I spent two days last week “live blogging” and lived to tell the tale.

Live blogging is blogging an event while it’s happening. It’s that scene of young people—usually guys—sitting in the back of the room, furiously typing away at their laptops during Bush’s State of the Union or the Scooter Libby trial.

I’m not your typical live blogger. I am a woman. I have a newspaper subscription. And I didn’t know the term “live blogging” until I was half-way done with my first gig as a live blogger.

I’m not your typical any kind of blogger. I’m the type who gets a thrill every time the inserted photo actually appears online and the link goes to the intended destination.

I only signed up to blog the Knight New Media Center’s Politics in Cyberspace conference out of a sense of duty, or perhaps fear. I would love to get a job after I graduate journalism school, and it appears that newspapers are dying. Or at least rarely hiring anymore.

If I can’t blog, if I can’t upload images, video and audio clips, I might as well go to law school.

So I jumped on the Internet bandwagon. OK, I was pulled onto it. But I’m here.

And of course, live blogging turned out to be a lot of fun.

The other USC Annenberg students and I had to simultaneously listen during each seminar, take notes of key ideas and colorful quotes, analyze the material, come up with some (hopefully) funny or insightful commentary and write our post while still listening to the ongoing seminar. There’s something exciting about multi-tasking more than I ever thought humanly possible.

There’s also something liberating about blogging. Bill Nichols, managing editor of Politico.com, said during his dinner discussion that bloggers are not forced to report on stories they feel “obligated” to do. It is not their job to record all the important events of the day. But rather, he said, “We feel a great freedom to pick the most interesting and provocative stories.”

The USC bloggers were indeed instructed not to cover the seminar but rather to provide ongoing commentary on key points of interest.

That can lead to lazy work. You are not responsible for catching every significant point, so you can ignore ideas you do not fully understand or care about.

Yet it also gives you the freedom to invest all of your energy into one specific thought.

After Phil Noble of PoliticsOnline spoke about the future of the Internet, his comment about giving $100 laptops to the world’s poorest children struck me as problematic. I blogged about that issue – arguing that those children need mosquito nets and malaria pills, not laptops – and I was free to ignore his other arguments. If I had been working as a traditional reporter, I would have written about his most important comments, not only the one that disturbed me personally.

But is giving my opinion about mosquito nets journalism? I did not do any background research or interviews. I used my memory of newspaper articles and my own experiences from living and traveling in undeveloped countries and hanging out with street children to form my opinion. That is far from scientific or professional.

And yet, that’s what bloggers often do.

Blogging can never replace traditional print, online or broadcast reporting. We as a society need newspapers – whether online or sitting outside your front door – to provide the news of the day. But there is something exciting and liberating about blogs, both for the reader who wants that extra bit of commentary, and for the individual who wants her voice to be heard.

Blogging is less an alternative to journalism and more another tool in a writer’s belt. And as I am slowly learning, this tool has as many rules on how to use it as any other. Real bloggers take blogging very seriously. A blog must be written in a conversational tone. It must have links and as many multi-media features as you can master. It must provide commentary. It should be funny. It can’t take more than a few hours to write. And it must, more than anything else, sound raw. Once you got all that, you are “free.”

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Hanna Ingber Win is an editor at Pop and Politics. “Pushing Off” is her column of dispatches from twentysomething land. Images: Chris Ranes