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 🙂