Exciting experience too for a reader who watched the world premiere of real-time blogging!
Exciting and at the same time: mentally soothing. Let me explain why.
The first speaker, Dan Rayburn set the theme by talking about streaming media. He did not explain what he meant by that, nor did he provide examples of applications, leaving the listener in the dark as to what this breathtaking technology (hype) actually is all about.
Submitting this question during his talk wasn’t picked up by Stephanie Downs and so it took about 20min until we, the ‘dumb listeners’, received at least a technical explanation of this type of media. Again: no mention of what it is used for, what it is beneficial for, nor any sample applications of it.
This caused a big question mark in my mind and thankfully was echoed in Robin’s blog. His repeated comments on the lack of clarity, the lack of explanation, lifted my spirits and calmed me down.
Beautiful too how Robin mirrored the outcry when one of the panellists mentioned that Europe is 3-5 years (!) behind. What a statement. What an assumption. And a great skilful return by Robin (read 19:06 http://www.kolabora.com/webconferencing/001916.html)
It has been mentally soothing to follow this real-time blog and it certainly met its objective: (Robin’s quote)
The challenge I had posed to myself was: how do I blog a one hour long real-time event, while it goes on, in a way that makes my blog a complement to what is happening in the event and not a replacement for it?
And here is some feed-back from a humble reader: some recommendations on the refreshing and editing of the posts. With editing I mean ‘adding to the post’. I have not seen Robin take anything out of it afterwards, not even a typo disappeared. He did however, add lines to an already posted comment.
This made me to scroll down after every refresh (refresh rate was well chosen), to see whether the post contained more infos.
My recommendation therefore is:
do not add content to the posts, rather create a new timestamp. A re-editing afterwards such as changing formatting or adding links is definitely ok but should not be done during the event. Otherwise even reading the blog will be a bit too heavy even for multi-tasking individuals.
Well done, Robin, hats for this mega-multi-tasking real-time blogging experience.