I, too, struggle with finding a balance between depth and breadth in my blogging practice. One of the many things that impresses me about Ethan is that he manages to do both (though perhaps at some cost, with respect to exhaustion).

My notes from Carl’s inspiring talk include a reference to “speed blogging vs. slow blogging” (and also to Oriah Mountain Dreamer’s mantra “slow down, let go”) … and just as Ethan’s posts reduced the pull I felt to post more extended entries on all the talks, your post satisfies my desire to post a separate entry on Carl’s talk.

For me, blogging is very much a practice of processing the stimuli I am exposed to - and I felt very much overstimulated at Pop!Tech. Like you, I take a slower approach, and yet I find if I take it too slow, I never get around to posting my notes (and reflections) … and thus miss the opportunity for processing. I suppose there is always a tension between input, processing and output - and between focusing on the past, present and future - but I do find that the events I blog about are easier to remember … not sure what’s the cause and what’s the effect.

I often feel backblogged, and find there is typically a narrow window during which I might blog about a recent event or experience … after which time other events and experiences transpired which supersede the unblogged ones, and so I rarely go back for further processing. So while I, too, praise slowness (in blogging and other dimensions of life, online and offline), I don’t want to slow down too much … but I have to admit that in writing that last statement, I’m wondering what the risk would really be in slowing down further. I guess I’ll stop writing, slow down, and reflect more on this.

Here are some of the issues that I had while blogging Pop!Tech this year (and yes, I also love going to conferences with the “twinblogs” — Ethan even gives me a ride to some ;-))

a) making summaries of Pop!Tech doesn’t make sense — Ethan or somebody else will do it anyway– hey, don’t they now invite people to do this kind of thing for free anyway?

b) making summaries of Pop!Tech talks doesn’t make sense in general, because it doesn’t make those complex ideas much justice. No way I can communicate whatever Van Jones did on stage by saying “he spoke about green issues and, umm, jobs”. That was a performance. But not only that — those talks will make even more sense if we try to offer the reader much more depth about the issue rather than transcribing the speech word by word or just summarizing it.

c) The whole conference transcribing business, that I am myself often guilty of, is — I truly hope– going to disappear once Pop!Tech or TED will just use voice-recognition software to literally transcribe all speeches word by word and put them next to videos (hey, won’t that make that dotsubtitle job much easier?) So, this would be actually kill the whole summaries/liveblogging business.

d) what we are missing from the live blogging conference scene is really complex analysis — links to other ideas/blogs — the kind of interlinkage between ideas that blogs are good for. This would really add value even to those who came to the conference. I am not sure if Ethan would agree with me but in my viewpoint his best live-blogging is when he actually intervenes and makes personal comments (which he says he’s trying to avoid as much as he can– you shouldn’t!)

e) now, that usually requires a lot of research, prior preparation and post- and pre-conference thinking, which all of us going to these fancy conferences are probably capable of…

so yeah, I am still thinking what to do with my notes– may be I’ll just open them up next month and try to relate them to something else. a live-blogging conference mash-up would be a truly great idea