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Choosing between Twitter, live blogging or fast publishing

Choosing between Twitter, live blogging or fast publishing

I love it when bloggers write about conferences I cannot attend. Blogs and Twitter are my main resources to stay in touch with conferences such as the Web 2.0 Expo in San Fransisco last week. Bloggers take different approaches to cover conferences which all have their advantages and disadvantages. The main three approaches are using Twitter, live blogging tools or fast publishing.

Twitter

Twitter is a useful tool to stay in touch with both conference organizers and attendees. Stay up-to-date with schedule changes, keynote transcriptions and videos and people in the room. Twitter is used more and more often by speakers to answer questions from the audience or from people who are not attending the conference. The downside of such interaction is that there are always people out there to get their 140 characters of fame and add a lot of noise to the signal.

One of my favorite uses of Twitter during conferences is a backchannel people can send their posts to. During the Next Web conference in Amsterdam a few weeks ago a backchannel was created where all posts that included #nextweb were posted. By following the backchannel you can get information from everyone actively participating in providing content from the conference.

Live blogging

CoverIt Live is one of the most popular tools used for live blogging. It provides an easy and instant way to provide your blog readers with the latest news without having to refresh the page:

Your commentary publishes in real time like an instant message. Our ‘one-click’ publishing lets you drop polls, videos, pictures, ads and audio clips as soon as they come to mind. Comments and questions from your readers instantly appear but you control what gets published.

It is an excellent solution for blog visitors if you are “live reading” the blog. However, for archival (and SEO) purposes I am not too fond of using such tools. For example, I wanted to check out Mashable’s post on Matt Mullenweg Announces Related Posts and Themes for Photo Bloggers. If you use an external service such as CoverIt Live the content is not actually a part of your blog but it is embedded into your blog from their server. The fact that your content is embedded has consequences for indexing and finding the content. Be aware when using such tools that your live coverage will not be indexed nor be part of your blog’s archive.

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Fast publishing

This is my personal preferred method of blogging conferences and keeping up with conferences. At the Next Web Conference we covered the whole conference with only two people and took turns in covering the keynotes. After a thirty minute keynote we would have another thirty minutes to turn our notes into a blog post and publish it online. While thirty minutes to edit your notes is not much it provides you with just enough time to turn them into a coherent blog post.

Why do I prefer fast publishing over Twitter or live blogging? Your blog is not as good as its latest post, it is the archive that counts. Which is your preferred method?

View Comments (5)
  • You prefer it a a publisher, but you should ask the question to the receiver. I am both and understand you. But twitter is more fun than fast blogging because it combines real time publishing with real time conversation. Archive or no archive.

  • Great thoughts. ‘It’s the archive that counts’ is a very good reason to prefer fast publishing.

    I’m wondering, though, if converting a Cover It Live session to a post or three might be the best of both worlds.

    You get the interactivity of Cover It Live with the archiving of a regular blog post.

    Thanks for making me think!

  • Fast publishing – as both a writer and a reader. If I’m not *at* the conference, that thirty minutes isn’t going to make that much difference to me – I can wait for your blog post. I’d rather have coherence than speed that leaves me with more questions than answers.

    What I have seen recently is people using Twitter to take notes which they then turn into a blog post, which might be a good dual-location solution?

  • @Erwin Blom: both as a publisher and a receiver I see the advantages of Twitter because it allows for real time conversation. Twitter is perfect if you keep track of conference tweets as they happen. It is a moment tool and not one that allows you to read the conversation a day later because of its lack of coherence.

    It does not have to be an either/or situation. I can imagine using Twitter as the live blogging tool and then at the end of the conference taking an hour to wrap your tweets up into a coherent blog post. Turn your tweets into an archivable and readable blog post.

    @Jay Kelly: Great point. I think converting your CoverIt Live session into a blog post offers a lot of value to both your blog and your readers.

    @Sue: I also rather take an extra thirty minutes to convert my notes or tweets into a blog post. I think the latter is an excellent solution.

  • I go for Fast Publishing.
    I love coveritlive, it’s a great ajaxy tool with loads of features.
    I love twitter too, the best part of Twitter is you will find one or the other way to update!
    But the major drawback of these two is being, as already mentioned content is not on your blog & fetched from somewhere else. You will be loosing traffic from major traffic source Search Engines

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