At the risk of stirring the fire, I think the idea of "opt-in" for blogging is terrible. You present in public, people can report. You're IN PUBLIC. At most you might want to have a "blogging-not-permitted" icon, but seriously, if you don't want people to write about it, why are you presenting it in public? You want to give secret presentations, then have a secret meeting of your secret society somewhere where laptops and telephones and paper notepads are forbidden. - Richard Akerman

@Richard I say it should be an opt out system for exactly that reason. - Brian Krueger - LabSpaces

Maybe the rules are different in science, but what Richard says sound right: Public presentations are public. I don't like liveblogging (as a reader or speaker), but if it's legitimate for someone to take notes and pass them along or to report on an event, how could liveblogging NOT be legit? (Better forbid those cell phones and MP3 players--some of 'em, including nearly all non-Apple MP3 players, can record the event!) - Walt Crawford

http://tinyurl.com/kkthaa - Bora Zivkovic

http://friendfeed.com/sciphu... - Bill Hooker

@BoraZ Thanks for the pointer - in the end it comes down to making what may have been implict assumptions clearly stated. Its incumbent upon conferences and conference presenters to state explicitly if they don't want their information to go out. Otherwise the default assumption in the 21st century is if it's any kind of public forum then it's open Twitter season. - Richard Akerman

I have to admit, had I read all this and understood the deep gulf between apparent science assumptions ("some public conferences are really secret meetings") and librarian assumptions ("if it's open, it's open"), I might have thought thrice about moving Walt at Random to a science-oriented platform. Makes me very nervous, it does. - Walt Crawford

I go to zero science conferences, to be sure--but I'm very much feeling "two cultures" at this point. (Of course, so far my readership seems to be down 90% on the new platform as compared to the old, so maybe the whole thing's irrelevant...I can just fade away.) - Walt Crawford

Well, my style of fading away could take a few...decades. - Walt Crawford

When I presented at #lotf09 all the tweets were immediately posted on the second screen as I was talking. I didn't know that at the time but it meant we had an audience which was communally aware of a large number of views about the presentation. The only person who couldn't see them was me! I hadn't been asked but I am rather enjoyed it in retrospect. Most were factual. But I can see speakers who might objects, especially in their first presentation - peter murray-rust