Web Worker Daily

live blogging an event

I recently live-blogged a 3-day conference. Gearing up for the event, I posted here about the equipment I was bringing as well as musings about the dynamics of live blogging. While I’ve live blogged parts of events and have Power-Twittered a conference before, this was my first full-scale, solo, multimedia live-blogging project for a client.

The live blogging was a success. In fact, the client was caught up in the excitement of seeing posts showing up literally in the middle of sessions with quotes and commentary about the topics discussed that they finally “got” what a blog could be.

Everyone at the conference was fired up to see images from the sessions and events and video clips of themselves or their fellow conference attendees waxing philosophical about the conference proceedings.

Here are my key lessons from the three days. For anyone whose work will take them into the realm of live blogging, I hope these prove helpful.

Read the rest of this entry »

As reported in more detail on our parent blog GigaOM, Idaho-based M2E Power is on to something new in the land of cell phone chargers. Next year they’ll be selling a charger that gets its energy just by being carried around while you walk - it’s in the same general physics realms as those flashlights you can charge by shaking them. But M2E says they’ve refined this application of the Faraday Principle to the point where it can be packed into a small size and still offer impressive amounts of power - perhaps one hour of talk time for six hours of movement.

GigaOM covers some of the implications of this for areas with unreliable power grids, but it could well prove useful for web workers too. With devices like the iPhone 3G getting increasingly hungry for power, the thought of a backup battery solution that you could just toss into your computer and forget about is pretty attractive - especially if it would charge the best when you were on the run and most likely to be away from your regular charger.