Tomorrow I'm attending Internet Librarian International 2008, and I thought I'd try out a different approach to live blogging.

I've been following some of the live blogging that Andy Powell has been doing at http://efoundations.typepad.com/livewire/ and I had some issues with the CoverItLive tool that Andy was using. A discussion about approaches to live blogging then started on Brian Kelly's UK Web Focus Blog, and I suggested that an alternative approach would be to have a Twitter account for the event, and use that as the live blog feed. I felt this approach would have some advantages – I said:

I can see that not everyone would want to have an RSS item pop up
everytime you finished a sentence, but it would allow much more
flexibility in terms of use:

Pull together all live streams across several live blogs
Searchable after the event
Archivable via an RSS aggregator
Users could choose their own client to view live stream
Can be consumed as push or pull model depending on user choice
Can be read off-line

I’m sure there are other possibilities – the point is that RSS is generally more re-usable etc.

Andy identified some problems for him in using Twitter – particularly the inability to go back and edit the transcript later.

So, since this is the first event that I've been to since that discussion, I thought I'd give it a go.

If you want to comment or contribute to the live blog, get yourself a twitter account by signing at http://twitter.com and then post a tweet starting '@ostephensili08'

You can either view the 'pure' stream – just me tweeting as follows:

Follow ostephensili08 on Twitter
View the Twitter stream at http://twitter.com/ostephensili08
Subscribe to the Twitter RSS feed at http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/16794267.rss

Alternatively you can view the stream with others comments (recommended – bound to be more interesting than just me)

View the Twitter stream at http://search.twitter.com/search?q=from%3Aostephensili08+OR+%40ostephensili08
Subscribe to the RSS feed at http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=from%3Aostephensili08+OR+%40ostephensili08

We'll see how it goes!