Saturday Conference Schedule
We're pleased darned excited to have all of the following discussion leaders at ConvergeSouth 2006:
(Complete bio information can be found here.)
 Elizabeth Edwards shares her husband's deep commitment to improving the daily lives of all Americans and making sure that everyone in this country has the opportunity to succeed. A passionate advocate for children and families, as well as an accomplished attorney, she has been a tireless advocate for many important causes.
Elizabeth is the daughter of a decorated Navy pilot. In her early years, she attended school in Japan, where her father was stationed with a reconnaissance squadron, flying missions over China and North Korea.
As an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Elizabeth majored in English. She went on to study American literature but then switched to law, graduating from UNC Law School in May 1977. Elizabeth has an impressive legal background. Following law school, she clerked with U.S. District Court Judge Calvitt Clarke, Jr. in Norfolk, Virginia. Later, she worked for the North Carolina Attorney General's office and then was a bankruptcy lawyer in Raleigh, North Carolina.
read the rest >>
Photo credit: Justin Sullivan, Getty Images and USA Today
Robert's topic: 10 Ways to a Killer Blog.
 Robert's full bio is on Wikipedia. Bullet points that we like are:
• His mother worked for Apple Computer
• Robert was born in New Jersey in 1965
• Scoble has long been a prominent advocate of both RSS technology and the Tablet PC.
• Before joining Microsoft, he worked extensively with Microsoft technologies in a professional capacity at NEC Mobile Solutions, where he was sales support manager, and UserLand Software, where he was director of marketing.
• Robert Scoble joined Microsoft in 2002 (and left in 2006).
Read his whole bio here. Photo borrowed from here
 Maryam Scoble is a programming director at PodTech.net. Previously, she was a Webcast producer for MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network). She has spoken about the emotional life of blogs at blogging conferences such as Northern Voice in Canada and Blogher in Silicon Valley. She has also been working in the event industry since 1995. She worked for Fawcette Technical Publications from 1999-2002 and planned the content of industry conferences such as VSLive!, SQL2TheMax, and Web Design World.
Maryam finished her undergraduate studies at U.C. Berkeley and has an M.A. in English Literature from Mills College, California. Maryam’s husband, Robert Scoble, is none other than the “Scobleizer” and a strong presence in the tech blogging community, so Maryam spends her free time blogging about living, loving, and working with geeks as well as life, love, and everything else.
Photo credit
Wendy Warren
Wendy Warren is the Assistant Managing Editor for the Philadelphia Daily News. Her bio and photo will be online soon. We promise not to use the photo on the Girlfriends' Locker Room site unless Wendy says it's OK.
 The Facts: Reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer since 1988. Knight Ridder Berlin correspondent, 2000-2003. Latest job: covering the business of entertainment. Before that, reporter for The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky., and The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star in Norfolk, Va. B.A. in American Studies, Northwestern University. M.S.J. in Journalism, Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism.
The Vision: Someone in journalism school was describing the proper way to tell a story: imagine you're at a dinner party, explaining what had happened that day to the professor sitting across the table, as the server's husband, a trucker, is eavesdropping from the doorway. Over the years, I've preferred imagining I was talking to the trucker while the server's wife, a professor, was listening in. But you get the point. Conversational, compelling, correct, is what I'm going for.
Photo credit
Doug Fisher
 Doug Fisher blogs at Common Sense Journalism, among other journalistic and educational vocations and avocations.
Fisher is a veteran journalist who most recently spent nine years as a news editor for The Associated Press. His interests are in reporting, precision writing, ethics, media economics, and new ways to manage the increasing flow of information so that reporters and editors, as well as consumers, do not suffer “information burnout.” He began his career in radio and television, became a newspaper reporter and then was a fellow in the Kiplinger Public Affairs Reporting Program at Ohio State University before joining the AP in 1983.
Among the major stories he has covered or helped cover were the shooting of civil-rights leader Vernon Jordan; the return of those who fled to Canada rather than serve in Vietnam; the collapse of credit union systems in Ohio and Rhode Island; the largest evacuation at the time after a hazardous chemical accident outside Dayton, Ohio; and development of many of the Air Force’s secret weapons, including the stealth fighter, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton. He has covered legislatures in Indiana, Ohio, Rhode Island and South Carolina; has covered or helped direct coverage of presidential campaigns dating to Jimmy Carter’s; and directed the AP’s coverage in South Carolina of the Susan Smith murder case and trial and of numerous hurricanes. His work exposing flaws in management of the federal revenue sharing system won a San Francisco State University award.
Session Topic :The Big Bang II: Learning to Love Chaos.
 Jim Rosenberg, author of the blog Mr. Sun, is a veteran of online humor. Mr. Sun has received national attention for its original humor and unique voice. Jim spoke at SXSW, adding his take on Humor on the Web as an invited conference panelist. Prior to Mr. Sun, Jim was the author of Mr. Monologue, a personal challenge to write a Leno/Letterman style comedy monologue that became one of the most popular original humor e-mail newsletters of its kind, with over 15,000 opt-in subscribers and a national following.
At various times, Jim has been a paid writer of humor for radio personalities, music reviews for the local newspaper, columns for alternative weeklies, and also served for nearly ten years as the on-air moderator for the "High I.Q. Bowl," an academic competition among North Carolina's brightest high school minds. Jim currently writes a weekly Sunday humor column for the News & Record. In addition to his creative interests, Jim enjoys spending time at home in Greensboro with his two sons, and pursuing his business career with the same spirit of creativity that fuels Mr. Sun.
Who's helping?
Stewart Pittman
Anthony Piraino
The Greensboro Blogging Community
Session Topic: The Greensboro Model - Where is the Participation?
 Lex Alexander, 46, has been a writer and editor, in print and on the Web, for the News & Record of Greensboro since 1987. He has received national honors for his religion reporting and state press honors for his political reporting, column writing and book reviews. A native of Charlotte, he has a degree in English from Davidson College and lives in Greensboro with his wife, 8-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son.
Click here for Lex's N&R blog
Photo credit Sean Coon
 As editor, John is in charge of the news, features and sports content of the News & Record and www.News-Record.com. He has been at the News & Record since 1985, when he started as an assistant city editor. Since then, he’s been city editor, assistant managing editor, editorial page editor and Team Management coach. He has been editor of the paper since 1999. One common misconception: He is not in charge of or involved with the newspaper’s editorial pages. That is the purview of Editorial Page Editor Allen Johnson.
Born in Virginia and reared in Oklahoma, John graduated from high school in Raleigh and earned a B.A. at St. Andrews Presbyterian College in Laurinburg. He has taught school in Salisbury, helped build a mental health hospital in Raleigh, edited a magazine in Norfolk, Va., and worked at newspapers in Monroe, Asheville, and Raleigh.
John is a member of the Rotary Club of Greensboro and attends Christ United Methodist Church in Greensboro. He and his wife, Susan, a Greensboro native, have two daughters. Most weekend days and many weekday nights, he can be found pacing the sidelines of a soccer field, cheering in the stands at a high school softball game or in the yard, trying to make the house presentable. He also reads, preferably Larry McMurtry, Elmore Leonard, or Barbara Kingsolver, jogs and watches his hairline recede.
Click here for the News & Record Home Page Photo credit
 As editorial page editor of the News & Record, Allen leads editorial board meetings, edits most editorials and writes some of his own. He also screens letters to the editor and writes a weekly column. He relishes the chance to discuss issues that affect his hometown’s future. Allen joined the News & Record in 1987 as features editor. In 1992 he became sports editor, and in 1999, editorial page editor.
A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill in English, Allen also received a master’s degree in journalism from UNC-CH. From 1981 to 1987, he lived and worked in Winston-Salem as editor of the weekly Winston-Salem Chronicle.
Photo credit
 Ed Cone is a longtime blogger, veteran unconference participant and instigator, and early proponent of local blogging. He works as a senior writer at Ziff Davis Media, where his case study on the use of the Internet by the Howard Dean campaign won some kind of award or something, and also contributes an opinion column to the [Greensboro] News & Record. Ed has been a contributing editor at Wired, a staff writer at Fsorbes, and a freelancer for publications great and small from Paris and North Carolina. He is a native of Greensboro, where he lives with his wife, Lisa, two kids, and a dog.
Click here for at least one of Ed's day-job blogs
Photo Credit
In 2001, Bill Wood joined the NCAT Registrar's Office as a Information Systems Liaison, mostly performing registrar functions and Focus/Web Focus programming and implemetation. My first big project was to be the traveling one man show to implement Web For Students and Web For Faculty, placing all course registration and grades processing online, as well as the transcript and course matriculation of studen academic carreers online. He has a degree in Construction Management and has done VBS/Excel and Web site development.
Bill is now the Help Desk Manager at NC A&T State University but is much easer to find on the Battlefront Forums as Wilhammer, espeically in the often heated General Discussion Forum. www.battlefront.com . Bill lives in Eden, NC, with my wife, Jean Ann, son Fred, 6 cats, one dog, and a gerbil.
Lisa Lewis
Lisa Lewis is co-leading the A&T student-oriented Facebook/Social Networking session.
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