#trending

Fountain at Bonnaroo in 2011 (taken via Instagram).

I’m at home today, preparing my gear and snacks for the 2012 Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival! Reporter Hayes Hickman, photographer Adam Brimer and I will depart for our three hour-long drive to Manchester, Tenn., early tomorrow morning.

Our Web coverage of Bonnaroo has changed heavily in the past decade, and that’s the topic of my Sunday print #trending column.

In 2002 and 2003, our Bonnaroo coverage was cursory with stories and photos and perhaps an entry or two just for the Web.

In 2004, music reporter Wayne Bledsoe and photographer Saul Young shared their ‘Roo experiences on blogs called “Wayne Blogsoe” and “Saul at Bonnaroo.” A year later assistant visuals editor Lauren Spuhler joined the team, giving our online coverage a boost.

Spuhler shared photos and snippets of the scene in a Bonnaroo blog. She experimented with podcasts, took photos for a Web gallery, and created video profiles of concertgoers with hidden talents — Bonnaroo Idol. In 2007 she started a Twitter account as part of her coverage, sending tweets via SMS. We snagged the Twitter handle @bonnaroo, which was readily available at the time. We sent tweets as @bonnaroo for a while until the Bonnaroo organizers contacted us and claimed their handle. We gave them @bonnaroo and are now known as @bonnaroonews.

Spuhler embraced the upgrades in prosumer technology that boomed in the mid 2000s. She posted a lot more video and tweeted away from the festival. Her followers were enthusiastic and she arranged tweet-ups. (See our coverage from 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011. Some links in the older content may not work anymore due to major technological upgrades, but you get the gist of our coverage plans.)

Last year, I took the coverage reins from Spuhler. I had the luck of attending a photo manager workshop a few months before the festival so was armed with some fun apps on my iPhone that I wanted to try out. I used a little point and shoot camera to take video and used my iPhone for photography. Armed with an Owle Bubo device (basically a lens attachment for a phone) I snapped, tagged and uploaded away. I took panoramic images with the phone and also shared photos via Instagram.

The most thrilling part of the process was uploading photos just moments after they were taken. I loved seeing the instant retweets of my coverage and the realtime engagement.

This year, in addition to our usual Web coverage plans on Twitter and Facebook, I will post a lot of photos to Instagram and Tumblr via my iPhone. The Tumblr is a new experiment, and I’m excited to see how many fans, follows and reblogs we will get. The photos we’ve posted on there right now are already generating some interest. A photo by Brimer of Florence Welch from Florence and the Machine waiting on a porta-potty at Bonnaroo in 2011 already has a lot of reblogs.

Brimer will also be posting photos to our Tumblr and sharing photos via his @adambrimer Instagram account.

Videos will be posted to YouTube. Our traditional stories and photo galleries will continue to be posted to www.knoxville.com.

I hope you’ll follow our coverage and get a feel for the Bonnaroo vibe.

PS: In short, here is a concise list with links to all our standard coverage platforms and areas:

• Bonnaroonews on Twitter
• Bonnaroo photos on Tumblr
• Bonnaroonews on Instagram
• Knoxnews on YouTube
• Bonnaroo on our Pinterest
• Stories on Knoxville.com
• Knoxville.com on Facebook
• Tweets by Hayes Hickman as @knoxvilledotcom
• Tweets and Instagrams by Adam Brimer as @adambrimer