Tag Archives: live-blogging

What do bloggers do at conferences?

Posted on 08.06.2010 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

A l'heure ou tout le monde (ou presque) tweete à n'en plus finir, il vaut la peine de s'arrêter deux secondes sur ce qu'apportent blogueurs et autres podcasteurs lorsqu'ils assistent à une conférence -- en matière de couverture qui ne se décompose pas au bout de quelques jours, ou même quelques heures (comme une rivière de tweets).

Voici un début de liste:

live-bloguer les différentes présentations
bloguer de façon plus synthétique/critique (un peu moins live, du coup)
photographie (live et moins live)
interviews d'orateurs (texte, audio, vidéo)
interviews de couloirs (texte, audio, vidéo)
couverture de la scène entrepreneuriale et des startups
couverture "off": fêtes, events réseautage...

Vous pensez à autre chose?

[en]

In the process of getting ready for managing blogger accreditations for LeWeb’10 in Paris (for the third time, but warning, the system will be different this year!), I’m having a good hard think about what bloggers actually do at conferences that makes them a valuable audience.

I mean, everybody today is live-tweeting (a bit of a pleonasm). Clearly, if a conference is to invite “new media people” or have “official bloggers”, something more is expected than a brain-dump in the real-time stream. (Not that I have anything against that, but the interest of such a dump fades quickly with time.)

Bloggers (and podcasters) have various talents. I’ve finally learned (after years of finding what I did pretty normal) that mine is live-blogging. Others, like Charbax, catch people in the corridors and interview them — I was so impressed by his Lift’08 videos (you can find his interview of me somewhere on the 2nd or 3rd page) that I invited him to come and do the same thing at Going Solo. These are just two examples amongst many others.

So, here’s where I need your help: I’m trying to make a list of “blogger/podcaster missions” for conferences. Here’s what I’ve got:

live-blogging of sessions
synthetic/critical blogging of sessions/event (somewhat less live)
photography (live and less live)
speaker interviews (written, audio, video)
corridor interviews (written, audio, video)
start-up/entrepreneurial scene coverage (maybe this needs to be broken up into sub-missions?)
“off” coverage: parties, networking events…

What else can you think of? If you’re a blogger or podcaster who likes to attend tech conferences, what value do you consider you bring to the event? I’m all ears

La blogueuse et les conférences

Posted on 10.05.2010 by Stephanie Booth

[en]

I write a weekly column for Les Quotidiennes, which I republish here on CTTS for safekeeping.

[fr]

Chroniques du monde connecté: cet article a été initialement publié dans Les Quotidiennes (voir l’original).

Les conférences, c’est l’occasion idéale de créer des contacts et de renforcer les liens existants. Et si l’on a la chance d’avoir un blog, c’est doublement l’occasion de le faire.

En 2004, j’assiste à ma première conférence “de geeks” (à l’époque, c’est clairement ce qu’on était, nous les blogueurs). Fraîchement sortie des études (elles ont été longues!), il m’est difficilement concevable d’écouter un orateur sans prendre des notes. Blogueuse depuis plusieurs années, il m’est difficilement concevable de prendre des notes sans les publier. Ça deviendra une habitude par la suite: je prends des notes aux conférences auxquelles j’assiste, et je les publie sur mon blog.

Pourquoi est-ce que je vous raconte ça? Parce que je me suis rendu compte, au détour d’une conversation ou deux avec d’anciens et nouveaux participants à la conférence Lift en fin de semaine dernière, à quel point c’est mon activité de blogueuse au fil des conférences qui a servi de catalyseur (voire de détonateur!) dans la construction de mon réseau. (Je n’aime pas trop le mot “construction” ici, qui donne l’impression d’une démarche délibérée alors que c’est plutôt un processus organique qui se fait un peu tout seul, mais faute de mieux…)

En me positionnant comme “celle qui prend des notes et les publie sur son blog”, j’initie des contacts tant avec les autres participants que les orateurs — ou même les organisateurs de la conférence. On pourrait dire que c’est la recette “faites quelque chose qui ait de la valeur pour la communauté, et elle vous en sera reconnaissante”.

Je ne sais pas comment c’est pour vous, mais pour ma part, si je me retrouve dans une salle pleine de personnes et que je n’en connais aucune, je trouve très difficile de faire connaissance avec les gens autour de moi (à plus forte raison si ces personnes se connaissent déjà). Par contre, si je connais une ou deux personnes pour commencer, ça aide énormément. Bloguer est un excellent moyen de provoquer ces quelques premiers contacts qui mèneront plus loin.

Bien entendu, plus on fait ça de façon désintéressée, et mieux ça marche. C’est d’ailleurs comme ça avec plus ou moins tout ce qui touche au réseautage et aux médias sociaux.

Live-Blogging vs. Live-Tweeting at Conferences

Posted on 19.12.2009 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Live-tweeter une conférence, c'est l'équivalent d'être actif dans le backchannel IRC de la belle époque des conférences de blogs. Il n'y a rien de mal à ça, mais il ne faut pas confondre ça avec le live-blogging: en effet, passés quelques jours, semaines, mois ou même années, qui va replonger son nez dans le fouillis des tweets ou des logs IRC de telle ou telle journée? Comparez ça avec un article sur un blog, qui sera lu, relu, et encore relu -- qui conserve donc sa valeur une fois que l'excitation du temps réel est passée.

[en]

One of the things bloggers brought with them when they started attending conferences is live coverage. Unlike the traditional press, which would provide you with a summary of the proceedings the next day, bloggers would be madly photographing, taking notes, uploading, and hitting publish in the minutes following the end of a presentation.

Live-blogging was born.

(For my personal history with it, see my BlogTalk 2.0 posts (2004) about collaborative note-taking using SubEthaEdit and a wiki, and my notes of LIFT06 (2006). Real proper live-blogging had to wait until LIFT’07 and Martin Roell’s workshop on getting started with consulting (2007), however.)

Then Twitter showed up, and everybody started a-tweeting, and more particularly live-tweeting during conferences.

But live-tweeting does not replace live-blogging. It replaces the IRC backchannel, allowing people to comment on what is going on as it happens, and letting people who are not physically present take part in the fun.

(I’m not going to talk about backchannels here: they’re great, but can also have unpleasant consequences in certain situations. A whole series of blog posts could be devoted to them.)

So when bloggers at conferences neglect their blogs and spend all their time live-tweeting, they are in fact fooling around in the backchannel instead of doing what bloggers do, which is produce content which retains value months, sometimes years, after it was published.

Don’t get me wrong: live-tweeting is fine, so is participation in a more traditional IRC-based backchannel. But don’t confuse it with live-blogging.

Tweets of the moment, just like IRC conversations, tend to be great when consumed in real time. But as the days and weeks go by, they become just as pleasant to read as an IRC log. (Understand: not pleasant at all.)

So, dear bloggers, when you’re at a conference to provide coverage, do not forget who you are. Not everybody is a live-blogger, of course, and some produce very valuable writing about an event they attended once they are home and have allowed the dust to settle.

But tweeting does not replace blogging.

Do you think I got my point across, now?

Welcome to LeWeb’08!

Posted on 09.12.2008 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

A la conférence LeWeb'08 à Paris.

[en]

Here we are& it’s started! Here I am at LeWeb’08 — and now that I’m here, very happy :-) (I’ve come to dread events in a way, but that’s the subject of another post and has nothing to do with LeWeb’08).

For those of you who are not here with us, keep up with what’s going on by following the live video feed by Ustream.

Tweets, photos and posts tagged “leweb083 are aggregated in the LeWeb’08 sixgroups livecommunity and @eventtrack.

If you are blogging about LeWeb’08, you might want to add the Livecommunity bar to your site (I have to approve them but if I see stuff about LeWeb’08 on your site it won’t be a problem). Here’s the code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://leweb08.sixgroups.com/widgets/api/json/v/03/"></script> <div id="sgBarContainer"><span style="font: 9px Arial, sans-serif; color: #ccc; ">Livecommunity powered by <a style="font: 9px Arial, sans-serif; color: #ccc; " href="http://sixgroups.com/" title="Community Software">sixgroups.com</a></span> <script type="text/javascript">if(sg){document.body.style.paddingTop = "27px";sg.addWidget({type: "sgBar", vposition: "fixed"});}</script> </div>

You can see it at work on this site.

There is also a Bloggersbase blog (with contest) that you can contribute to. Official bloggers (bloggers who received a blogger accreditation from me), don’t forget to add your publications to the “Coverage” page. (The general public doesn’t have access to this page, so if you’re not an official blogger you won’t be able to see it.)

The first five rows have small tables, each fitted with an ethernet cable and power. Most of the seats there are taken, but I still see a few empty ones. I’m on the wifi, which is behaving nicely (fingers crossed).

Right, I’m going to leave you and continue listening to David Weinberger :-)

Oh, and you can find me (and others) on irc.freenode.net in channel #leweb08&

My Notes of FoWA Autumn 2007

Posted on 05.10.2007 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Compilation de mes notes prises lors de la conférence Future of Web Apps.

[en]

Despite lack of power and wifi, I did manage to take a rather insane amount of notes during the Future of Web Apps conference in London. I’m happy to say my RSI didn’t get too much in the way.

You can help me out by posting links to slideshows, other notes, speaker blog posts on the notes posts I made. I took quite a lot of photographs too, and I’d really appreciate if people looking at them also tagged them, while they’re at it (if you’re a Flickr user, you can tag my photos). Of course, if I made a mistake somewhere, feel free to point it out.

Day 1

Day 2

You can help me out by posting links to slideshows, other notes, speaker blog posts on the notes posts I made. I took quite a lot of photographs too, and I’d really appreciate if people looking at them also tagged them, while they’re at it. Of course, if I made a mistake somewhere, feel free to point it out.

I have some thoughts about FoWA as a whole, but I’ll blog them in a separate post. Already, my excuses to those I met and who found me grumpy, I think I’m nearing networking burn-out (more on that in the upcoming post).

I missed three talks that I would really have liked to attend, but luckily, Suw took notes:

Note: ~~my blog template is still broken in a big way, so if you’re reading this and see text all over the place or the (now) very tired Kubrick layout, it means I’m not done troubleshooting.~~ ~~Well, back to normal now without me doing anything. Good thing I didn’t spend time troubleshooting — seems like it was a problem with DreamHost again? I really need to move out.~~ ~~Actually, not back to normal. This is K2 with one column instead of two. Very creepy.~~ Right, seems like I’m to blame for the “coming back with only one column” part. (But not for the “going south” and “coming back” by magic.)

FOWA: FireEagle (Tom Coates)

Posted on 04.10.2007 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Notes prises à l'occasion de la conférence Future of Web Apps (FOWA) à Londres.

[en]

Here are my live notes of this Future of Web Apps (FOWA) session. They are probably incomplete and may contain mistakes, though I do my best to be accurate. Chances are I’ll be adding links to extra material and photos later on, so don’t hesitate to come back and check.

Share your location online. Capture and make sense of your location, share it with your friends, share it programmatically.

How Fire Eagle works.

Apps either get your location or use it in some way. Too heavily enmeshed with one another. Flickr is good at using your information, but bad at getting it (you have to enter it by hand). Plazes is good at getting location. So, problem, each time you build such an app you have to work on both sides.

Better model: one brilliant way of capturing location, then a whole bunch of services based on it.

Open APIs mean anyone can build a client and anyone can access the data (with permission). Central repository.

Input: postcode, address, GPS trace, co-ordinates, neighbourhood name, village/town/city…

The service: a way of handling the data in the middle and APIs on the outside. A bit like PayPal, a service in the middle.

You give other services permission to access your information.

Example: Dopplr gives my location (London) to FireEagle. Then, I manually update my location on mobile site (“Victoria Dock Thingy”). Or I could broadcast location from my phone. (The app exists for certain phones already.) Then I can decide to share more or less precisely where I am with various applications. I open my laptop at a café, Plazes sends Fire Eagle my location. Then, I take a picture and send a geotagged picture to the web. Site updates my location.

Twitter maps application: I only want updates from my friends if they’re in London. steph-note: that would be great!! Proximizer: know how close your boss is. Friends and family widgets.

Being honorable with your data (privacy, ethics, etc). Because, in fact, why would I want to put that information anywhere? Because it’s profoundly useful and fun to do so. Possible to share location without being invasive. Also, exposing your logs to you. Possibility to purge your data. If you’re doing something naughty (buying your partner a present secretly), “hide me” button. Private places.

Possible problem: people forget they’re sharing. The app can check back and remind them.

FOWA: Copy is Interface (Erika Hall)

Posted on 04.10.2007 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Notes prises à l'occasion de la conférence Future of Web Apps (FOWA) à Londres.

[en]

Words are the most important components of your user interface.

Caveat: interface language found in the wild… American. So, not talking about internationalisation, different versions of languages, cultural issues…

Exciting interfaces: gesture thing Tom Cruise is using, Wii, iPhone… But not yet for data/information stuff.

You don’t know how people are going to access your application. Nabaztag. Applications people love today are made from text. Even interacting with our TV with a text-based interface.

Language is an interface.

Dopplr philosophy. Device independant. User benefits by having direct access to information. In our everyday life, our priority isn’t shiny stuff, but things that work. steph-note: interpreting somewhat, here.

How will the application developer benefit?

Though it takes a lot of skill to use language well, it’s easy to iterate. People will freak out when you change the colours of your site, but won’t budge much if you change language.

5 ways to get words right:

be authentic; consumating vs. eharmony (Erika’s pet peeve: the “submit” button. If you change one piece of copy, change that. People don’t “submit” anything.) Twitter has good “we’re down” messages. Sounds like there are real people behind that application. steph-note: when putting a quote on a slide, read the quote in full.
be engaging; schoolofeverything.com, virgin-atlantic.com (“Hello gorgeous!”) Citybank: “Who was your arch rival when you were growing up?” as proposed security question. Pownce genders.
be specific with the language you use. emusic.com
be appropriate: it would be disconcerning if my bank tried to be my buddy. Amazon: “where’s my stuff?” Flickr “Talk Like a Pirate” day. But… some people were afraid the site had been hacked!
be polite: rude doesn’t get much forgiveness. Feedburner: “Activate Feed” and “Cancel and do not activate”, including type size to help you do what you want to do. subtraction.com: “remarks”. particletree.com adding “Everyone needs a hug” as default text in their comment box, when they were dealing with terrible flame wars.

Things that have gone wrong:

8 kinds of bad:

vague: basecamp, “file should be under 10Mb”; Apple: “some warnings occured. would you like to review them?”; Bank: “expand your relationship” (creepy!) Ask real people how they would call this thing they want to do.
passive
too clever/cute; “Murder your darlings.” Be ready to kill your pet phrases.
don’t be rude or stupid unhelpful.
oblivious to your surroundings: CNN — “Don’t miss: Bodies trapped in wreckage.”
inconsistent: the whole “my/your” inconsistency. Read your interface aloud to see if it sounds dumb.
don’t be presumptuous

You will still need designers. We’re sociable and entertaining, shouldn’t lose those skills when developing our application. Language isn’t going away. It will pay to pay a lot of attention to it.

FOWA: Data Visualisation (Eric Rodenbeck)

Posted on 04.10.2007 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Notes prises à l'occasion de la conférence Future of Web Apps (FOWA) à Londres.

[en]

From Stamen.

Data visualisation is a medium. steph-note: this seems like a lot of stuff to see

Slide of the US, last elections: blue and red states. Break down by county, quite another picture. Break down more, looks all mixed up. The way you present things changes the story you’re telling.

Cabspotting: GPS positions of taxi cabs in SF. Empty cabs and full cabs. Obvious thing is to animate this, and you see the cabs moving, with pick-ups and drop-offs. Other obvious thing to do is to show speed (slow downtown!). And animate that too.

Oakland crime. There isn’t one single view that will solve all your problems.

Animation of digg users digging stories.

Twitter Blocks: interesting because it shows me stuff about the contacts of my contacts. Can tell me if some of my contacts are also contacts of my contacts. steph-note: finally understanding why Twitter Blocks can be interesting… sorry, guys, I’m slow.
real estate flow: housing information visualised. Map of dates that houses were built in SF animated over time.
visualisation of what towns people are searching about based on where they are. Also, what towns they search for after having searched for a given place.

FOWA: Launch Late to Iterate Often (Dick Costolo)

Posted on 04.10.2007 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Notes prises à l'occasion de la conférence Future of Web Apps (FOWA) à Londres.

[en]

Dick: a bunch of startups, last one successful (FeedBurner), so now people think he knows what he’s talking about.

We hear a lot about how cheap it is to start a company now. Lessons learned that are somewhat counter-intuitive to what is usually thought in this industry.

It’s true that you can get a company started without much money, but it still costs a lot to scale.

Cofounders: unequal equals. Better to treat all cofounders as equal. Unequal brings problems (“yeah, sure you want to do that, you have 75%”).

Dick and cofounders never build business plans anymore. Business plans are things that people write to try to make things they want happen the way they want them to happen. Dick doesn’t think investors read them anyway.

Disagrees with trying to evaluate the size of the market. You can’t know. e.g. eBay.

Location: FeedBurner, everybody in Chicago. Believes there is no strategic benefit in locating a company in the Silicon Valley. Actually, better to be away, you’re distant from the echo chamber. Self-perpetuating myth. Benefit in buzz in being in the Silicon Valley, but do you really need buzz to be successful? For Dick, no benefit in the long-term success of the business.

Cash. You always need way more cash than what you think that you’re going to need. Estimate, then multiply by 2.5, and it was even a bit tight. The leading cause of companies going out of business is running out of money. So raise as much as you can. Don’t run out of business.

VC funding is great. Find the right investors. Raise money when you don’t need it. You can get better terms for venture investors. When you start raising a few millions from VCs, you’ll start seeing legal/jargon VC terms (preference, multiples, participation). They’ll tell you they’re standard deals, but there is no such thing. So learn to understand those terms. (e.g. on Dick’s blog, and other places).

It’s better to own a smaller piece of a bigger pie than the opposite. Everybody needs to be happy about what’s going on. Everybody employed needs the same kind of deal (options, equity etc.), keeps goals aligned, and everyone is treated the same way. Even if it’s the “only way I could get that guy”.

Hiring. Take the guy who runs the fastest and then figure out where to put him. Don’t go out to hire a VP of sales. Look for people who are best available athlete, well-rounded person for this kind of role, but able to zig if necessary. steph-note: …any startups looking to hire? Dick prefers flat organisations. Hierarchy begets bureaucracy. Problem with flat organisations: when there are under-performers. Replace hierarchy with tools. Deal with this by having employees come up with their own KPIs (measurable!)

Growing the team: mistake = hiring sales and marketing too soon. Once you start selling and marketing, things need to be cooked and ready to go. Without that, you can iterate rapidly. Speed of execution is a competitive advantage of small companies over big ones. Wait until you’re ready to go to market.

Product development and business strategy (1-4 years)

Visit to the eye doctor. Iterate on everything. Disagrees with “get a crappy version out there”, because then you have to iterate with that version that is out there.

Day 1: feed stats, but knew they wanted to do more later. They waited until they had a basic underlying architecture to be able to extend the service before they launched. It didn’t do much, but was ready for building more. So that allowed them to iterate very rapidly. “How are you guys rolling out features every month?!” Spent the first 5 months building that underlying architecture for extensibility.

Let the market tell you what the business model is (cf. Twitter). Open system with APIs, help the market tell you what the business model is. Lock-in is bad for business. APIs lower the barrier to entry and to third-party service development. Lock-in creates barriers to entry. steph-note: so does the fact you don’t own your data.

Revenue plan: don’t kid yourself. Goes along with “don’t run out of money”. You’ll never make as much money as you plan, or as fast. VCs don’t pay much attention to it. Those plans are always wrong and at least a year late.

Don’t spend months and months trying to get your pricing right.

Strong advice: don’t worry about your exit strategy, worry about everything else, and also be competitive on your merits, not on how much the other guys suck.

Let your company have a voice and a culture. It’s harder to make your language sound antiseptic.

FOWA: Putting Users First (Thomas Vander Wal)

Posted on 04.10.2007 by Stephanie Booth

Here are my live notes of this Future of Web Apps (FOWA) session. They are probably incomplete and may contain mistakes, though I do my best to be accurate. Suw also blogged this one.

Throw out the “user”: used to be a good term to help us think of the people using our system… but somewhere along the line, the user became the annoying person for the developers, lost its empathy.

Focus on people. Real people doing real things. Me. All the stuff that has to do with my life, connecting all the bits. My information.

Real people… means we have to start thinking about their desires, wants, needs. This is really important for people who are building, designing, developing… even using these systems.

If we don’t think about their wants and needs, that’s when they start sending nasty e-mails or complaining on their blogs or facebook.

Real people includes the 95% of people who don’t live their life on the web. (Not us in the room, that is.) Think outside of the alpha/beta users. People need the information in their real life, out of the browser. Real needs there.

Tech pains:

syncing (no comment)
refindability: remember that time where you were trying to find something you knew was there?
taste: better agree with the editor of Mahalo on what a “cake” is
identity: “I gave the internet my details, why do I have to do it again?”
easy of use
portability
privacy: smart privacy
attention: we only have so much attention… we’re going the same stupid things over and over again (sorting junk out of the mail)

Lots of problems that tools today can address. What we should be doing is easing tech pain.

Tagging and other features.

Work contributing vs. derived value.

Tagging takes a bit of work but it puts your world of information in your context. Ratings require roughly as much work but don’t derive as much value.

Tagging brings up the “F” word: “Folksonomy”. Coined by Thomas in 2004: looking at Flickr and del.icio.us. It’s not a taxonomy… it’s regular people calling things the way they usually call them.

Folksonomy solves the problem of retrieval. I tagged it, so I can refind it. It’s also usually done in a social environment, so that opens it to others. Personal and shared folksonomies. The act of tagging is done by the person who is actually consuming the information. I put something of my identity in my tags.

Three bits: object being tagged, metadata or tag, person doing the tagging.

Identity linked to object by interest. Identity linked to metadata by vocabulary. Object to metadata by definition. A community of those using the same term to tag the same object emerges. Community linked to metadata by terminology. Community linked to object by culture.

This allows us to find more objects. Find somebody else who has tagged stuff “audi”, subtract what I’ve tagged “audi” from their stuff tagged “audi”, and that gives me five new things! Smart system.

Social bookmarking gets (more) social. Ma.gnolia has groups. Nice feature: giving thanks. Just a click to say thanks for something nice you found through somebody else.

Private groups; top tags; recent bookmarks; discussions; members.

Sharing and being social is how humans have got out of caves, and how we advance as a society.

Getting to real relationships: lots of tools have a “broadmind friend” concept of relationships (“you’re my friend, therefore I’m interested in everything you are.”)

Spheres of Sociality: personal, selective (many), collective (all people on the service), mob. steph-note: I got a “mob” feeling when I tracked “FOWA” on Flickr.

Directional sociality: real relationships are not equal. They can be unidirectional. Unequal access. People might have access to read our blog, read and comment, read and also read private feeds.

steph-note: this is exactly what I mean when I say we need a way to structure our social networks

We don’t want to be listening to everything from everybody. And we need to be able to do something with the information. Frustration with Facebook and also, to a lesser extent, with Twitter.

Ease of use: needs to be as simple as ripping off a phone number from an ad stuck on a lamp post. The information is portable. Our web services need to be this easy. Good example: Stikkit. Identifies that this thing I’m saving is a date/calendar thing. steph-note: like Tumblr recognises that I’m posting a quote

Test early, test often, and test with real people. We’re not necessarily our own best audience.

Tag Archives: live-blogging

La blogueuse et les conférences

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Welcome to LeWeb’08!

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My Notes of FoWA Autumn 2007

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FOWA: FireEagle (Tom Coates)

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FOWA: Copy is Interface (Erika Hall)

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FOWA: Data Visualisation (Eric Rodenbeck)

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FOWA: Launch Late to Iterate Often (Dick Costolo)

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FOWA: Putting Users First (Thomas Vander Wal)

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