Webware

My favorite liveblogging tool, CoverItLive (see Ultimate liveblogging tool: CoverItLive), is set to add support for live video Tuesday. But rather than launch its own video-streaming service, the system now lets authors insert video embeds from uStream, Qik, or Mogulus into a live blog.

This approach gives CoverItLive users flexibility, but at the cost of simplicity of use. The cool thing is that bloggers have a choice of video services. If you are live-blogging a speech, for example, and you have a good view of the stage, you can pop a Webcam onto your laptop and stream it to your viewers via uStream. If you're live-blogging a news event from a desk indoors but the news is happening outside, you can embed someone else's Qik camera phone video instead. Regardless, as soon as you paste in the video embed code from your streaming service, a little window will in your viewers' CoverItLive content windows. They can pop out and expand the video if they wish, or close it.

CoverItLive now lets authors embed live video streams.

(Credit: CoverItLive)

The downside is that bloggers will need be logged in to both CoverItLive and their video service to post their own videos into their live blog. That's not a critical flaw, but when you're live-blogging an event and trying to focus on creating great content, dealing with two services at once is a lot to handle.

CoverItLive CEO Keith McSpurren admits that the current level of video integration in the product is a bit of an experiment, done in part because noisy tech bloggers like me were clamoring for it, and in part because adding video via embeds was quite simple. He may add deeper integration in the future, such as integrated sign-ons done in partnership with the streaming companies, if the current experiment is a success.

McSpurren says that only about 20 percent of CoverItLive's use is for covering conferences, where the uStream integration will likely be employed. He told me that he's seeing the most use come from sports and politics coverage, where audiences are larger and where rebroadcasting video is tightly restricted. He's also seen big spikes in usage during disasters, where local news operations have kept live blogs open for hours at a time, to keep readers up to date on road closures, shelter locations, weather conditions, and the like. "Natural disasters have been a strange boon for the business," McSpurren told me.

It's public service live blogging like this where I see the Qik video integration having great human value. If a reporter is live-blogging an event from a newsroom and a reader is on the front lines--driving past firetrucks on the way to a shelter, for example--the writer could easily paste in the reader's Qik embed link to show readers what's happening on the ground. Clearly, this would require that people in highly stressful situations take the time and energy to fire up a cell phone video stream, so I wouldn't expect to see a wildfire live blog overwhelmed with available video streams. But a smart firefighter or police officer might want to provide a livestream to reporters to illustrate the conditions they are facing. See also: NowPublic (Reuters 2.0?), which has a lot of conceptual overlap with this concept.

Other liveblog tools worth looking at include Scribblelive and Google Docs.

I had to eat a little crow this morning. Yesterday I recommended that CNET One More Thing Apple blogger Tom Krazit use CoverItLive to liveblog the Steve Job Macworld keynote (see review: Ultimate Liveblogging Tool: CoverItLive). He declined. And good thing, too, since CoverItLive choked during the keynote. The failure was because of a minor programming slip-up, not the platform's inability to scale to hundreds of thousands of users, CEO Keith McSpurren told me. But it doesn't matter. In the liveblogging Superbowl, CoverItLive "tripped over its own laces," McSpurren admitted. Bloggers burned by the outage included CrunchGear, Fake Steve Jobs, MacDailyNews, and about 25 other blogs. Some sites posted messages sending their readers elsewhere, including to Twitter.

Sad Engadget

Which also failed.

With CoverItLive and Twitter out of action, traffic continued to pour into other, more traditional blogging platforms, many of which were already reeling under the load of having, basically, all of their regular readers hitting refresh every 5 seconds looking for updates. CNET's own blogging platform, which hosts the One More Thing blog as well as Webware, struggled and collapsed, generating error pages 23 percent of the time. Engadget failed, too.

To its credit, Gizmodo stayed up, although it did get slow, according to reports I got. I did not get any reports of TUAW failing, and people I know say that MacRumors' special liveblog site, MacRumorsLive, which has its own home-grown AJAX-based liveblog platform, did great.

This year's Stevenote liveblog fiasco reminded me of the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge, in which the majority of the robot car contenders drove into walls or otherwise failed. Of course, in the second competition, in 2005, several cars finished, some spectacularly. Liveblogging is like that. The idea is great, the world wants it, but most of the platforms need more tuning.

CoverItLive is a new hosted service for blogging events in real time, or "liveblogging." It's a useful tool for people covering major industry events, speeches, sports, and the like. I first saw the product in use when I was watching the CrunchGear team cover the Bill Gates keynote at CES.

I've liveblogged several events myself in the past, but I've used tools not designed for the job. My hack has been to set up a unique Twitter account for each event and embed a widget from that account into my blog (example: YouTube's Steve Chen interviewed at the NewTeeVee Live conference). It works, but only barely, and the feature set is not ideal. In contrast, CoverItLive's design and features are, basically, awesome. There are some issues that might give big publishers slight pause, but the product is off to a great start.

The CoverItLive authoring window is an awful lot like an IM client.

Setting up a CoverItLive account is fast and free, and once you've done so you can either jump straight into liveblogging or schedule upcoming events. Liveblog content is all hosted on CoverItLive, and you put it on your blog by pasting in a small snippet of HTML code.

Features you get as publisher, in addition to really easy-to-use IM-like text-entry window, include the capability to take comments from readers and post the ones you like in your stream; live polls; and the option to post either canned or new pictures and videos. CoverItLive also provides publishers with statistics on their live viewership, which is very useful.

Once a writer tells the system that the event is over, CoverItLive converts the blog into a static block of text, which users can read in a scrolling window. Pictures and polls that were pop-ups during the live event are inserted at the correct locations in the timeline.

The service is free to use and carries no advertising. CoverItLive's Keith McSpurren told me he'll look at monetization strategies in the future, including advertising and possibly paid "pro" or downloadable versions, but for at least the next 12 months, the entire system is free.

Once an event is over, viewers can replay the liveblog in a CoverItLive window that's embedded in a blog.

(Credit: CrunchGear)

McSpurren also told me that because of the the way the system is built, it scales to supporting far more users than chat-only products like UserPlane. He said it can easily handle "hundreds of thousands" of simultaneous viewers. I was not able to verify this.

I like this system a lot, even though there are some small issues with it. For example, all content published in a CoverItLive liveblog is hosted on the CoverItLive servers, not on the blog it's embedded in, which means that it's not searchable on the blog site. That could be fixed by having CoverItLive convert liveblogs to ordinary blog posts after the event, but McSpurren has yet to launch that feature. And again, because the content is hosted elsewhere, any context-sensitive advertising that appears on a host blog's page won't pick up the content in the liveblog, potentially hurting ad revenues a little bit.

For publishers who want to host all content on their own servers, there may be a downloadable version of the software at some later date.

But this is a great system and I expect to see it used a lot. I expect several outlets will be liveblogging the MacWorld Steve Jobs keynote on Tuesday with it, although at the moment the only confirmed site I know of is the GeekBriefTV site.