Blogging Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum
While I’m looking forward to attending and blogging the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum in Sydney next month (Feb 19), I’ve decided I won’t attempt to “live blog” the event – i.e. writing and posting to my blog during the event and from within the live sessions.
It’s not that I don’t think there is a place for live-blogging: just that I believe that if I take notes – and hopefully some pictures – and write up the posts later the results will be more satisfactory.
For me anyway. After a couple of attempts at BlogWorld Expo to emulate the experienced live-bloggers I decided it wasn’t for me. Better for me to do a blogified version of what I’ve done for years in lecture rooms, at conferences and in seminars: listen attentively, take handwritten notes on one of those old-fashioned writing pad thingies, then put the blog posts together later.
Happy to do “conference blogging” or “event blogging”, just not live.
I’m still interested in the phenomenon of live blogging and a post from May last year but which I’ve read only today, by very experienced conference blogger Josh Hallett suggests to me that, not only is there a case to be made for live blogging, but that we should expect to see more of it, not less, as people become more adept at the multi-tasking involved. The Great Live Blogging Debate of 2007 post is well worth a read by anyone interested in the topic. Conference organizers for instance: I suggest that any conference organizer who is not currently across the issues would do well to remedy that, soon, or deal with headaches later.
And it was Josh’s How to blog a conference post last year that made me aware that to do a professional job of blogging a conference you needed to do more than just turn up, take notes, fire up your computer and post. In fact, I found his checklist of things to do and think about quite daunting. And also extremely helpful.
For anyone still keen on doing live blogging and interested in ways to make that more efficient, on Read/Write Web, Sarah Perez has a review of Coveritlive, the software product and service for live blogging and live, online and interactive coverage of events. Quite fascinating and you can see a demo on the site.
I have to admit that there is a little voice saying, “Wouldn’t it be cool to use a new Web 2.0 tool like this to enhance your blogging of the Enterprise 2.0 forum?” To which another voice in my head says “Yes, definitely cool, but the operative word would be ‘enhance’ and possibly – in my inexperienced hands and a venue I have not visited previously for a conference – it would be a complete shemozzle”.
Preliminary research online and by phone or Skype, then pad and pen, camera, take good notes, write up quickly after the event, post. For me, that’s a practical plan.
Taking a couple of leaves out of Josh Hallett’s playbook for conference blogging, here are a couple of transparency dot points:
- my blogging of the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum is by invitation of the man behind it all, Ross Dawson and in return, I get a pass to attend the event
- I see myself as a documenter of the event, not an analyst or critic – like Josh, my inclination at such events, is not to critique a presenter I am not impressed by but probably to focus more on others I find of more value.
Des Walsh
Business coach and digital entrepreneur. With coach training from Coachville.com and its Graduate School of Coaching, and a founding member of the International Association of Coaching, Des has been coaching business owners and entrepreneurs for the past 20 years. Over the same period he has also been actively engaged in promoting the business opportunities of the digital economy. He is a certified Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) coach, and a certified specialist in social media strategy and affiliate marketing.