Category: Blogging

Liveblogging 101

Our long-awaited presentation we are doing at this year’s Northern Voice has finally appeared on their website. As an all-volunteer conference, I really appreciate all the work and efforts the organizers are giving to make this year’s personal blogging and social media conference a success.

My session will be on Friday, February 22, 2008, from 14:00 – 14:30 (2:00-2:30pm) in a new track–Internet Bootcamp. Entitled Liveblogging 101, it is meant to introduce newbies to liveblogging.

As a technologist and qualitative researcher, I am really interested in how liveblogging is an act of involvement and participation. It is not a narrative of the events–that is stenography. It is an interactive co-creation of the event itself from the perspective of an active participant. This in fact summarizes what my blog title, Silence and Voice, is all about. With liveblogging, the silence is ended as participants take up and use their own voices to record the event as they experience it.

Liveblogging:  Unfiltered. Raw. Authentic. If you want it nice and neat, buy a book.

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Tagging: The Book

taggingbook1.jpgWell, it should not come as a surprise that a new book on tagging was just released: Tagging: People-powered Metadata for the Social Web. I have not read it yet, but thought the review on LibraryThingmade the book seem interesting enough to warrant my ordering it. As tagging is something about which I am both very interested as well as somewhat confused. Perhaps Gene Smith, the author, will be able to help me demystify it.

I wonder if he is planning to attend Northern Voice 2008, too?

Northern Voice Bootcamp, Here I Come!

I am planning to attend this year’s Northern Voice 2008 in Vancouver. I will be presenting, with my colleague Robin Yap, at a new feature in the Moosecamp unconference, called Internet Bootcamp.

The proposal that Robin and I submitted is:

northernvoice2008square2.jpgLiveblogging as Active Participation

Do you want to actively report, interpret, and comment upon what happens around us in real time? Think only professional journalists can do this? If so, then think again! Liveblogging is a term for when people blog about events and presentations as they unfold, with all the personal feelings and thoughts through which we see the world. Unfiltered. Raw. Authentic. Liveblogging is active involvement, allowing us to both co-creator our meaning while we publish it on blogs in real time. This session will explore how people liveblog, its usefulness in an age of social media, and some best practices. A future research agenda will be also be explored.

This has not appeared on their website yet, but that is indeed what we are working on.

Do you liveblog? If not, consider attending our session! If you do, do you have any suggestions or recommendations about how or what we cover? This is something that many people do, and we are hoping we can create a forum to talk about this. Hopefully we can learn something from one another!

WordPress Upgrade, Again

I just upgraded my blog to the latest stable release of WordPress (Version 2.3.2), and updated my theme Royaleto its current version, 1.4, as well. Upgrades like these always seem easier before they actually begin . Strange how they tend to show problems and inconsistencies with other widgets, plug-ins, and the like. WordPress is much easier than MovableType to upgrade, as even with the tweaks and hiccups, I was still able to do it myself and without the need of hiring a developer!

One of the cool features in the current theme is the toggle buttons on the upper right of each post. The posts can be individually toggled opened and closed. This does not effect functionality much outside of printing, but anything to add interactive possibilities (such as to print a post without the sidebars) is a nice feature.

Twitter Champion

I just read a fascinating post from Richard Azia, where he described some of his thoughts having recently Tweeted 10,000 times (in under a year!). He had some really thoughtful reflections about Twitter as a truly social media. I commented on his page about this, sharing my own thoughts about why I started to Tweet more. To quote my own reply:

. . . I have started using it [Twitter] again a lot more because of 3 reasons–I have a BlackBerry and started using TwitterBerry, since it makes it easier to Tweet while on the run. Secondly, I find myself more open to sharing things in my day as my own public reflective practice (like autoethnographic and narrative studies). Thirdly, I recently switched my blog from MovableType to WordPress, and use Twitter Tools–this allows me to have my daily Twitter feeds get automatically added to my blog (so I do not lose my thoughts if Twitter decides it wants to become a walled garden).

I here so many people argue for or against Twitter, that is is nice to here somebody share a rather humble explanation of how they use it. I like to see such examples, especially after hearing all the arguments.