Live blogging an annual meeting? Not if Apple can stop you

CNBC tech reporter Jim Goldman promised his readers and viewers that he’d be live blogging the Apple Computer annual meeting, but the company barred anyone from bringing in iPhones, laptops and other communication devices.

That didn’t stop some, however. Philip Elmer-Dewitt of Fortune notes that a few were able to get away with it. Read more here.

And Tom Krazit, who covers Apple for CNET News, seems surprised by all of the fuss.

Krazit writes, “It was therefore a bit surprising Wednesday to read CNBC’s Jim Goldman loudly complaining about the fact that Apple doesn’t allow laptops into its annual meeting, held earlier Wednesday at the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.

“Goldman’s right about one thing: in this day and age, it’s pretty silly for Apple to pretend that a public event can be held away from the reach of the Internet. Indeed, two shareholders published text-message updates of the meeting, which although quickly snapped up by the tech media hungry for any scrap of information related to Apple merely confirmed one thing most business reporters know about annual meetings: they are usually very boring.

“But the ban on computers is nothing new for Apple: this is the third year I’ve attended an Apple annual meeting, and each year they’ve had the same restrictions in place spelled out for all attendees in the proxy statement that announces the date of the meeting. Similar bans on ‘electronic devices’ have been in place since at least 2004, and before then, wireless mobile computing was relatively rare among the press corps.”

Read more here.