A new and simple live-blog platform: Scribblelive
There's a new live-blog platform in town: Scribblelive. Like CoverItLive (review), which we've used at Webware to cover events in real time (latest: Google press day), it's free and lets you very quickly set yourself up with a blog that shows your updated posts to readers almost the moment you write them.
It's clearly a very early-stage product, but I wanted to cover it because of the philosophical differences from CoverItlive. CoverItLive is a writer's platform with a capable control panel. It lets you create a live blog element you can embed in any other site or blog. Scribblelive is quite the reverse: It lets you contribute to your blog from outside the system, but you can only (so far) view the live blog itself on Scribblelive.com.
The Scribblelive writer's console is simple and clean, and you can edit updates even after they are live (click to enlarge).
I expect that Scribblelive will eventually get an embeddable player, because that's the thing that will make the platform attractive to bloggers who want to keep readers on their sites. At the moment, it feels like a more live version of Tumblr.
I still prefer the more developed CoverItLive, with its embeddable player, nice blogging console, and fancy features like a polling engine and media library. But there's a lot to be said for the simple and open design of Scribblelive. Adding a colleague as a co-blogger is as simple as sending them a secret link. And you can post to your live blog via an e-mail address. (You're supposed to be able to send images in via e-mail, but that didn't work for me.) Soon to come, according to TechCrunch, is posting via Twitter.
Scribblelive also lets you edit previous posts just by typing over them. CoverItLive lets you edit, but only after a live blog is done and closed out.
Scribblelive has one important feature CoverItLive lacks: it runs advertisements, as interstitial live blog items. The ads are clearly labeled and not disruptive. This ad engine might help the venture make a few bucks in the early days.
If you want to quickly set up live blog, it doesn't get much easier than Scribblelive. If you already have an established blog and want to set up a post that's live, though, use CoverItLive.
Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe. 
