Friday 26 June 2009

Open Day liveblogging

I was part of an experiment to liveblog our University undergraduate Open Day. If you're curious, this was the result. Some thoughts of mine follow, in no particular order; bear in mind that the project was not mine so I don't know what the background/constraints may have been.

Personally, I think that the finished liveblog has more than a bit of charm. It is, perhaps, a little long to go through in its entirety; perhaps the two days should have been separated. But it is a chatty and visual record of the Open Day, and gives people who did not attend - or those who couldn't get to everything - a flavour of what was going on around campus. It was made available during the day via plasma screens that were set up in the main display areas.

I realised today that I should have set up a second account to Twitter the Open Day from, rather than using @amelialuzzi. I don't usually separate work and play on Twitter, partly because I don't think they're incompatible and mostly because it stops me from writing anything I wouldn't want my employers reading. But spamming one's friends with a work event is never a good idea, so I set up a new account today. Many apologies for those who followed me through yesterday.

The tool we used - ScribbleLive - was impressive. Easily allowed us to add Twitter accounts to our event, which we only used to add our own accounts but could just as easily been used to find other people attending the event and add their tweets to the liveblog. Another nice touch is that you don't have to register with ScribbleLive to login on the site - you can just use your Twitter, Facebook, or OpenID login. Slight glitch when it turned out that the new Twitter account I set up to blog the second day wouldn't upload. But I got an impressively fast response from their support desk - all fixed in just over an hour.

If the project had a weakness, it was that we hadn't sorted out exactly what we were hoping to achieve and whom the liveblog was for. That's not surprising considering it had been set up as a chance to test a new technology. But it resulted in posts aimed at a mix of audiences. There were information posts - "this talk starts in 15 mins" - which were useful to people attending on the day but say nothing to people reading remotely or people reading after the fact. There were a range of photographs and tweets about cool stuff happening which have an all-audience appeal. And there were videos, which could only be accessed from the website, so would not have held much interest for people following on the plasma screens. We were running an information service and a marketing campaign as well as archiving the Open Day for people who did not attend; concentrating on just one of these aspects might have resulted in a tighter effort.

But maybe I'm being overly fussy here. Much of the charm in the liveblog comes from the fact that it represents a number of styles, points of view, and interests. I think each of us did a good job of finding things we were genuinely interested in, and putting that interest across. It worked very well as a team effort, and was a great experiment to take part in. I hope they let me do it again next time :-).