manifesto, he has long published an eZine (Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization) on the web, and authored a blog (JOHO).  He's a Berkman fellow working on a book on taxology or ontontonies or onomatopoedia or something.  The whole del.icio.us and FlickR tagsonomy/folksonomy thing can be expected to yield to his analysis.  Deserves a place at everybody's table but unfortunately he's a vegetarian so if you're serving pot roast or something, well... throw on a little lentil soup too.

Rick Weingarten - Dr. Weingarten is Director of the Office for Information Technology Policy of the American Library Association, where he does research and analysis of the policy implications of new technology for libraries and librarians. He is also on the adjunct faculty of the College of Library and Information Services at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he teaches information policy. For the previous three years, he has held the dual positions of Senior Policy Fellow for the ALA and Director of Public Policy for the Computing Research Association (CRA), a scientific association of academic Computer Science and Engineering Departments and industrial research laboratories. For five years, he served as the first full-time Executive Director of CRA.  he appears to be too busy to blog

Dave Winer - Blogospheric personality, entrepreneur, innovator, key figure in addressing the challenges of interoperability, Dave Winer has been blogging at Scripting News since before we called it blogging.  As a Berkman Fellow he was responsible for organizing two BloggerCons at Harvard, and this fall he took the show on the road to Stanford.

Ethan Zuckerman - Ethan's resume contains the information that he is a lousy but enthusiastic woodworker.  He is also an entrepreneur, a founder of Geekcorps, a key player in addressing global digital divide issues, and a research fellow at Berkman focused on writing a number of papers on the role of open source software in developing nations, information technology and economic opportunity in developing nations and technology transfer using volunteers. He spearheads a project called DevelopmentForge, designed to create a codebase of open source software for international development purposes, developed in cooperation with bilateral and multilateral aid agencies. He designed a set of Open Source tools  called Global Attention Profile that provide a comparative, quantitative profile of a media source’s coverage of different nations.  Ethan blogs here.

Jonathan Zittrain - Professor Zittrain is the Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman Assistant Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, and a director of its Berkman Center for Internet & Society. His research focuses on the technologies and politics of control of Internet architecture and protocols, the influence of private intermediaries on online behavior, and the future of open source software. He also has a strong interest in creative, useful, and unobtrusive ways to deploy technology in the classroom.  It does not appear to me that he maintains a public blog.

A lot of conversation is emerging on the conference blog site regarding who has been invited and why.  Zephoria (danah boyd), a blogger and PhD candidate at Berkeley says this about her work:  "I'm interested in how people negotiate their presentation of self in mediated social contexts to an unknown audience. I study social technologies...".   Me too.  The social context of this meeting is enormously interesting as are the social technologies surrounding it.  Many bloggers are journalists.  Not all of them have studied at Medill or Mizzou.  Politics, funding, personal achievement and discipline, quality of thought and direction of interest are combined here in an era of rapid change in media, presentation, and control.  Just as Usenet norms and standards developed, so also are these standards developing in the online publishing communities of the blogosphere.

I hope that my "program," this modest attempt to broaden an understanding of who the participants are and the level of interest they represent, is accepted in the spirit it is offered.  If I've had a little fun with some of the people as I slogged through assembling this material, I hope even the humorless will forgive that.  Let me know if you run across broken links, or whatever.