Back when I did my post on 21st Century Worldcons I suggested that Web 2.0 techniques could be used to better involve those who cannot attend the convention in what is going on. That, of course, requires a web site. I haven’t had the time, and don’t have the skills, to do that properly, but it is amazing what you can fling together in a hurry using WordPress and a few simple plug-ins. As a result, I’d like to present to you, ConReporter.com.

What’s all this about? Well, the technical term is a “mashup”. That means it is a site that gathers material from elsewhere. In this particular case it does it using RSS feeds. So people who are attending a convention give us their feed URLs. We put them all into the web site. And then anyone who can’t go to the con has us as a one-stop-shop for a wide variety of reports on the event. It is Citizen Journalism in action. I have already signed up a bunch of people. You may recognize some of the names.

It isn’t perfect by any means. I’d like the reports to be much more searchable, but that requires more complicated programming. What I have done instead is assign tags to each reporter on the basis of their interests. That means that users of the blog can easily get a list of those reporters who have an interest in, say, costuming, or science panels.

Someone, I am sure, will accuse me of stealing other people’s content. That’s certainly not the plan. We only syndicate people’s feeds if they ask us to. Of course that means that you have to ask. We won’t automatically include your feeds just because you are reporting on the con.

What I need now is help. Kevin and I cannot run this by ourselves. We’ll be way too busy. And besides, we need reporters. So I am looking for two groups of people.

Reporters: Are you going to be at Worldcon? Will you be blogging or tweeting from the event? If so we’d love to have your reports included on the site. We are particularly interested in people whose interests are not yet covered, and in people who are going to be reporting in languages other than English. This is a Worldcon, and we want the whole world to be able to participate.

Editors: If this thing takes off as we hope it will, we’ll need help over the next few weeks getting all of the reporters set up on the site. We also need people who are not going to be at Worldcon who can monitor what is going on and create blog posts on the home page highlighting particularly interesting reports. We need people who can act as studio editors for the CoverItLive sessions, answering questions and approving comments.

Long term this is something I hope other people will take over. I hope the technique can be used for other conventions, and I don’t have the time to keep it running. But I’m putting it out there because I want people to take an interest in Worldcon, and I want people who run conventions to see what can be done.

Feedback would be very much appreciated.

The Montreal Worldcon is looking for people who are going to be blogging, tweeting or whatever from the convention. They don’t say why in the post, but as this is coming from their press room people I’m pretty sure they want to know who’ll be pestering them for things and what they can do to help. Sign up here (and hopefully we’ll get several folks blogging in French too).

Unsurprisingly the #1 question is about wi-fi, which I am still working on.

I figured I ought to test out the latest CoverItLive software before I head out to Montreal. You can find the test here. Feel free to try test tweets with the #worldcon or #hugo hashtag.

I hope to use this technology as part of the coverage of the Anticipation committee meeting in Montreal next weekend (no, not reporting what’s said in the meeting, unless I’m asked to, reporting on Montreal). And I expect it will get used at other conventions I’m attending around the world this year.

Over at Eastercon, Geri Sullivan and Ben Yalow did a video presentation via the LXtra webcast about the Reno in 2001 Worldcon bid. There’s not a lot of new information, and having Geri on Skype videophone from the US introduced some annoying time delays, but it was great to see something like this being done. You can watch it here. It lasts 20 minutes.

Talking of Worldcon, Kevin and I will be in Montreal next weekend for a committee meeting. I do intend to take a good look around and shoot some video. We’ll also be tweeting, though not with the iPhone due to roaming costs so the photos will have to wait. Given that the BSFA’s Eastercon coverage through CoverItLive appears to have worked well, I’m planning to do something similar, and hopefully other attendees will tweet too (the hash tag will be #worldcon). Because we’ll be in meetings or out and about a lot of the time we won’t be able to keep an eye on it, so it would be nice if one or two people could offer to do so for us. I’d also like to schedule a Q&A session, but I can’t guarantee that as I don’t know what our schedule will be.

Over at the BSFA web site someone has used CoverItLive and Twitter in combination, which shows off very nicely what can be done with that technology. I’ve been using Tweetizen because it is quick and easy, and because I hadn’t tested CoverItLive with Twitter or for a long period. It is good to know that it works. I can now roll that out for future cons.

What the BSFA folks haven’t done, and I definitely wants to do for the Hugos (and maybe the Nebs if I can stay awake through the night) is to have people online hosting the event and interacting with the remote audience. That way it becomes a proper interactive experience rather than just something people watch.

I’ll trial it next weekend while I’m in Montreal and will try to encourage other people to tweet while they are there.

Which leaves just one question: given that the BSFA folks were so smart, how come they only tweeted the results of the Best Novel category?

I’ve just been listening to the Eastercon Fan GoH session in which Greg Pickersgill interviewed Bill and Mary Burns. I say “listening advisedly” because while the sound quality was superb the video was very blocky and it was only because I knew the people involved that I could picture what I was seeing. Fortunately, for this particular event, sound was pretty much all you needed.

The event was streamed on the LXtra channel at Ustream. People kept popping in and out, but there were generally 10 or 12 people online. Geri Sullivan was there, and other people from the US. For those of us online there was a chat window, which was quite useful, though it would have been good to have a link to a list of IRC chat commands somewhere off the screen for the benefit of newbies.

The feed did drop a number of times during the panel. I believe the problems were at the LX end, in that the hotel wi-fi wasn’t playing ball and Peter Sullivan had to get the feed out using a mobile broadband signal. I do hope his phone bill isn’t through the roof this month. To do video properly you really need a good quality wired connection, but those often come rather expensive in hotels. Still, kudos to Peter and Steve Green for making this happen.

As to the event itself, Greg did a great job with the interview, though several of the online audience were disappointed that he didn’t ask Bill about efanzines.com at all. There was, however, a certain amount of heavy irony in having an event that reached out to fans around the world that featured people for whom even Eastercon was deemed “too large”. Other opinions expressed during the interview were that masquerades should be scrapped and that modern conventions have too much programming. And that, of course, is why we still have things like Corflu, so that people who want that sort of event can get it.