Jessamyn West is speaking at the Local Government Librarians’ Association of Western Australia conference here in Perth on Friday 2 March. Registration closes today.

Last night, I urged a friend to register for the session. She said:

“Weblogs???. My public library doesn’t even have enough money for bookstock and only recently automated - and you want me to go to a talk about blogging??”.

I filled her in on some of Jessamyn’s personal background - the former dreadlocks, the unusual marriage proposal in the middle of presenting a tech session at a conference, the session where she placed bunny ears on a library director, but most of all her passion for using her tech skills to help small libraries serve their communities better.

Last week, Jessamyn posted in abada abada a link to an article about her in the Valley News. If you haven’t already read the ALIA Librarians on the Edge article from last November, then this one provides a good background.

The fact that the author seemed to use so much material from Jessamyn’s blog, as well as interviewing her, got me thinking about how blogs relate to traditional print media. Much of the “truth” about her and her life seems to come from the picture she’s painted in her blog.

This suggested two trends to me:

1) Bloggers begin to control the mainstream media portrayal of what they blog about - a very extreme evolution of the press release. Instead of just reprinting a press release, as often used to happen, reporters begin sewing together pieces of a blog for news articles.

2) Maybe - and I saw no evidence of it in the article about Jessamyn - news media will begin “catch out the blogger” pieces, where they trawl through blog posts like Alex Hanson did - but then do more research on the bloggers’ life and reveal the bits that the blogger chooses not to show in some puff of scandal. “Scoble was in Chicago for a week back in 2001 and he didn’t mention it” Shock horror!