Blogging Tips

Learning How to Live Blog

I read a great post by Jonathan McGee on The Chatroll Blog that I wanted to share with you. Jonathan put together a terrific list of tips of people who want to do live blogging, and do it well.

Live blogging is the practice of blogging while attending an event, so that people who aren’t there can keep track of what is happening. You see a lot of live blogging at conferences (especially technical ones) and when you see a really good live blogger doing it it’s almost as good as listening to a podcast of the event after the fact.

My favorite thing about live blogging is when the person doing the blogging interjects their personal opinions as little asides to the notes he or she takes during a talk or lecture. I really love those little extra tidbits about what is happening in the room, or what the audience reaction is to controversial points.

A good live blogger definitely needs to be a quick typist and a good listener, but it’s different from just transcribing an event—there’s a certain amount of synthesizing information so you hit the highlights without getting bogged down in unneeded detail. And a really good live blogger tracks down any materials used during the presentation (like PowerPoint slides), and links up Web sites that come up during the talk.

I think Jonathan’s first tip is the best, though: “Tip #1: Know your audience (a.k.a. Do you really need to live blog the event?)” Just because you can live blog an event doesn’t mean you need to or even should!

Read Jonathan’s complete post here.

Have you ever live blogged something? Do you have any tips to share?

Blogging Tip for the Day: Photograph Your Desk

Some bloggers—maybe you?—do hit dry spells where coming up with one more blog post just seems impossible. Maybe not even desirable.

And sometimes, just sometimes, you need something quick and easy to get yourself back in the game. Enter the desk photograph.

Long used by experienced bloggers who are casting about for something, anything to blog about, the desk photograph has two major things going for it. First, it’s a photo. Every blog reader likes a good photo. (And photos take up a nice chunk of space on the page, too.) Second, it lets people get a glimpse of part of your life that they won’t otherwise have access to. Use a desk photograph to give people the proverbial 1000 words, without writing a word.

The photo in this blog post is from a post on Peter Flaschner’s blog Almost Cool. He doesn’t say whether he was stuck for a blog topic, but we know better.