Stealth reporting

I came across some interesting stuff today about how to deal with the increase in blogging and twittering at conferences.

Having liveblogged JISC's Innovation Forum last year, I'm off to JISC09 in a couple of weeks to do a similar thing, so it's interesting to see the presenter's perspective covered...I'd never really thought about how intimidating it could look from up there on the platform, to see a raft of folk looking down at their laptops and typing away (me included).

It'll be fascinating to see how this year's speakers interact with the laptop audience, and whether they go down the route of actively incorporating material from the backchannel, especially as Twitter usage has become more widespread (and this is a fairly tech-heavy conference).

Hopefully I will have my exciting new netbook by then, so following what's going on on twitter and on the blogs (as well as the speaker) should be a lot easier - the laptop has a tendency to die with loud beeping after about 30 minutes, which doesn't do much for the stealth reporting.

The wanderer returns

Right, I'm back. It took a while, and was a delightful train journey (Virgin Trains, if you're listening, how about some more seats on your services?) but normal service is now resumed (ie, a blog post once in a while, if you're lucky).

You can read all the live blogs from the conference here, including those from a fantastic group of other bloggers. Nice to meet you all!

I'll try and organise some thoughts on liveblogging over the next couple of days (aside from dreaming up ways to make people talk slower).

Blogging. Live!

Hello! So here I am, blogging live from the conference where I'm liveblogging. This is getting rather confusing...

So far, the liveblogging is going well. I've typed more in the last 2 days than I have in the last two months (thank god for touch typing), and discovered that it's quite hard to listen, type and synthesise the argument all at the same time.

Some thoughts so far:

• get a clear brief from the client as to whether they're looking for verbatim (or almost verbatim) coverage, or more of an overview
• be very grateful if a session has a powerpoint presentation - it makes life much easier, and if you can get a copy of it, it can be embedded into the post to give some added oomph
• photos are great
• audio/video is even better
• make sure that the person chairing the session tells everyone to state their name and organisation before they outline a question (it helps if you have a participant list you can check this against)
• check out all the rooms beforehand, and work out where to sit based on where the power points are (they're often hard to find in an auditorium, and the last thing you want is loud beeping halfway through the session as your laptop battery slowly dies)
  

More thoughts to undoubtedly follow. Once my fingers have recovered.

Liveblogging (as opposed to dead blogging?)

The huge mountain of work continues, it's pouring with rain, and I'm wearing two jumpers. I guess that's my summer over and done with, then.

I shouldn't grumble, really. I've spent the last two weeks in 30 degree plus temperatures, been swimming every day, drunk a bathful of nice French wine (and discovered the delights of rum and coke - what can I say, I was virtually teetotal as a teenager so I missed out on this one), and eaten my entire body weight in cheese and croissants. It was pretty good while it lasted.

And while I might whinge about work, I shall actually be out and about next week, meeting real, live professional people. Woo! When you work at home (and have days where you get to 6pm and realise you've only talked to (a) the cat and (b) the two-year-old), you get quite excited about this sort of thing, you know.

Anyway, I'm off to a conference, to try my hand at liveblogging. While I might have been around on the interweb since March 2002, this will be the first time I've had to blog on the fly, and I have to confess to being a little nervous (some of the content will undoubtedly get quite technical in an area that I don't know a huge amount about).

I had a bit of a dig about on Google, and came up with some top tips on liveblogging from the great and the good. But does anyone have any other suggestions? All hints and tips gratefully received...