21.8.07

Invite: Relevant Parties Excluded

A conference on blogging that won't let in prototypical bloggers? Doesn't sound like the best idea, now does it?

Information Week discusses the "Blogging Convention Open Only To Traditional Press" (aka blogworld).

"Press credentials are open only to accredited members of the professional media and will require submission of articles and verification that you intend to write for a publication on the conference."
Wikipedia entry for "Publication": To publish is to make publicly known, and in reference to text and images, it can mean distributing paper copies to the public, or putting the content on a website.

[Update] A reader's comment made me realize I need to clarify this post:

The point of interest here is the Expo's muddled self-referential exclusion, not a protest of the exclusion per se. The Expo wants to clarify what blogging is and help bloggers establish themselves as new media. Yet, in the same stroke, the conference is unable to properly sort out bloggers from journalists effectively without getting caught in the tangle of the very definitions it's attempting to sort out. That is the point. I skipped underlining that because I thought it was self-evident.

4 Comments:

Mark said...

I like the "require submission of articles" statement, in other words. You need to submit your blogs to us to make sure the message we want is being sent out.

Anonymous said...

How else could they do it? They're trying to get conference attendees--an audience comprising almost exclusively bloggers or other media types--to shell out several hundred dollars to attend. How many spots are they going to fill at full price if they hand out press credentials to anyone who can register a blogspot site?

melanie said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
melanie said...

True, but the irony was too juicy. I added a clarification to the original post. Heh, oops. Thanks for calling me on that.