Call for feedback
November 14th, 2005 beatrice.pulliam
In the interest of full disclosure and exploring what worked and what did not, we are doing an open debriefing of our blogging experiences. We need your feedback and comments. Did we deliver? Did you find our posts informative or entertaining? These are just a few questions that come to mind. I’ll list a few more items to get us going…
Some challenges:
Chasing wifi
(obvious one) This was a barrier to consistently providing live blogging from sessions. There was wifi in the public areas of the hotel, and spotty to no coverage in meeting rooms. This is nothing new, this is a common scenario at many conferences held at hotels. This meant we took lots of notes and had to fit in time to dash out to the lobby to post notes or wait until the end of the day to synthesize and post more detailed summaries. What is the preferred post - stream of consciousness musings or detailed, blow by blow accounts? What gets lost in the translation…?
Coverage
It’s a natural thing, people want to write about what they know or what interests them. How do you ensure that a large number of sessions get covered? Is that possible? I found myself popping into sessions I hadn’t planned to attend.
Tone
This isn’t earth shattering, one’s professional experience informs and impacts the way the info presented at sessions is understood. That works its way into posts, of course. Would you rather have cut and dry posts or do you like the color commentary?
Technology
The Pew Reports say that only 15 percent (maybe less than ) of people know what a blog is. I had several people come up to me during the conference with very positive comments about the ASIST blog. Did you have any experience with blogs (either as a reader or contributor) prior to this year’s conference? Would it have been helpful to hear the moderators give an explanation of blogging prior to sessions ? Or are the proceedings enough for you?
A blog, a wiki, a message board AND Flickr…Too much or not enough? I added a visualization tool (thanks Anita) in the sidebar and to date, over 350 hits have been recorded (no idea from this tool if those are 350 unique hits) to date, so people are stopping by. We still need to go through our other less visible, but more specific statistical tracking tools. Do you know the difference between a blog and a wiki and does it matter to you?
Lack of public terminals at ASIST conferences - I have been wondering about this to myself for the last couple of years. Most conferences have an internet cafe or vendor sponsored setup that allows people to check their emails, etc. How would the presence of public terminals impact your involvement with a blog? Would you be more likely to volunteer to blog the conference? Post comments and read the blog during the conference?
Access to presentations
Many speakers have made their presentations available, either by posting their urls at the end of their presentations or by uploading them to the wiki. We didn’t upload any presentations here, but I tried to include links to presentations where I could find them. I think we can expect more presentations to surface over the next couple of weeks. Do you think the blog should provide a place for uploading and downloading presentations?
With only a few challenges listed above, would you like to see this again next year? How can we improve this as a communication and/or collaborative tool? We really want to hear from you…
Entry Filed under: ASIST2005
1 Comment
1. Pascal Calarco | November 16th, 2005 at 3:32 pm
I didn’t have much chance to look at the blog during the meeting, but did after I came back from the meeting, and it was generally useful and interesting.
I did post the SIG Cabinet draft minutes to the Wiki, which was a great help! Thanks for your wonderful leadership in invigorating ASIST with these (relatively) new technologies!