how do you blog an event?
The talk among the bloggers at both BloggerCon & AoIR was the same. How on earth do you blog a conference?
This is a hard one. The drive, especially at technical conferences, is to blog the event -- immediately. But, how useful are those notes? Do the notes even make sense to anyone else?
There seem to be several options.
Type your notes as a series of unfinished sentence fragments & post them. If you were nice, you would bullet out full sentences & add a little formatting. Overall, this option makes it hard for the world to see what the heck was really going on because the text is disjointed & probably only makes sense to the blogger who took the notes.
Type an entire transcript. Wow. This is hard, to say the least. Even so, this is a great resource for the blogger & the readers.
Write a short blurb & link to someone else's extensive notes. With this option, you get the immediacy, but you don't drive yourself crazy trying to make sense in your posts.
Take notes & create a post around the notes. You can take notes either electronically or on pen & paper. Then, after you've had time to think about the presentation you can construct a logical & well-communicated post. This type of coverage is most beneficial for readers because they can get the meat of the event & your unique reflections.
Post a retrospective of the event. This is great because it provides your readers with a one-stop post with highlights & your thoughts.
Post the blurbs just to get it blogged -- then go back to clean it up later. This way you met the immediacy by getting it up but still provide the context needed to understand it all.
This question of how to behave & blog is not a new one. Dave Winer posted a picture & asked how many people looked "engaged" at BloggerCon. Most felt the group was rather engaged - both online & offline.
The answer of picking a blogging method for each blogger attempting to capture an event boils down to the audience. Are you your own audience or are you writing to share the event with people who couldn't be there? If you can answer that, then you should be able to pick a method that works best for you & your readers.
