July 29, 2005
I just jammed a giant peice of banana bread in my mouth and added a BLOGHER category to theflink. I guess it's time to rev'er up.
Where Am I? At a nify wifi cafe in the mission district. I have a little while to brainstrom my live-blogging tutorial (embarrassing personal admission - I have never live-blogged before. I have no idea what to tell these people... I think I am going to make this a non-heirarchal learning opportunity , of neccessity)
Here is an unorganized list of some things to think about when you are covering your session:
Top ten things NOT TO DO
#1/ Don't tell anyone what the name of you session is or what conference you are at. Let them figure it out by clicking around, and, off your post.
#2/ Waste time on innoucous details such as; I am wearing my favorite yellow argyle sweater to this session . The banana bread at this conference is great, moist and not to sweet. DO get to the important details of the session and do your best to be concise even if it's not second nature.
#3/ Don't publish your post until the session is well-over. In fact spend about two hours after the session polishing off your language. Because "live" really means, when ther are no more spelling mistakes.
#4/ Don't spend more time explaining your opinion of what is beng talked about then what is actually said by the other people in the room, including the presenters. I mean, it's your blog, why waste time on reportage? If the other participants want to be heard, let them blog about it themselves, right?
5/ Whatever you do don't summarzie and don't try to give an impression of what the session highlights were. Just write a huge post where the important parts are buried inside expository paragraphs about a nit-picking argument between two participants overheard during the smoke break.
What you should try your best to do
1/ DO answer the 5 w's in the first paragraph.
2/ Do make use of summarizing sentences for presenters main points or themes.
3/ DO try to keep your paragraphs under 250 words (I think, this is one of the journalism standards things I haven't had to think about since I stopped writing for the university paper).
4/ DO publish your post at intervals during the presentation so that people can see what's going on as you are writing.
5/DO expand on the major threads of discussions that occur. Try your best to do some summarizing of those as well though, rather than giving a play by play.
*6/ MOST OF ALL. Remember that you are not writing for the people who are already at the conference, you are writing for the people sitting at home, so you need to be clear. Try not to use acronyms or jokes that are conference specific. if you refer to events or themes outside the scope of your session, reference them via links or tagging.
7/ Here is a decent article on using technorati for tagging in posts The tagged web and using Technorati. This explains the basic principals and gives a how-to. The tags are "blogher" and "bloghercon".
8/ Trackbacks are just a simple way to tap a post on the shoulder and say; "hey I am writing about this post." It's the way we will be getting excerpts of your entries to appear on the page about your session. For a better explanation take a look at this page of the Movable Type documentation.
Technorati tags: Blogher, Bloghercon,
Flickr tags (Same principle used here as in Technorati):Blogher, Bloghercon
Good luck everyone and I am looking forward to seeing you on Saturday if you don't make it to Fridays training session.
Photobloggers
Maybe we can talk briefly on saturday. I am less than a hobbyist as a photographer, so I probably don't have much to tell you about how to take good conference photos.
Continued from main page..