How to blog a conference

I regularly check Anton Zuiker’s Sugarcubes, displayed in his sidebar. There, I recently discovered that Ethan Zuckerman and Bruno Giussani put together a booklet that explains how to liveblog a conference – Tips for conference bloggers (choose between a large PDF and a small PDF). Pretty good information overall.
When I went to the first BloggerCon in Chapel Hill, I was still a newbie: I sat next to and chatted with Dave Winer without knowing who he was. I do not remember now, but I believe I wrote a brief post about the BloggerCon afterwards.
The following year, at Podcastercon, I sat back and enjoyed myself, and only felt compelled to, afterwards at home, write a post that was mostly about Dave Warlick’s amazing session on podcasting in the classroom. That was the first time many of us have seen The Wizard in action (he usually travels around the country doing this), but that experience was instrumental in our seeking out early and getting Dave to lead a session on the use of the Web and the concept of the Flat Classroom in science education for the Science Blogging Conference.
At last year’s ConvergeSouth, which was only one day long, I wrote only a one-post summary, but the year before, I wrote a whole lot of posts, session-by-session (the last post in the series has links to all the others on the bottom). But that was not liveblogging – I wrote all those posts over about ten days after I got home from the conference. From memory! I did not even take any notes!
Blogging from Scifoo was closer to real-time than is my usual practice (well, that was the first time I actually had a laptop, and I had it with me!), but even that was not real liveblogging. In the sessions, I want to pay attention and to interact with others. If I am crafting a sentence to write about what I just heard, I will miss the next ten sentences and loose the thread. I’d rather digest the entire session in my mind and write about it afterwards.
As an organizer, I do not have time to liveblog the Science Blogging Conference as I have to be at so many different places at the same time, making sure everything is going smoothly. But last year, a number of people did a great job liveblogging and post-blogging the conference. So I hope that there will be good blogging from the next one as well. Perhaps the Zuckerman-Giussani handbook will be helpful for the livebloggers here in January.