KonzeptioNerd

Live / Life Blogging

I hate it when I live-blog at the MedienMittwoch and people commend my speed-typing (which, to be honest, may look good in a chick-with-MacBook sort of way but leaves way too many typos) but rarely my writing. Of course - I’m often the only one with a laptop, so no-one sees the blog until after the event, when they leave comments regarding the event, not the blog itself.

Live-blogging is an excellent exercise in concentration and fomulation. Unlike personal note-taking or post-fact minute-writing, it requires picking out the relevant statements within a presentation or discussion and writing them out in longhand for others to gather the context and the implications simultaneously with the development on stage. For the readers, it has some documentary value, but it is almost impossible to keep abreast of the discussion, record key statements and make witty comments at the same time.

So we‘re toying with the live-blogging concept for the MedienMittwoch. Projecting the blog during the discussion is hardly useful as long as the audience don’t have the opportunity to at least comment along. If the blogger was such an important voice in the discussion as to warrent projecting, he or she might as well be part of the panel. As a mere transcription, the blog would only distract the audience (unless it was subtitling for the hearing impaired). Another option is to have (or drop) the blog as documentary and twitter for comments. During a conference-like situation, Twitter is great for picking out only the key statements (without much context) or to add a running commentary. Again, we’d need a way to include the audience in the action.

A pro pos of blogging: Last Saturday I hade the opportunity to participate in the first meeting of the German Bloggers group in Second Life, congenially hosted by Kueperpunk Korhunen. (I could only attend for the first 20 minutes, though, as I’d foolishly agreed to go out and watch Spiderman 3 - “3″ as in almost 3 hours long.) Here’s a SLURL to one of the German Bloggers info spaces.

While I was there (and, apparently also afterwards, see Kuerperpunk’s report), the discussion focused on anonymous blogging with accounts of legal notices, real-life harassment and other reasons not to sign one’s name to one’s posts. And I realized how privileged I am to work for a company where they actively encourage me to blog.

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