Dan Bricklin responds to comments on the lack of “success” of bloggers at the Democratic National Convention.
He’s right about one thing: The need for better “mobile-minded” blogging tools.
I’ve tried to blog while at conferences and I’ve found it a challenge. Part of the problem is the software tools. Part of the problem is the hardware. Part of the problem is the lack of supporting infrastructure.
Here’s what I noticed about how I handled blogging at conferences:
When I’m sitting down at a conference session, blogging is relatively easy–as long as I’m at a table. Many times I can almost keep up typing–particularly with key points. However, just as often there are pictures I’d like to take. But now what do I do? For best quality I have a handheld digital camera, but it’s still a bit clunky to get the photo that I want. OneNote helps here, because I can type and insert photos, however, it doesn’t help with sharpening the image or making other minor adjustments in place. What I’d really like is the camera and notebook-bound software to keep in sync. I’d like to “think” as if I’m capturing a single frame, but have the camera capture and download to OneNote a series
of them, so that the software could find the “best” (such as least blurry) one. But if I don’t like it I can go to the previous/next. Cameras that work very well in low light are also critical here. Getting the OneNote contents to a blog is a second step that a few are trying to make easier, but there’s more work to be done here.
For walking around a conference room floor, blogging with a slate Tablet PC, is terrific. What I like to do is use a “webcam” attached to the Tablet PC. I hold up the slate to take pictures, just like I’d hold up a camera–of course, with a Tablet the preview is pretty easy to see :-). The downside is that the slate has to be always on and ready. More often than not, the Tablet has gone to sleep or the machine is heating up and getting slower, or the battery is going down. I wrote WebcamNotes so I could use it on a tradeshow floor. On a convention room floor handwriting is a great match. But I’d like to see more tools. I’d like to see new “instant-audio-editing” features inside OneNote or other apps. I want to be able to capture my thoughts and the convention sights and sounds—and do it all quickly.
Now here’s the clincher. What would make this all compelling is if I could blast off my new blog entry right then. My setup doesn’t facilitate this. Quite often WiFi at conferences is mediocre–especially on the showroom floors or in the hallways. And even without WiFi, my cell phone often doesn’t have adequate reception inside showroom floors or hotel interiors so it’s hard to leverage it too.
As a result, many times I accumulate pictures or thoughts that I plan on posting later. But by the end of the day, my feet are tired, my voice is tired and….and…I go to sleep. That’s why I think for convention-style blogging, such as at the DNC, what’s needed are blogging tools that enable you to catch snippets right then and there. Maybe it’s just my style, but I instinctively find it easiest and more natural to simply record what I see when I’m on the go. Longer prose with thoughtful analysis is best saved when I have time. When I have only a snippet of time while walking around and talking with people, I only have time for blogging snippets.
That being said, as a reader, what I often find most interesting are the bloggers that faithfully record presentations. What makes these blogging efforts so compelling is that I’m unlikely to get the information any other way. Dan Bricklin does a great job of this style of blogging. As a reader he takes me along to various tech conferences–giving me a glimpse of what it would have been like to be there, standing in a hallway, listening to his thoughts on a presentation.
I also have to throw in that I think part of the “blogging” problem that many of the DNC bloggers encountered was that they didn’t have Tablets. The ideal times to blog, would have been while standing in a security line or while chasing behind a crowd following some notable individual. If nothing else, you could collect autographs on your Tablet and upload them. Or possibly audio record snippets of the crowd on your Tablet or maybe a chance “interview” you have with a delegate while standing in line for lunch. Tablets might have enabled the bloggers to share more of what I wouldn’t have heard about otherwise–making them even more compelling.