Recently in Conferences Category
Expect to see me at the Interactive & Film segments at this year's SXSW conference! I'm looking forward to seeing how things have evolved in the past two years (hello, sustainability!), but I'm equally interested in all the pre-networking and external conference activities that take place around this event. Like the Rocky Horror Picture show, the conference sessions are only half of what's going on. heh.
I'll be checking the meet-ups and other opportunities for interactivity, but if I don't catch wind of it, be sure to send info my way!
I finished perusing the Department of Health & Human Services conference blog on pandemic flu, and found many interesting ideas around how to run a conference blog:
1. Limited Time Range. This blog was designed to run a few weeks before and a few weeks after the actual event (June 13). This gives them some lead time to build interest, and a small window for maintenance and building new content. I hate the thought that this blog is going away, but I see the reasoning behind it.
2. Conference Presenters are the Bloggers. If you're going to speak at a conference, then you must be a subject matter expert, right? And if you're a subject matter expert, then people want to hear what you have to say on a subject, right? Who better to blog than your presenters! I wonder how the Department of HHS talked them into it. They seem to have received some excellent participation.
3. Separate moderator. Someone to vet comments and to see to the formatting details? I could see how this would take the humdrum out of blogging. Maintenance is always a bear. It probably reassured SMEs with low blogging confidence, too.
4. Sponsors Don't Blog. I work for a quasi-governmental agency that's deeply concerned about its reputation, and I can see why the HHS took this approach. They're sponsoring debate, but they're not actually debating. They're asking for help and kicking around ideas without risking their rep. Clever.
5. Weekly Topic List. Since this is a group blog with a group of loosely connected people, I can see a topic list as providing a useful framework for blog posts. It may also encourage more community among the bloggers since they'd have a shared sense of purpose/agenda.
6. Smart Design. I love the layout of this site, the simplicity of it, and the inclusion of a lot of information with minimal clutter. Each of the blog entries has a small snapshot of the blogger along with former posts and a biography. There's also a nice suite of social networking tools that's located at the bottom of each entry. Very nice.
7. Good Outsourcing. The HHS hired an outside agency to build this blog. They bought experience rather than doing it themselves. I think it was worth every penny.
I would be very interested in seeing the HHS's metrics for success. What were they? Did they reach them? I also want to know if their presenters enjoyed the experience and would do it again. I sincerely hope they find a way to share that information b/c if it was successful, this could be a template for other government-sponsored conference blogs.
Just read the NY Times article about phasing out personal laptops in the classroom. It raises some good points about attention span, the focus on surfing instead of learning, and how some things are best experienced with pen and paper. The school that's phasing out the laptop program cited the lack of academic progress of its students and rising costs of maintenance as additional reasons for stopping.
The article struck a chord with me because I have the same questions about their effectiveness in conferences as well as classrooms. I know that I work during conferences if there's a laptop in front of me, and that many of my colleagues IM and surf. Other colleagues have told me that it distracts from their involvement if they see a sea of people typing away instead of paying attention to presentations. As a presenter at conferences, it can be downright disconcerting to face a room of apparently disinterested people (though it does help with stagefright!).
As I help plan conference and classes, I wonder if it's best to put a stop to the technology intrusion. Laptops have their place, but should they be present in a learning environment? From my own experience, I think we're better off without them.
As I was sitting in a conference center full of IT professionals abuzz with the acquisition news, I was struck by how the conversations centered around the money exchanged between Google and Youtube. I doubt that anyone here has uploaded a video much less viewed one through the service. I suspect that I'm the only one, and that makes this a lonely, lonely conference.
Companies want to monetize the web - I understand that. At the same time, I want them to understand why I get itchy and nervous at their talk of business models and ROI. I'm glad for the folks at Youtube but at the same time I'm sad for the Web.
More later.
Unexpectedly, I'll be attending Lou Rosenfeld's Enterprise Information Architecture seminar on September 14 in Chicago. He'll be talking about "tying together content in a rational, user-centered way, regardless of content ownership issues, cultural hurdles, and turf battles..."
After years of working at it, I wonder if the cultural hurdles and turf battles can indeed be overcome. No one appreciates good information architecture more than I do but is it time to move on? With newer and more interesting ways of finding content, do sites need IA? I hope to get the chance to ask.
If you're attending, be sure to say hi!
