The view from the 'Bloggers Booth' at the Futuresonic Social Technologies Summit

As something of a blogging obsessive, the opportunity to spend two days writing about some of my favourite topics at the Futuresonic Social Technologies Summit was too good to pass up. On Thursday morning at the Contact Theatre, Sarah Hartley and I set up a ‘blogging booth’ at the back of Space One in the Theatre. A bit of sweet-talking to the technical staff even gained us a 4-way plug socket to charge our laptops.

Being the seasoned journalist, Sarah opted to cover the Summit in a considered, reflective way – picking out the key stories and serving them up in easy-to-digest packages. I, meanwhile, being a real-time web junkie with the attention span of a fly with ADD, decided to liveblog the sessions.

What is a liveblog?

For the uninitiated, liveblogging is the process of covering an event in bitesize pieces by frequently updating a blog post with new information as the event goes on. Probably the most popular liveblog posts in the world are the ones that the big gadget blogs, Engadget and Gizmodo, do when Apple unveil a new product. The Apple faithful around the world frantically refresh their browsers as a blogger at the launch event keeps them updated with breadcrumbs of information about what usually amounts to a not-terribly-exciting incremental product revision.

I felt a liveblog would be a good idea for Futuresonic as quite a lot people I know couldn’t come to the event, whether that be for financial or other reasons. With some big-name thinkers in the social technology sphere talking there was bound to be a high level of interest, so I decided to provide a running commentary and leave the considered reflection for Sarah’s posts.

Choosing the right tool

My first job was to decide what tool to use for liveblogging. My options were threefold. Firstly, there was Twitter. With a short message format and the ability for people to easily subscribe to your messages it’s no surprise that until recently Twitter was a popular tool for live coverage of conferences.

The problem is that not everyone you follow is going to be interested in the conference and if you’re sending a tweet every minute about something they don’t care about you’re going to be heamorrhaging followers in no time. You could set up a new Twitter account specifically for the job but if people start to comment on your coverage via replies, you end up with a fractured conversation in which only you get to see the full picture. No-one else will get to see all the comments you’re receiving.

My second option was a dedicate liveblogging app. CoverItLive is a good looking, easy to use and feature-packed tool designed specifically for the job of liveblogging. Importing it into your blog is a simple process that takes seconds. You can publish reader comments directly into the liveblog stream (once you approve them) which makes for a much easier to follow conversation. ScibbleLive is another service that offers a similar featureset.

Some people were advising me to try one of these dedicated apps but I had other ideas. I wanted my liveblog to be as social, sharable and as fast as possible. For me there was only one choice – FriendFeed.

Created by a team of former Google staff who had previously worked on projects like Gmail, FriendFeed is the perfect example of where the social web is in mid-2009. Originally developed as place to share your content from across a wide range of web services (blog entries, photos, Twitter messages and much more) it has developed into a real-time multimedia discussion platform with huge potential to replace Twitter as the digerati’s communications service of choice in the near future. You can read why I believe this will happen in a post from a couple of weeks ago here.

Liveblogging in FriendFeed was a cynch. Having set up a dedicated FriendFeed Group for people to discuss the summit, I created a new discussion thread within that Group for each talk that I attended. The title of the thread was sent automatically to Twitter to help draw people into the discussion. I then spent the duration of each talk typing a short paragraph about each point that the speaker made. People following the liveblog saw these appear in realtime without the need to refresh their browser.

Reader participation was easy – anyone with a point to make could add their comment directly into the comment stream. People not at the Summit could add questions which could be answered by me or others in the room. What’s more, because the liveblogs are permanently stored within FriendFeed they’re easily sharable and searchable and people can add to them at any time in the future.

Is it worth running a liveblog?

Being a liveblogger means you sacrifice a certain amount of your own enjoyment of the event you’re covering. I needed to keep my focus entirely on the speaker, channeling their words straight through my fingers and onto the internet. While my readers got an instant commentary on what was being said, I didn’t get a lot of opportunity to actually reflect on the contents of each talk. It was also a tiring experience. My liveblogs towards the end of each day were slower and little thinner on detail than the morning ones. I also worried that I may have over-simplified or misrepresented some of the more complex concepts discussed. I’ve had no complaints about this as of yet, though.

Was it worth it despite the downsides? Absolutely. The FriendFeed Group only attracted 13 subscribers but a few people contributed their own thoughts to the liveblog stream, making it an interactive experience. There were also a good few ‘lurkers’ following along who either talked to me afterwards or thanked me via Twitter. Some of the speakers even used Twitter to link to my liveblog of their talk, which was a nice validation of my efforts.

Will I liveblog again? If the opportunity arises I’ll jump at the chance. In the meantime, if I brush up on my old Media Law classes from university, I’ve probably developed the skills to be a court reporter!

You can read my liveblogs from the Futuresonic Social Technology Summit over at the Summit’s FriendFeed Group.