International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media

Contact Information
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March 30-April 2, 2008

Invited Speakers

Marc Smith

Microsoft Research
Bio

Marc Smith is a senior research sociologist at Microsoft Research specializing in the social organization of online communities and computer mediated interaction. He founded the Community Technologies Group, and is now part of the Internet Services Research Center at Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley.

He is the co-editor of Communities in Cyberspace (Routledge), a collection of essays exploring the ways identity; interaction and social order develop in online groups.

Smith's research focuses on computer-mediated collective action: the ways group dynamics change when they take place in and through social cyberspaces. Many “groups” in cyberspace produce public goods and organize themselves in the form of a commons (for related papers see: http://www.research.microsoft.com/~masmith). Smith's goal is to visualize these social cyberspaces, mapping and measuring their structure, dynamics and life cycles. He has developed a web interface http://netscan.research.microsoft.com) to the "Netscan" engine that allows researchers studying Usenet newsgroups to get reports on the rates of posting, posters, crossposting, thread length and frequency distributions of activity.

This research offers a means to gather historical data on the development of social cyberspaces and can be used to highlight the ways these groups differ from, or are similar to, face-to-face groups. Smith is applying this work to the development of a generalized community platform for Microsoft, providing a web based system for groups of all sizes to discuss and publish their material to the web.

Smith received a B.S. in International Area Studies from Drexel University in Philadelphia in 1988, an M.Phil. in social theory from Cambridge University in 1990, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA in 2001.

David Sifry

Bio

Dave Sifry is an American software entrepreneur and blogosphere icon known most recently for founding Technorati, a leading blog search engine. He also lectures widely on wireless technology and policy, weblogs, and open source software.

Sifry grew up on Long Island, and learned to program on a Commodore PET. He decided that he would move to Silicon Valley and start a company when he was still a teen. After studying computer science at Johns Hopkins University, he worked for Mitsubishi.

Sifry cofounded Sputnik, a Wi-Fi gateway company, and Linuxcare.

He has been a founding member of the board of Linux International, and a technical advisor to the National Cybercrime Training Partnership for law enforcement [1].

Brad Fitzpatrick

LiveJournal Founder, Hacker
Bio

Brad Fitzpatrick was the founder and CTO of Danga Interactive, best known for the popular community blogging and social networking site LiveJournal.com. Fitzpatrick grew LiveJournal from its early days as a hobby project in college to a site with over 13 million accounts. Throughout LiveJournal's history, Fitzpatrick led the development of a number of open source tools and projects including memcached, OpenID, MogileFS, Perlbal, and DJabberd. Since August 2007, Brad has been working at Google.