Conference Blogging

I'm trying to decide what I think about bloggers covering conferences, especially as David Weinberger and many others are at Esther Dyson's PC Forum event in Arizona this week.

I'm not there, but at home, though I am often at conferences like these, so the shoe is on the other foot for once.

Here's some ideas.

1. Does any one really need real time conference coverage?

2. I find real time coverage of a conference is more interesting to other bloggers who happen to be attending the conference and have a sense of the "context" and place itself.

3. I find the coverage is useful when I happen to run into it later on Google and I'm researching a specific subject and it happens to fall into that area.

4. I miss the conference bloggers regular writing and I would venture to say their conference blogging is almost always less interesting than their regular writing, unless there is just spectacular earth-shattering news happening at the conference.