Lisa Williams

Lisa Williams is the founder and CEO of Placeblogger.com, a Drupal-based aggregator and searchable directory of independent local blogs. She will be a panelist on the Drupal and the Knight Foundation session, which will talk about Drupal and its potential impact on news organizations. The Knight Foundation is a multibillion dollar foundation that is developing its focus on supporting the development of tools that will help news organizations and democracies thrive.

Since launching on January 1, 2007, Placeblogger has ammassed the largest available directory of local weblogs. Placeblogger was one of the winners of the Knight 21st Century News Challenge, and is currently funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Placeblogger is currently looking for developers who are interested in making significant contributions to how Drupal handles locations, mapping, and developing APIs.

Lisa Williams also runs H2otown, a community and news site for Watertown, MA, has been a project leader at the Center for Citizen Media and has consulted with a number of national media organizations and major metro news organizations. Her most recent project was working with the Boston Globe to implement a hyperlocal strategy. Lisa is also a 2007 Peter Jennings Fellow at the National Center for the Constitution.

Lisa’s been blogging since 2000 on her personal site and is a member of the Berkman Blog Group hosted by the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society. She was an active member of the iPodder team, doing outreach and documentation including the web movie Four Minutes About Podcasting. She’s been working with the Center for Citizen Media since June of 2006.
Lisa has spoken at many newspaper associations, universities, AEJMC’s annual conference, Bloggercon II and IV, BlogHer I and II, Media Giraffe’s Democracy and Independence conference, South By Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) and Citizen Journalism Unconference at Wikimania. In her previous career as a technology analyst, she spoke at many tech conferences. She’s been a consultant to national and local publications on the subject of blogging and community engagement online. She lives in Watertown, MA, with her husband and two children.