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How Live Blogging Makes You a Better Blogger

by Jennifer Beever

I don’t know about you, but one of the challenges for someone new to blogging is researching and  writing entries without spending tons of time. I’m pretty conscientious about my blog entries. I don’t want to put out only my opinion nor do I want to generate fluffy or light blog entries. I want to reference other opinions, videos, blog entries, etc. so that readers get value.

Last month I live-blogged at a conference. It was challenging, in that I wanted to finish a blog entry in the one hour 15 minute time slot each speaker session was allotted; yet I wanted to offer some depth. At this conference, which was the Confab conference for consultants, the seats with plugin access for laptops were in the first three rows. I tried to sit way over on the side so as not to annoy anyone with my blogging activity.

Live-blogging forced me to more actively listen for the nuggets and take-aways from each session to put into the blog, and to listen for a way to “net out” the session – that is, to find a way to quickly characterize the speaker, their comments, the audience Q&A. As the session started up, I entered in the session title, speaker info with links to their sites, took notes, wrote up my blog entry while paying attention to the ongoing presentation and discussion.

Throughout the conference I completed several entries. On the flight home, I thought that if I had queued up the speaker info, links and session titles in advance I could have focused more on content during the session. Back in my office, I researched live blogging, and, (no surprise) found that others had had the same experiences and put together very helpful information, including the tip to set up blog entries with session basic info and links in advance!

See Bruno Giussani’s Tips for Conference Bloggers. Bruno is the European Director of the TED Conferences. I also got value from the PDF that Bruno wrote with blogger Ethan Zuckerman.

My blogging is becoming more efficient through learning from those who have walked through the learning curve before me! This blog entry took me about thirty minutes, which is probably a record!

What have you learned about live blogging? Or about blogging in general? Please comment below.

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