Category: Liveblogging

Using Blogs for Progressive Political Change and Agitation

Kathleen Milberry who blogs at Geeks and Global Justice is speaking about her blog and how it is related and integrated into her dissertation research. She stated that blogs are really amenable to political activism.

Marc Lee then spoke about his work at his website, The Progressive Economics Forum. Marc uses Dreamhost and likes it, which certainly is counter to many of the other recent complaints I hear about the host. He finds this useful for real-time commentary, especially for reaching the blogosphere before things formally hit the media.

This session seems to be about sharing what Kathleen and Marc do with their blogs for political and research reasons. As a session in the Unconference, it did not have a specific and formal “point” outside of sharing their work and vision.

Interesting DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) in the US that allows people to contact a domain host to effectively stop people from using stolen content. Somebody stated that people who are doing political blogging should be familiar with this, since people can complain about things and then the host can shut down the domain very quickly.

Somebody just recommended Alex King’s Share This WordPress widget. Will have to check it out.

People are sharing a lot of great Canadian / American concepts and content. What an open group of people with a wide variety of expertise who are willing to share and help one another. This is one of the reasons why I am so fond of Northern Voice!

Kathleen just mentioned that political and activist blogging is a great act of empowerment. That fits so well with my blog name, Silence and Voice!

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Blogging 101 at Northern Voice 2008

Northern Voice has started with the Unconference today. I will be doing a lot of liveblogging along the way using Windows Live.

I decided to attend Blogging 101, the first of the sessions in Internet Bootcamp. Richard Eriksson of Raincity Studios presented. I decided that I wanted to see the approach that this stream is taking as I will be speaking about Liveblogging 101 later today at 2:00 pm.

Richard just made an interesting comment about adding blog comments. He mentioned that he adds his own comments to his own blog to help make his blog more conversational as well as to add more information

Somebody added a comment about writing about your blog’s purpose, whatever that purpose may be.

Richard then spoke about RSS feeds, and I shared a comment about subscribing to RSS feeds for academic journals. There are a number of academic journals I read (or at least want to see the content that is being published), and I subscribe to them using FeedDemon (which I have used for years, constantly gets better each year, and is now free!).

Richard is giving a good introductory session right now. He made good use of PowerPoint slides, following some of the best practices of having no more than six words per slide. While there are many reasons to use PowerPoint, for a presentation like this the few words per slide is really valuable.

Richard was discussing Event blogging and Liveblogging. He discussed how liveblogging can involve adding date stamps each time a post is updated. I think that may be useful if using a service such as Cover It Live, but that system (with great bells and whistles) is still a little bulky to use.

Twitter is a great microblogging platform, using only 140 characters. I Tweet at http://twitter.com/JeffreyKeefer. Sketchblogging is a concept I am not very familiar with, but it reminds me of Hugh’s work.

Tumbleblogging is something I am not very familiar with, so will have to look into this a bit more later. Mental note to myself.

Now that the time for this is running out, I see that lots of people still seem to have lots of questions. Good to leave a session with continued interest still there.

Why Liveblog Democrats and Republicans?

I love how the Times is liveblogging both the Democrat as well as the Republican races. Of course, being Super Tuesday with 24 states holding their primaries.

Without a central location or event or person, and with such a variety of dates and times and places and candidates, how is liveblogging of any value?

This is yet another example of an issue to bring to my Northern Voice presentation on liveblogging in two weeks.

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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