I recently spoke at the Professional Convention Managers Association on how they can open new lines of communication with blogs, podcasts, and wikis. So prior to my session I looked into conference blogs and wikis a bit. Last week I wrote about wikis, Conference Wikis – A Great Application. Here are a few conferences with blogs. Looking at them can give you ideas.
Individuals have blogged about conferences for some time. It seems now that more conference events are sponsoring these blogs and trying to aggregate those blogging the conference. It is a way to start the event on a virtual basis prior to the start and then continue the conversations afterwards and provide an archive for what happen and what people thought about it.
NCCE 2006. This is a blog for the NCCE 2006 conference in Portland, OR
Northwest Council for Computer Education – podcasting contest
Sun Developer Network - 2006 Java One Conference – many bloggers are listed – one of the issues is capturing all the individuals who blog an event. Tags can help and an aggregated site like this one is very useful
National Conference for Media Reform – blogs covering the 2005 conference
National Association of the Deaf 2006 conference blogs
World Advertising Research Center – the WARC regularly blogs from key conferences and events around the world. You can find a list on their site
National School Boards Associations has an annual conference blog – “This is a frequently updated website highlighting ideas, resources, examples, and materials from sessions, workshops, activities, and events at NSBA's 66th Annual Conference taking place in Chicago, Illinois, April 8-11.”
Fast Forward Blog – how could I not include the group blog for the Fast Forward conference on Enterprise 2.0. I am one of the group bloggers. Here is my post announcing it with more details, FAST Forward Blog and Conference.
David Warlick has set up a new service to help conference blogging: Hitchhikr. People can register conferences, suggest tags and Hitchhikr finds all blog entries that use that tag. It does what some of the conference sites do, provide one stop conference reading and viewing as Flickr images are also available. As his site days, “we can't always make it to the conferences we need to attend to mix with the people we need to see -- face-to-face. This is why Hitchhikr was invented, to provide you with a virtual space where, thanks to blogs, podcasts, and RSS, we can connect, share, respond, and grow knowledge out beyond the place and time of the event.” I have not tried it but it seems a good idea. Conferences could also do this on their own but this might expedite it. 
business blogs
Bill - thanks for making the FASTforward blog a success. I think that blog was so successful that it might have a life after the actual event. It because of the fact that a conversation can have a life that goes beyond an event that we launched the Future of Communities (www.futureofcommunities.com) blog in a way that was not quite as tightly linked to the Community 2.0 conference.
Posted by: Francois Gossieaux | January 28, 2007 at 12:38 PM
Francois. Thanks for your comment and for including me in the Fast Forward blog. I saw the Future of Communities blog and will be writing about it soon. Bill
Posted by: bill Ives | January 28, 2007 at 04:55 PM