Full Circle Associates

Live blogging advice gleaned by Mir at Blogher. Take a look at her post for the things NOT to do. Here are the "to do's. As a liveblogger at a variety of conferences, I'd suggest that this is ONE way to do it. Might be worth some more conversations and writing.

1/ DO answer the 5 w's in the first paragraph.

2/ Do make use of summarizing sentences for presenters main points or themes.

3/ DO try to keep your paragraphs under 250 words (I think, this is one of the journalism standards things I haven't had to think about since I stopped writing for the university paper).

4/ DO publish your post at intervals during the presentation so that people can see what's going on as you are writing.

5/DO expand on the major threads of discussions that occur. Try your best to do some summarizing of those as well though, rather than giving a play by play.

*6/ MOST OF ALL. Remember that you are not writing for the people who are already at the conference, you are writing for the people sitting at home, so you need to be clear. Try not to use acronyms or jokes that are conference specific. if you refer to events or themes outside the scope of your session, reference them via links or tagging.

7/ Here is a decent article on using technorati for tagging in posts The tagged web and using Technorati. This explains the basic principals and gives a how-to. The tags are 'blogher' and 'bloghercon'.

8/ Trackbacks are just a simple way to tap a post on the shoulder and say; 'hey I am writing about this post.' It's the way we will be getting excerpts of your entries to appear on the page about your session. For a better explanation take a look at this page of the Movable Type documentation.