Blogging and RSS Make the Event
February 28th, 2005Neville Hobson writes:
“If I were organizing a conference right now, at the very top of the list of communication channels that I’d be thinking about in my communication planning would be blogs and RSS. Yes, I’d also be thinking of all the traditional ways to communicate - the website, the press releases, the flyers, etc - but top of my list are the new media channels.”
“And not only blogs and RSS purely from the conference organizer’s viewpoint - I’d want to ensure that the ‘blogging infrastructure’ is such that anyone who attends can just go right ahead and blog, wherever and whenever they want. That primarily means wireless network availability so you can just fire up your laptop, get connected and away you go…”
“There can’t be any doubt that this new way to get people talking and buzzing about your event - not only the formal stuff but also the informal, chit-chat type things that happen: see Renee’s blog for examples - has no parallel. It is the most effective way to rapidly spread the word.”
Another “Duh!” moment for me. Of course weblogs and RSS can help get the word out about conferences! Come to think of it, we (the Blog People) have been doing that for Computers in Libraries for the past 4 months now. Wow. Talk about your cheap advertising. Note to library conference organizers. Send out press releases or links to bloggers and ask them to hype up your event. We just might do it.
Pete from PC4Media (from where I found the above post), chimes in:
“Greg IMd me during the conference, and said: “It is like you are right here.”. Why? Because I happened to be reading and reblogging two of Marc Canter’s and Lee LeFever’s posts, that they were blogging while sitting next to Greg (I presume.)
The point here is…. That bloggers are
1. Letting the rest of us who don’t go to these events feel like we are almost there (from an educational perspective… and to a degree: from a participatory perspective)
2. Evangelizing these events to the rest of us, so that we really want to go to them.”
That was our goal for the PLA Blog. We wanted to get people excited about attending the event and excited about blogs in general as well as having librarians who couldn’t attend the meeting but would like to play along at home.