Stowe Boyd posted a ”blink” on Corante about an event he was going to that he thought was charging for a live video stream.

On the train en route to NYC, for the Blogging Goes Mainstream conference, hosted by Business Development Institute, and a long list of great speakers. If you can’t attend, I think PR Newswire is streaming the audio out for $125.

That got me thinking/blogging about some of the implications of charging for live audio and video streams. What are the tensions between folks who live blog out at an event (text, audio, photos, video) and what organizers might want to sell. Are they competing? Complementary? Is someone going to want to ‘own’ that stuff?

Stowe riffed back and I thought it worth a post here on Many2Many (as I have been a very delinquent guest blogger!)

Stowe noted that the event location did not have wireless — except for employees (hmmm), so live blogging was out of the question. He also said “I think any conference that tried to prohibit blogging would have a riot on their hands.” (Stowe, I’d love to know if they did sell feeds from the event in question and if so, if you know how much uptake they got.)

I agree that trying to limit blogging is riot-inducing. I’ve yet to meet a blogger who is begging to be controlled! But limiting connectivity starts to go in the direction of control - implicitly.

But lets think beyond blogging to podcasting, combining photos and almost-live transcript blogging. Think of IRC channels and note-taking wikis open out to the public. These are more than a blogger editorializing on conference content. These are potentially high value artifacts of the event. Personally, I have received GREAT value when folks have done this, even when I’ve been a paid participant at the F2F event (think of http://www.northernvoice.ca) But what would an organizer think? Is this something they want to reserve the right to sell? Can they? Should they? Like at many concerts, which prohibit cameras and recorders, will our laptops and wireless be banned from conferences and events so the event producers can sell out the same thing?

What is the balance point for the event organizers and the free-contributed “sending out” from bloggers? How different might this balance look in different situations?

For me this goes to a deeper question about the perceived and real value of participation in distributed events. Or distributed participation in F2F events. ;-)

I’m in the midst of writing up a “lessons learned” about an online e-consultation and one of the issues that keeps coming on the table are the costs and benefits of participation in distributed events. In the end, I believe this will be one of the factors that determine if people can build a market “sending out” live events to offsite folks (and visa versa).

Right now there is less willingness to pay for something online than F2F. The price points are different. Clearly, they are not the same experiences. But can enough value be created — and perceived/experienced — in online participation so that people will pay? It sure does costs to produce them; different costs, but costs nonetheless. Or will free or “almost free” dominate and the cost be recovered in other ways? (i.e. sponsorship, marketing benefits, etc.)

I think there is room for a wide range of options, but I believe controlling is a losing proposition in almost all cases. I say that from lessons learned trying to control blogging at a past event, even though I think we had good reason to make the request in terms of keeping trust in the room. It is contrary to the nature and ethic of blogging, even if that same ethic may be perceived as contrary to the interests of either the event producers or participants.

No easy answers. What do you think?