Check Out Coveritlife.com If You're Interested In Live Covering Your News

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Permalink Reply by Doug Fisher on July 5, 2008 at 7:32pm

Coveritlive is cool. I have a question to toss out to anyone -- We have an upcoming conference, and the organizers came to me looking for suggestions to allow participants to cover it online.

However, they're looking for "something like Twitter, but something that would work without everybody having to have individual accounts. ... He also asked if you knew anything about a Moblog and how we may be able to use this technology if we can't get something like Twitter to work."

I told them I wasn't aware of something that didn't require at least some sign-on, except, of course, that you created a master account and just gave out the logon and password.

I suggested (keeping in mind that these all take some preplanning)
1) CIL - and sign up people as writers and producers to the master blog. But that won't accommodate mobile as far as I know.
2) Blogger, as a group blog. They can also us Mobile Blogger, though it will take some work for each person to create a mobile Blogger account and then merge that with the master blog.

Also, if they do use Twitter, they still are going to want to display the feed(s) somewhere. I'm unsure of the best way to get a Twitter feed into a blog. Suggestions?
Doug

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Permalink Reply by Kevin Koehler on July 5, 2008 at 11:16pm

Can you clarify a bit what your conference is looking for? A live question/discussion tool for participants, or a way to aggregate online coverage?

I've used Cover it Live several times and been quite pleased. It's an easy, slick way to push writing out live. But it's real strength to me is generating a good, moderated discussion. Anyone, logged in or not, can send their commentary and you can quickly choose what to publish.

I met one of the CiL guys at the Personal Democracy Forum a couple weeks ago. They seem to have a real good sense of what users need (Or at least what I think is needed). They're adding new features and tweaks all the time, but are rightly focused on reliability at scale right now. I was impressed he even remembered one of my live blogs. They're paying close attention to users.

Ultimately, CiL is best used as a hierarchical tool. If you want a real crowdsource deal, probably better to look for another solution.

But I'd recommend CiL to all bloggers & journalists out there. There are lots of creative uses. You can start from scratch and have it running in a few minutes. Try it. Experiment.

See also Mashable's How to Live Blog a Conference.

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Permalink Reply by Doug Fisher on July 6, 2008 at 4:58am

Kevin:

Thanks. I don't think they are quite sure what they want yet. My original sense was more of a crowdsource. But in thinking about it, I like the moderated discussion idea, which is what I think really is a little closer to what they may want -- they just don't know it yet. The ability to submit without logging in can be a real plus.And with the producer/writer model a couple of people could be handling it. It may just mean a slight rethinking on their part (meaning-train a couple of grad students as moderators).

Thanks. Any other ideas on the crowdsourcing end besides a group blog with perhaps a Twitter badge?
Doug

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Permalink Reply by Mark S. Luckie on July 5, 2008 at 7:56pm

I'd highly suggest the group blog (it's much simpler). For Twitter you might want to use the embedding Twitter provides ( http://twitter.com/badges ) or try Chirrup which lets you display replies to your tweets. More on liveblogging here.

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Permalink Reply by Doug Fisher on July 5, 2008 at 8:35pm

Mark:

Thanks. I'd forgotten about the badges. (Though I think they work only on the rail, and the organizers are pining for something they can put into the main blog stream. But they may be the best solution.)

Since this is a tech conference, there's a certain "cool" factor here, so that might point toward CIL. We'll see as we discuss further. Many thanks and if you or anyone else things of anything, let me know.
Doug

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