Thursday January 03, 2008

Bruno Giussani and Ethan Zuckerman have created a handy guide for bloggers who are covering conferences or other events at which they would like to blog summaries of a series of talks. Tips for Conference Bloggers is available free here in PDF form as either a six-page document or in a three-page booklet format.

Based on my experiences blogging the last four Sun HPC Consortium conferences, the advice is all useful, though I do have some comments. First, I recommend writing your draft entries in a text editor rather than using blogging software, especially if you are unable to keep up and publish each summary within 10 minutes, as recommended by the authors. At the last Consortium meeting, I lost eight draft entries with no backup when ecto ate them. I'm assured by ecto's developer that this problem has been corrected, but this failure caused me such a huge problem and put me so far behind schedule that I now write my entries in emacs and then paste them directly into roller for publication. On overreaction perhaps, but I had committed to blog all of our customers' talks at this conference and had no recourse other than to spend many hours reconstructing my notes for those talks.

Also, while I agree that publishing talk summaries within 10 minutes is a good goal since it leaves you time to participate in the conference yourself rather than spending all of your time hunched over a laptop, you need to decide how much detail is appropriate for your event. In my case, I try to present a fairly detailed summary of each talk with a lot of content links, which takes time. And since one talk often immediately follows another, it is easy to fall increasingly behind as the day progresses. As the guide mentions, sharing the load with another blogger can be a great help. Also, early access to presentation slides can really help you preload your drafts with useful links and other material so you can publish your final entries more quickly.

Via one of my favorite sites, Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools. The CT discussion of the blogging guide is here.