In the near-decade since “live blogging” events has been a thing, there has been debate about its utility – those arguments tend to extend to attendees live-tweeting, leading to an audience with noses buried in phones. I have tended to agree it’s generally not a bad thing, depending on the context of the event (see my post about how TedX Cambridge created an “atmosphere of attention”).
Another side to this is those running the event recruiting (or hiring) people to blog their events live, regardless of whether they encourage the audience to do so or not. At base, live blogging is simple: dispatches from the front, updated live, akin to the old teletype and telegraph updates from bygone media days.
I was asked to blog a few sessions at Blogwell in Boston today (Oct 22, 2013 – in fact, I am writing this as I wait for the event to begin). The setup is simple: just text updates on a standard blog post. In the face of more complex curation tools out there (like Storify), this is pretty bare-bones, but if I do a good job, the ideas I capture from listening (rather than trying to get photos and gather other observations) will make the posts focused, useful and accurate.
For myself, I am interested to see how this goes. I have done live social media for clients before, but somehow this feels a little bit more like a “reporter’s adventure.” We shall see..
(TO BE CONTINUED?)