Citizen journalists of the Internet will meet next week for a three-day, multi-part conference on Web logging, commonly known as "blogging," hosted by Belmont University and the Media Bloggers Association.
"BlogNashville will bring many of the new medium's top practitioners and thinkers to one place to discuss the current and future of blogging," says Bill Hobbs, Belmont's public relations specialist and blogging coach in the school's office of marketing and communications.
"Blog" is short for Web log, generally a personal online journal that is intended for public consumption and participation. Online writers, or "bloggers," commonly express their opinions and share information on blogs, which are usually centered on a particular topic, like politics or news.
The conference will be held May 5-7, with most sessions on Belmont's campus and some at Vanderbilt University. Hobbs said the event will include breakout sessions, training, panel discussions and informal social gatherings.
The event is free and registration is available online at blognashville.org, but the conference is limited to 300 participants.
"So far, we have 221 people registered," Hobbs said Monday.
The conference will feature experts in the new communications field, including Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor who maintains instapundit.com, a popular blog that Reynolds describes as an "intersection between advanced technologies and individual liberties."
Sessions include discussions on various types of blogging, including audio and video blogging, faith-based blogging, military blogging and building "blogspheres", which are Internet group blogs.
MTSU digital media professor Jennifer Bailey Woodard said she plans to attend the conference and has also encouraged her students to attend.
"I am hoping to get some new connections, do some networking and find ways of integrating blogging into our classes," Woodard says. "We are looking at setting up group blogs for our classes."
The effects of blogs on journalism and the mainstream media are among the topics Woodard said she hopes to learn more about at the conference.
"Blogging is such an individual undertaking, and some blogs are certainly more credible than others," Woodard says. "Internet blogging is so wonderful and yet so strange. It opens up the media to the world, but adds more credibility problems. But it does allow those who never had a voice to have one."
Hobbs said that the instantaneous nature of the Internet helps to keep bloggers accountable for what they publish.
"Blogs have a self-correcting dynamic," Hobbs says. "If I publish something factually inaccurate on a blog, it will be pointed out immediately by other bloggers, and because it happens in real-time, errors are often corrected right on the blog."
Among the topics scheduled during the conference is legal protection for bloggers and using the Internet and blogs as research tools for journalists.
Hobbs said the legal session will discuss what legal protections bloggers can expect under the First Amendment and what standards should be followed to avoid slander and libel lawsuits.
"This is a new area of law. We don't really know if bloggers are covered by the same legal protections as journalists," Hobbs says. "Can bloggers protect their sources?"
Hobbs said the session on computer-assisted reporting and research, often called CARR, is intended to help journalists use the Internet for research and fact-checking.
Mark Tapscott, a conservative journalist and director of media relations for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, will lead the session along with a representative from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a policy watchdog group for the middle to low-income families and individuals.
"Tapscott pioneered this type of training using the Internet and database to improve reporting," Hobbs says, "but we didn't want to appear partisan, so we made sure that we had representation from a more liberal group like the CBPP as well."
Hobbs says one of the highlights of the event will be a roundtable discussion on "anoniblogging," which will be held at the Freedom Forum on Vanderbilt's campus. Anoniblogging is technology designed to hide the identity of the blogger, which allows bloggers to publish with less fear in countries with repressive governments.
Participants in the anoniblogging discussion include Rebecca MacKinnon of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Mark Glaser of the Online Journalism Review, and Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian based in Toronto whose blog is popular in Iran and who has aided other Iranians in publishing their own blogs.
"Iran now has the second highest number of bloggers in the world, after the U.S.," Hobbs says.
Woodard says she hopes to gather information at the conference that will determine if blogging will become part of the curriculum at MTSU, possibly as part of courses offered as early as this fall.
"We want to teach mobile media - where a reporter is using a laptop, a cell phone, a digital camera, reporting live from the scene," Woodard says. "We also want to plan an Internet magazine coalition, do a variety of things, including publishing a Web newspaper. Blogging could be part of that. We are not that heavily into blogging here yet. That's what we hope to learn."
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