Live Blogging

Blogging means, among other aspects, sharing your thoughts, pictures, ideas and work by publishing them on the web. There are many occasions for writing a blog post. Maybe an idea has emerged, and you start doing some sort of research about it, taking a photo, writing down rough notes and create the text. Finally, you finish the whole posts and enter them to your blog. Normally, the publishing itself does not take much time. The way is short from logging in to the admin panel, accessing the write section, write, copy and paste and hit “publish”.

Through blogs, a new possibility of sharing your events came up. Events can be conferences, fairs, workshops and many more. What might be interesting for someone who is not able to attend a certain event, are the visual elements published on the web, such as photos and videos, but also audio media and documents for downloading. And, as always, the freshest is the hottest. A video of a presentation uploaded seconds after it actually terminated, makes the blog visitor feel like he was right there and not at home in front of the screen.

When the question about liveblogging came up on the WordCamp 08 Blog, I began thinking how this might be accomplished. Which is the quickest way to get a good amount of media online in a short time?

Surprisingly, when surfing the web some days ago, I stumbled about a tool called CoverItLive, a free online tool for liveblogging. It offers the possibility to launch a live blog before an event begins, and to upload media like photos and videos. I registered and created a blog for WordCamp, but did not launch the blog yet, but there is a demo view of such a blog on their front page. My expectations to a live blogging tool can be summed up as follows:

1. It has to be well usable.
2. It offers a comfortable handling of my media files
3. It does not take many efforts to create and publish posts on the blog

I will post about my experiences  and my first attempts on liveblogging, and find out whether it takes a tool to use nor not.