AMY GAHRAN: The Right Conversation

Trying Twitter for Liveblogging

OK, I finally succumbed. I'm trying out Twitter. I'm both curious and skeptical about this service, which focuses on people saying what they're doing at any given time in 140 characters or less.

But I think this may hold some uses for live blogging, especially augmenting coverage for live events.

Tomorrow I'm heading to Los Angeles, for a Knight New Media Center seminar: Election ‘08: Covering Politics in Cyberspace. There, on Thursday, I'm giving a talk: Tools of Engagement:  It’s a Conversation, Stupid. I'll be out there for a few days, so I figure I'll try Twitter out for occasional posts about the goings-on there. Who knows -- it might even end up being listed as one of my tools of engagement.

If you want to follow along, on Twitter I'm agahran. Here's my feed. Don't worry, I'm not posting anything too intimate -- although I won't guarantee relevance or clarity for all.

It's an experiment. Tell me what you think!

Running a Group Conference Blog: What I'm Learning

This Tuesday I'm flying to Burlington, VT for my annual brain food festival -- the conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ). I've been working with this group since 1990, and I have a lot of friends there, so this event is always a blast.

This year, I set up an unofficial SEJ2006 group weblog. It's "unofficial" because it's a strictly volunteer, independent effort by people who are either SEJ members, attending the conference (speakers, exhibitors, others, etc.) or who are working on the conference (staff, etc.). I did this mainly because it was more efficient to just set it up by myself, on my own, than to have to deal with any organization to get it done.

To be quite honest, this blog has been consuming much of my time this week. More than I'd intended -- but this is an experimental project, and experiments always entail unforeseen resource demands as well as results. It's OK, I've been learning a ton of useful stuff from this effort.

So if you're considering setting up a blog in support of your conference, benefit from my experience. Here's what I've learned, so far...

10 Ideas: What To Post to a Conference Blog

I've been working hard lately to get the unofficial conference blog up and running for the 2006 conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists.

Now that it's up and the crew of volunteer bloggers is mostly trained in how to use our blogging tool, Typepad, they're starting to request more guidance on content. Most of these contributing bloggers come from print media. They know how to write, but they've never blogged before -- and most of them also have little or no experience in creating any content specifically for online media.

Consequently, they aren't familiar with conference blogs. That's fine -- many people aren't, although that's starting to change. I've worked on some conference blogging efforts, so I've pulled together a list of 10 kinds of posts that work well on conference blogs.

As with any conversational-media effort, it helps to know your audience, as well as your community of contributors (both bloggers and commenters). What skills and expertise do they bring to the table? What do they want? Ultimately, that should be your guide.

Here's my list...