Lessons from Gov2.0, and How I liveblogged it

For three days last week, I attended the Gov2.0 Expo Showcase and Gov2.0 Summit, liveblogging the entire thing here and cross posting to Twitter. Between Tuesday and Thursday, I posted nine entries and 550 updates. After the conference, I dumped the entries and updates into one document, amounting to 66 printed pages and 19,815 words, plus another page of notes from the event's press conference and two video interviews with Tim O'Reilly and Santa Cruz's Peter Koht.

This was, in effect, just my usual notes, except more thorough and done entirely in public. Doing it in full view of the internet gave me an added incentive to keep going, to write complete sentences, to spell-check and to include links. All of that has been useful in the follow-up stories I'm writing for the NewsHour.

Feeding through Twitter was good for promotion, but it was more like an alert system. I'd originally planned to simply live-tweet the event, then dump my tweets into blog posts using TwitBlogger, the tool I built back in January. But sometimes 140 characters (minus hashtags) isn't enough to get a whole thought in.

To do the actual live posting, I used a version of Aaron Bycoffe's django-liveblog, modified to cross-post updates to Twitter. My version is available here on GitHub.

There are certainly other tools available to do this, starting with CoverItLive. But CiL gives me more than I need and doesn't do everything I want. By using my own app, I got exactly what I wanted, and nothing more.

Before: Gov2.0 Summit, Day 2: Afternoon session | After: China's big day, the short version