This was originally published last year on my old blog 🙂

So I recently got to attend the 2014 Web Summit and it was absolutely insane. I was part of the Live Team, which basically means I got to go to the event for free, but I was assigned different areas to cover, and I had to live tweet/blog/instagram/vine/whatever them, to make sure that everything was getting coverage on social media.

We were encouraged to be as creative as possible but I’m pretty terrible at taking awesome photos/making perfectly looping Vine videos, so I was kind of struggling to think of anything to do other than live tweet each talk.

I’m a big fan of Mashable, and in particular Dasha Batelle, who incase you don’t know is like the best Snapchatter in the world. She started working for Mashable in January, and I just remember being completely astounded by the way in which they used Snapchat to cover the Academy Awards. They took live snaps from the event, complete with illustrations from Dasha, which made you feel like you were getting snaps from your friend who was there, rather than from a news source. It was innovative and engaging and when I thought about how I was going to cover the Web Summit, I knew I wanted to try something similar.

Unfortunately, I’m not as naturally gifted as Dasha and the Mashable team, so I cheated and used a stylus, and even then my snaps are nowhere near as good as theirs.
It was actually a lot harder than I thought. You can only take one picture at a time on Snapchat, and everything was happening so quickly, so time was a real constraint in getting everything done and nothing was as perfect as when I had the luxury of drawing doodles at home.

Still, it was way funner than just tweeting, so here are some of the snaps I took, in chronological order.

(I know I spelled John Sculley’s name wrong. I was too excited okay?? It keeps me up at night.)