BlogIN

Zach Legend covered the first BlogIN event on Saturday

BlogIN—an outgrowth of conversation within the Smaller Indiana community—conducted a 15-session unconference on April 26 at the School of Informatics IUPUI campus building. Zach Legend, who also hosted a few sessions on video blogging, shot and edited a YouTube video on the event.

Although there were initial hopes that hundreds of people would attend, the few dozen who did participate seemed active and enthused. Many of the sessions were focused on marketing of blogs, but there were also sessions on improving blog writing and multimedia. Both Amy and I came away impressed with Zach, an ISU graduate who gained some local notoriety as the unofficial-turned-official videographer for the Indianapolis Colts. His sessions on how to create internet video were both accessible and inspiring.

I hosted a session at the end of the day on Identifying Local Bloggers, a topic near to my heart and potentially my dissertation work on local use of technology. Another Bloomington blogger and active twitterer live-blogged some notes, for which I am grateful since I couldn’t do that and moderate at the same time. Always a fan of the overhead document projector, I created a concept map in my notebook to share on the screen as we talked.

My notes from the Identifying Local Bloggers session.

My philosophy for unconferences is that it is important to come out of a discussion not only with ideas on which to ruminate, but also a list of tangible things we can do and encourage others to do. Tangible in this context means doable by a single person in a reasonable amount of time. In order to find local bloggers, we may need to build some centralized directory or special search algorithm, but no one person is going to do that in a reasonable amount of time. What might be reasonable is creating a Doodle poll and inviting people to schedule a brainstorming session for that project. The tangibles we came up with included:

• Announce a theme for Indiana bloggers to write about next month.
• Write a blog post about this topic: the value of knowing the local blogosphere
• Place blog entries in a local context (i.e. if you write about the value of Prius, include local statistics of use)
• Schedule a meeting to talk about a common content strategy for Indiana
• Generate an aggregate list of all local bloggers (such as an export from Smaller Indiana)
• Create a new Twine for Indiana bloggers

I was thankful Amy came with me for the afternoon, as it was great to share this experience with her. There is another blogging event coming up in mid-August, again hosted at IUPUI. This one is a two-day conference that will feature individual sessions on marketing, community building, legal issues, podcasting, web analytics and other relevant topics. There will also be a few panel discussions—Hyper Local Blogging, Dealing With Comments, Blogging Platforms, and Blogging & Journalism—and an unconference component. Registration is $49 online, but I have some discount cards for any locals interested in attending.