CoverItlive.com is a free (for now) service that allows you to live blog events and publish items directly to any publishing platform. Now this is pretty commonplace and can easily be done with WordPress (and a few extra plugins) but CoverItLive makes it easier and quicker to embed a variety of media and interact with your readers in real time. There is also an instant replay function, which as inane as that might be, might become handy at some point. Now I barely ever liveblog anything, but I can see a lot of use for this at conferences.
Have you liveblogged anything before?
I would like to know what other plugins you speak of to accomplish this. I liveblog events all the time, and would love to be able to embed a window that updates live, without making the reader push a refresh button. Then, I could copy and paste the content into a regular post, and keep it there in a more static format.
never liveblogged anything, but I plan on it in February. thx.
@Tapeleg, all you need is a plugin to add headmeta and then use the meta refresh option in the custom fields of that entry. Setting meta refresh to 60 will auto update your blog entry every 60seconds, all while you can edit your entry and add new content.
Google and you’ll quickly discover what you need. 😉
That would be cool, but of course, the page could refresh while someone is reading an entry, or it would refresh without there being an update. What would be cool is a shoutbox like window, where you can push new content to anyone viewing the page or window. You update a time, for instance, something happens in a hockey game, you write something, and it shows up automatically. Shoutboxes can do this sort of thing, in real time, or with Ajax updating every so often (such as every four seconds). Doing this in a post would be very slick.
Yep, it is the instant refresh that is the big winner here. I’ll look for something that uses that meta refresh, but I have looked before and not found anything. Maybe using that as a keyword would help.
But Tapeleg is right. What you need for liveblogging is often something like a shoutbox, or a ticket feed.
ticker feed -sigh-
Interesting service. One has to question if posting a number of updates would be suitable for a blog. I’ve seen a number of people user Twitter to live blog events but I wonder if the 140 character limit is forcing them to drop off pertinent information.
I would look into a shoutbox that you could embed into a particular post. That way, you would have a permalink to give someone to check out your coverage and then you could mess with the embed code to configure the look and feel of the shoutbox on the blog. I’ve had a ton of good experiences with the ShoutMix shoutbox service.
Or, how about a shoutbox/tagboard that only lets users who are registered to the blog post comments. Then you could embed it in a post, and only the blog owner can use it. I have embedded a Gabbly chat box in a post on blogger before, and had a live chat session, but the chatboard has gotten annoying with it’s ads and sounds. It isn’t as used friendly as it used to be.
The only time I ever tried to liveblog was at WordCamp Israel. The bandwidth was so small, that it took 20 minutes to get one post up. I quickly gave up.
Twitter and other microblogging platforms could be really good for liveblogging, I would think.
Great tool for social action.