From a business researcher’s perspective, one of the best things that has come out of blogging is conference blogging. Of course finding conference blogging is not a substitute for the experience of attending an event yourself, but having the ability to tap into timely–or in some cases even near real-time accounts–of what a keynote speaker or other experts are saying at a conference can provide a fast and convenient way to learn the latest state of the art thinking on whatever topic or industry you are following. And with more and more conference organizers assigning Technorati tags to their events, you can even do precision searching on Technorati to more precisely locate persons who have blogged the event.

But I’ve been asked a couple of times now–how does one know how much stock to put into conference bloggers’ notes? And that’s a very good question: none of us are perfect note takers, and so certainly errors, misunderstandings, and omissions are going to likely be found in many bloggers’ accounts of the conference they are reporting on. And because blogging is such an informal activity, it’s not likely that they are going to be put through any special scrutiny.

So what can you do? There are a few strategies you might take: you should try to find more than one person’s blog on a talk and compare their accounts; you can look for the names of persons in your field that you already know and trust to be sharp and rely on their reports; and you can always send an email to a conference blogger yourself to ask a few of your own questions and try to fill any gaps.

Those are a few of my suggestions. Want to suggest any of your own?

Technorati Tags: Conference Blogging