Conferences & Webloggers & Weblog Tech/RSS: Matches Made in Heaven

Neville Hobson writes about the importance of blogging and RSS feeds for conferences. via Alex Williams at Event Lab.

Gregory Narain keeps telling me that I need to start going to more conferences. That it'll be great for my business. I agree. But, my time and resources are a bit allocated right now, so I don't plan on flying around.

This is unfortunate, because I am missing out on meeting with the people I talk about and to - every day. Lee LeFever met my whole blog social network at Northern Voice.

Greg IMd me during the conference, and said: "It is like you are right here.".  Why? Because I happened to be reading and reblogging two of Marc Canter's and Lee LeFever's posts, that they were blogging while sitting next to Greg (I presume.)

The point here is.... That bloggers are

1. Letting the rest of us who don't go to these events feel like we are almost there (from an educational perspective... and to a degree: from a participatory perspective)
2. Evangelizing these events to the rest of us, so that we really want to go to them.

Neville Hobson goes on to say what he'd recommend to conference organizers:

If I were organizing a conference right now, at the very top of the list of communication channels that I'd be thinking about in my communication planning would be blogs and RSS. Yes, I'd also be thinking of all the traditional ways to communicate - the website, the press releases, the flyers, etc - but top of my list are the new media channels.

And not only blogs and RSS purely from the conference organizer's viewpoint - I'd want to ensure that the 'blogging infrastructure' is such that anyone who attends can just go right ahead and blog, wherever and whenever they want. That primarily means wireless network availability so you can just fire up your laptop, get connected and away you go.

Which brings me back to an idea I've had before.  Given that most conferences have their own websites and that my company builds websites for events, I've wondered what would be the best way to integrate blogging into the website.  We first thought that integrating .TEXT an (ASP.NET based blogging tool)(which could benefit from having its own website)  would be the best way to do this. But, more and more, I am thinking that - that isn't necessary.  All an event website really needs...

• is a way to let bloggers trackback to the conference blog.
• OR a way for a moderator to reblog/aggregate other blogger's posts.
• OR a way to tap technorati's database and aggregate relevant posts that are tagged with the conference's name. (Lee suggests this in the comments on Neville's post.)
  

Anyone interested in building something like this? or using something like this?

Comments

[Sooz]

From what I recall, Feedster has aggregated blog-related content for events such as the first BloggerCon in Cambridge Fall 2003. Maybe you can conspire with them?