Saturday, August 16, 2008

Day 57: Covering it Live


This is a what a live blogger looks like (design by bread and butter)


Today I am going to live blog for the first time. Liz and I are "covering it live" from a panel discussion happening at the New Museum called The Visual Rhetoric of Environmentalism.

This handy PDF on conference blogging by Ethan Zuckerman and Bruno Giussani should assist anyone else who might want to break into the live blogging scene too, and it's fun design.

Here's the fancy and super simple software, Cover It Live that you can use to become a pro in an instant.

Since the content that we generate today is going to be put to use for our beloved project ExtremeMediaStudies.org (which is grounded in responding to change as it unfolds) live blogging seems like the perfect medium. Though I'll know more about this tomorrow after having actually done it, it seems as though the role of a live blogger is less to make sense of overarching themes and big ideas that shape discussions as a whole, but more to keep a focused eye and mind on what is happening moment to moment- and send signals from this unfolding edge. This definitely might take some practice... I think the medium might lend itself to creating rich bodies of content in the form of raw ideas that can be useful for their "rawness". I imagine that this kind of content can offer a solid foundation and "record" from which bigger ideas might be drawn and elaborated upon more fully later. We'll see.

Since today's blogging is actually just a practice run for two other conferences that we are covering this fall, we aren't actually going to go live for the public until after it is over and we can assess how it really went. If all goes well I'll come back and re-post a link to what we made.

8: 00 pm UPDATE: It went well! Here's the link.


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