M’ learned colleague Pamela Henderson is liveblogging the keynote we’re all attending. It’s bliss — she’s busy typing away, I can lean back and listen and otherwise enjoy it. The future of liveblogging is definitely TeamLiveblogging… Meanwhile, here are Maharg’s Basic Rules for Liveblogging:
PREPARATION
- Make sure the room has wireless connectivity
- Sit beside a power source
- Connect phone cable to notebook (not necessary if you’re using a tablet eg iPad, but in that case use proper keyboard for speed typing)
BLOGGING
- Start right away, setting the paper & speaker, ideally linking to institution if possible, maybe even writing this frame before the session starts.
- Take photos of good slides, eg data hard to summarise, and insert into draft posting
- Summarise session with your own arguments in reply plus a sense of how worthwhile it was to listen to the paper
- Humour, wit, as well as a reasonably accurate account of the speaker is essential
- Use abbrev. wh: make the post authnetic as do typos so don’t worry about them, but txt in a blogz odd
- Link where poss and wh: time allows
- Tone: as you wish. I try to use direct, reportage, breathless, etc where very engaged, use distance & formality to signal disagreement with speaker, informality and intimacy to signal agreement.
- Publish at the end of the session
FINAL WRAP-UP
- What you thought of the conference generally. You can be gathering thoughts, quotes about this as you go, so not necessary to have this up by the conference end, but within a day is best.
Actually, now I see them, there’s a lot more to it as a form of reportage. Interesting to compare this form of liveblogging to other types eg in sports, for instance the liveblogging of Andy Murray on the The Guardian site.