The next best thing to attending a tradeshow, conference, or seminar is reading blog accounts and writeups about the event, especially if it’s specific to your industry. In this case, I’m refering to Affiliate Summit East, currently taking place in New York City.

Here’s my recommendation for one blog, if you want to read great liveblogging – Lisa Barone’s over at the Outspoken Media blog, covering the ASE sessions she’s attending.

You can catch her sessions here: Lisa Barone ASE09 liveblogging. (she tags her posts correctly, so you can bookmark that page for up-to-date coverate).

What makes a great live blogging session is a combination of factual reporting of the speaker/speakers presentation, plus the blogger’s subjective/objective interpretation of whether their words makes sense. A healthy sense of humor and snark doesn’t hurt either.

The SEO folks seem to live blog their seminars most closely, and affiliate summit coverage hasn’t seemed as heavily covered, despite the number of “Press” attendees walking about.

Some other coverage of ASE09:

• Affiliate Summit Co-founder Shawn Collins’ write up at AffiliateTip (from past experience, he’ll likely do end-of-day recaps)
• Possibly regular coverage at WebMetricsGuru
• Possibly regular coverage from Tim Jones

Also coverage from:

• TrishaLyn (initially I’d thought she was live blogging the panel she was on…which would be interesting. Then I saw that a guest blogging was doing the blogging)
• Ayako Bingham on her Branding100 blog
• John Chow’s Meet Market video coverage (with an “attractive girl” that the blog commentars seem to want to get to know better)

For Affiliate Summit East updates, I’d suggest looking at Justin Barr’s AffBuzz.com affiliate blog aggregator for updates.

Looking at the hashtag #ASE09 on twitter might be counterproductive as the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty low (especially late at night when drunk affiliates send stream-of-consciousness tweets).

If you’re looking for blog posts, using Google’s Blog Search with the “Affiliate Summit East” search string might ultimately be the most productive (unless the blogs aren’t indexed in google…)

–

Shawn has also just posted that Affiliate Summit West 2010 will be held in Las Vegas, Jan 17-19 featuring keynote speakers Dr. Robert Cialdini (author of “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”) and “Copyblogger” Brian Clark.