Dan Bricklin has a good piece on What we learn from the Convention blogging:

The Convention brings in a new element. There are 15,000 paid professionals covering the event. There are live and edited TV feeds produced by thousands more. These full-time people had time to prepare. They are used to covering such events -- that's what they do for a living year after year. What should the role of the blogger be? Their readers may or may not have seen any of those other reports. How do you integrate that in?

Bloggers who are used to commenting on a day-by-day world, thrust into covering a huge event, need to adjust. Unlike a normal conference or family event, with a single speaker, a single party, and a single hall to schmooze in, a convention has high-power meetings everywhere, media extravaganza presentations with waving signs, and thousands of interesting participants including some you only see on tabloid covers or the evening news and many, many others whose personal stories are gems. And it's something new for almost all of the bloggers.

I've been following some of the blogs from the convention and have some thoughts myself which I may expand on later, particularly on what we get from reading weblogs that's different than what we get from the traditional media. Bricklin said that one of the things that distinguished bloggers from print media was emotion. Bloggers aren't objective; they don't claim to be. Bloggers provide both a camera-eye and a tight-third POV and it's usually easy to tell them apart. Corporate spin and cynicism and 'just another event' aren't yet big factors for bloggers (and, one hopes, they won't ever be because when they are, it won't be blogging anymore).