I had about 250 people in my Kyte.tv chat room. I think Engadget said they had something like 40,000 unique visitors in an hour. Now you know why Peter Rojas gets the big bucks.
But I am a newbie at this press conference thing. I didn’t understand why Engadget sat in the back. Isn’t up front the place to be?
No.
The folks in the back could take pictures. Up front Apple PR people were telling me “no pictures.”
So, I did what I could.
I sent some video to my Kyte channel before we went in. I shot that with my Nokia N95. I have the Kyte app on it and it uploads video within a few seconds. Really great.
Once inside I found no wifi I could use so I plugged in my EVDO. Ran great. So far so good.
During the keynote I couldn’t really get photos off because PR was giving me the evil eye.
So, I resorted to text chat. You can go back and look at the chat.
One thing is that TechMeme will never link to video, streamed or otherwise, so if you’re hoping to get on TechMeme and you’re at a hot news event you better have at least one person live blogging it. To get noticed, though, you’re going to have to do something better than Engadget does. For me that means you’ll need to have a team covering events like this. One person blogging. One person taking pictures and pushing them up to Flickr. One person videoing and pushing those up. And one person chatting with all the peeps. Oh, and doing marketing during the event. Twitter, Pownce, Facebook, etc.
In other words the single blogger or journalist doesn’t have a chance. If you can get a team to photo/video/chat/market/and blog all at the same time then you’ll be able to attract an audience and stay relevant to the conversation.
Some things I’ll do myself next time. 1) Bring more batteries for my laptop. 2) Bring an ultra small camera on a bendable neck so I could sneak it in between people and position it well. 3) Band together with other people so that we can split up tasks and have someone at home wrap them all up.
Oh, and Steve Jobs granted interviews to people with notepads after the event but wouldn’t let himself be videoed. So, be flexible. If you can’t get one kind of interview done, switch to another kind.
But, seriously, when you are competing with 200 of the world’s best press you have to find an angle that no one else sees. I’m not sure I got up to that level today, but the people in the chat seemed appreciative that I was chatting live during the event.
Anyway, that’s all from Apple. Now back to work on other stuff.
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