Gearing Up For Lotusphere Live Blogging

For the past few years at Lotusphere I’ve
‘Live Blogged’ all the sessions that I attended and I’ve been asked how
I managed to get content up to my blog so quickly during the session so
this year I’m going to reveal my technique in the hope that more people
will be able to Live Blog and give different perspectives on the conference.

1. Try sit somewhere near a power
socket, if you can’t then make sure you have a fully charged battery for
the session. The last thing you want is to lose power half way through,
especially for something like a keynote session.

2. Create a local replica of
your blog. We are using Notes after all so why not make use of one of it’s
most important features. With a local replica you won’t lose time trying
to find a strong WiFi signal that won’t drop out on you halfway through
writing your live blog.

3. Setup auto replication for
your blog. Set the replication interval as low as you can. Personally I
create a new location document that has scheduled replication enabled at
2 minutes, that way I can switch to that location document when live blogging
and then return to my normal location document between sessions.

4. Turn off any extra prompts,
if your blog software prompts if you want to ping external services like
WebLogs or Ping-o-Matic then disable this feature for the duration of the
conference.

5. Before the session starts
create the new blog entry, give it a title, tags, and a little disclaimer
explaining that your live blogging and to excuse spelling mistakes, grammar
etc. Then PUBLISH that blog entry.

6. During the session remember
the CTRL-S key stroke. It will perform a quick save and allow you to keep
typing. Because you have already published your blog entry in the step
before then the CTRL-S will just update the already published entry.

7. After the session don’t forget
to go back and spell check your blog, remove the initial disclaimer and
maybe add a few photos that you might have been able to take.

And there you have it, how to use a
domino based blog for Live Blogging. I’m looking forward to seeing all
the live blogs at Lotusphere this year.