Blogging from the G20

I’m very grateful to be asked to report from the London Summit on Thursday as part of the G20Voice team. I’m one of 50 international bloggers invited to take part. As usual with events involving high profile government figures, the details of what will happen, when and where are still sketchy but basically we have the same accreditation as mainstream journalists.

So what will we be doing? Well there’s a briefing day on Wednesday when we’ll be getting to know each other better. I think the main value we can add as bloggers is that we can work together, riff off each other, help each other to fact-check and amplify each other’s posts.

There’s a limit to how much value there is in live blogging & tweeting everything that happens. You can only get so immediate. Beating everyone else by a matter of seconds isn’t going to be much use. We’re also not clear the level of internet access we’ll have either through the mobile networks or wifi so although I should be able in theory to qik and audioboo (thanks to bestbeforetv who are loaning me an iphone for the summit) I won’t know until the day the extent to which I’ll be able to do that in real-time and interact with people on the outside quickly and easily.

I’ll have my laptop, N95, iPhone, Edirol for audio, Flip for video.

But there will likely also be lots of people writing about the same stuff. Any press, TV and radio people are likely to be going for the same stories, although perhaps with slightly different angles. So the challenge is to find the stories that are interesting but not likely to be reported elsewhere. I shall also be looking at the events from the perspective of “leadership 2.0” – are there any signs that the attitudes of these leaders has changed, to what extent are they really talking about issues from the viewpoint of ordinary people?

Anything else you’d like to see me doing? (oi! keep it clean.)

7 thoughts on “Blogging from the G20”

  1. How are you seeing the community evolve? What are you noticing about how people are behaving, and what (if anything) is different around / due to social media? And, in turn, how is this changing the way that they (we) use social media?

  2. Yes, that’s going to be interesting – what I saw here: https://perfectpath.co.uk/2008/07/28/glimpsing-obama/ was the difference it made for people on the outside (me) being connected to people on the inside (@downingstreet) for once.

    This time it will be more complicated – there will be official tweets from (at least) Dowing St & the White House plus what we’re creating, plus what serious commentators outside the summit are saying, plus people using twitter to organise protest let alone those just making a noise in order to disrupt.

    When you say “community” who do you mean?

  3. Best of luck, Lloyd – what a fasicnating gig! I think the most interesting thing to hear will be your impressions of what things are like within that bubble: will you be able to get a real sense of what’s happening or will the reportage of being in the middle of it all be most valuable: looking forward to it…

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