Is Live Blogging Good For Conferences?
I caught a post by Darren Rowse, “Tips on Live Blogging an Event” last week in my feedreader, if you don’t know him he’s an Aussie who’s making SIX FIGURES from blogging. Hmm, guess this thing is real after all 
The post makes me recal many conversations we’ve had with the event chairs for TorontoTechWeek as to whether we wanted to provide Internet for live blogging or not. I’ve often said that you can look at things from three points of view and here is how I see it as far as live blogging:
- Speaker – people in the audience can’t give their full attention to a speaker because they’re trying to remembe if it is “e before i or i before e.”
- Attendees – constant keyboard clicking, it has to be distracting, oh way what site are they surfing now?
- Event Organize – all that time and effort into building great content and this all this person isn’t paying full attention because they’re trying to get every single comment made instead of let the points sink in
I’ve been to enough events and conference to see it occur on people blogs or on Twitter, but overall I don’t see the value and think it is more of a distraction than a benefit. What do you think?
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It all depends how live “live” is. The “live” that you are describing, minute-by-minute, is a distraction and I believe it takes a lot away from the conference. That being said, I am not sure it is quite as one-sided. I actually spend a lot of time scribbling notes by hand at a conference (much easier than balancing a laptop), so even without blogging there is a fair amount of “trying to get every single comment made”. Some people take no notes, some people live blog, others are somewhere in between.
The interesting question will be when laptops all come equipped with good quality microphones and voice to text software…no more distracting clicking and verbatim transcription of every word, save for a few errors the software makes.