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Tips forconferencebloggers
Always start with the battery of your laptop fully charged, evenif you’re sitting next to a powerplug. Remember that the laptopcan get hot, so if you’re holdingit on your lap, put some paddingunder it (some experienced con-ference bloggers use a lapdesk-- see laptopdesk.net). Sit downand get ready before the ses-sion starts, so you won’t disturbother attendees with laptop un-packing. This will also allow youto check the WiFi connectivitybefore the speaker goes on stage. And keep a bottle of water handy-- you will get thirsty.Don’t sit in the front rows (un-less you’re taking pictures of thespeakers), because you distractpeople around you with your typingand thosebehind you with the lightof your screen. Sit to the side or inthe back, near the power plugs.Big events often have overowrooms or media rooms where you can watch the speakers onsimulcast TV and blog comfort-ably. Some conferences offer spe-cic spaces for bloggers. If you’resitting in the main room, evenin the back, minimize the dis-turbance for the people around you, and do let them know that you’re blogging (so they won’tthink that you’re just ignoringthe speaker and doing e-mail).Conferences usually give out aprogram ahead of time. Use it toprepare for blogging:Do a quick Google search foreach speaker, and save (in thesame text le) links to theirsites, blogs, and the institutionsthey’re afliated with; write aone-or-two-sentences “biogra-phy” for each; and for the speak-ers you’ve never heard of, try toget a general sense of who theyare and what they do.To write the mini-biography, usealso the speaker informationdistributed by the conference or-ganizers (booklet, website, etc.).For the key speakers, save a pic-ture on your laptop (from their websites) and pre-format it for Web use, in case you will needit.If you prepare sufciently, you’ve got the rst paragraph of each post almost written aheadof time.
tools location PreParation
Blogging a conference is an intense and rewarding activity.This document offers some basic tips on how to approach conference blogging.
Copy/paste or type the name of each speak-er and the title of his or her talk into a text(Word) le.
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Tips for conference bloggers
You can choose to write yourposts either directly in the blog-ging tool interface or in a textle:- If you work directly in the blog-ging tool, you should rememberto save the unnished post as adraft (be careful not to publishit by mistake) a couple of timesduring the speech, just to avoidlosing the whole text in case,say, Internet connectivity goesdown or your browser quits un-expectedly.- If you work in Word or othertext editing software, you willhave to add links, etc., later, when copying the text into theblogging interface.It’s relatively easy to blog goodand great speakers: They followa narrative path through theirtalks and speak at a pace theaudience can understand. It’sharder to blog inexperiencedspeakers(because they may betoo technical,confusing, fast,etc.) and multi-speaker panels(because the discussion can takemany different unstructuredturns).But you don’t need to transcribethe whole talk, you need to cap-ture the gist of it. A 20-minutestalk can often be summarized ina 20-lines post.
Even on blogs, correct spelling andsyntax are a requirement. But you’renot writing a novel nor a magazinestory, you’re writing a summary,or a commented summary, of aspeech.
software sPeakers style
Sometimes even just three key points willdo, as long as they capture the relevantparts of the speech or of your analysis.
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Tips for conference bloggers
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