My Live Blogging of DEMOfall 2009

My twice-yearly coverage of the DEMO conference — this one, the DEMOfall edition, where some 70 new ventures will be launching — will appear here. It's a special event because it will be executive director Chris Shipley's final DEMO, after 13 great years. She's co-producing this one with Matt Marshall of VentureBeat, who takes the sole producer role as of DEMO 2010. 

Here's the page where my live blogging posts will appear, in real time as they are published: bit.ly/TWU3L.  (I'll be leaving this post here at the top of my blog as a "sticky post" for a few weeks.) To do this live blogging, I'm using a great tool designed just for this purpose called "ScribbleLive."  My coverage begins either Monday evening 9/21 (after the reception), or Tuesday morning 9/22 when the opening session kicks off, and goes through early afternoon Wednesday 9/23, when I must bolt for the airport. 

At the last three DEMO events I've attended, I have live-tweeted them rather than live blog — and that works okay.  But this approach is better, for a number of reasons: (1) I'm not limited to 140 characters per post… (2) I find it a nice middle ground between doing short, often hard-to-write (and understand!) tweets and the more rambling long-form blogging… (3) it's as fast or faster than tweeting… (4) it's way faster than me trying to post quickly on my own Typepad blog here… and (5) it prevents many of my Twitter followers from getting mad and unfollowing me when I'm doing so many rapid-fire tweets at events, which for a DEMO can be upwards of a couple hundred! Another cool thing is that I can attach a photo to any of my live-blog posts as well. (Though I will also upload all my pix to a Flickr set during and right after the event.)  The tool also allows me to attach an audio or video file, if I wish, but I don't expect to do that.

For me, as a longtime event reporter, this ScribbleLive tool is really an ideal solution. Thanks to my colleague on Minnov8.com, Steve Borsch, who set up this tool for some of the other events we cover, and helped me with this one.  Here's an example of how our team of four Minnov8 bloggers used the tool simultaneously for the first time: it was at the recent Blogwell event at General Mills in Minneapolis.

I look forward to DEMOfall and hope I hear from you — whether during the event, before, or after. I will likely be publishing some other, stand-alone posts here on this blog while at DEMOfall — namely, audio interviews, as I did for DEMO '09 back in March. To communicate with me, you can always post comments here at my blog.  Or, talk to me via Twitter by putting @GraemeThickins at the beginning of your tweets — since I will be monitoring Twitter search closely as I live-blog the event.  I'll be in my usual spot in row three of the press section, right down in front.