[blogging a conference - some tips]

I came across this excellent guide by Bruno Giussani and Ethan Zuckerman through Sue Thomas's google reader shared feedz.

In no particular order:

Speakers
"It’s relatively easy to blog good and great speakers: They follow a narrative path through their talks and speak at a pace the audience can understand.
It’s harder to blog inexperienced speakers(because they may be too technical,
confusing, fast, etc.) and multi-speaker panels (because the discussion can take many different unstructured turns). But you don’t need to transcribe the whole talk, you need to capture the gist of it. A 20-minutes talk can often be summarized in a
20-lines post.

Audience
You’re not blogging for the speaker, you’re blogging for yourself and for the people who may read your blog. So if a talk is too hard, too bad, too uninteresting to blog, don’t be afraid to give up on it. It’s the speaker’s fault if (s)he can’t make the material interesting or intelligible. (This should never, however, be an excuse for laziness.)

Timing
Ideally, you should liveblog, which means that you write the post, and add the links, as the speaker is talking, and publish the post not later than 10 minutes after the speech or panel is over. Not everybody can do this; it takes a certain habit. Think of it this way: If you can publish right away, you will be able to network with the other conference participants during the breaks, rather
than sitting at your laptop rewriting your notes."