Webware

Webware's favorite live blogging tool, CoveritLive, is getting a new tool for its authors: the capability to update a live blog via Twitter.

When setting up a live blog, producers can tell it to monitor Twitter accounts for updates.

It's a simple, if slightly crude, implementation: when a live blog producer is setting up coverage, he or she can tell the system to monitor specific Twitter accounts and post the Tweets in the live blog window. As a Twitter and a CoveritLive user, I'd prefer a bit more control, such as the capability to tell CiL to take filtered Twitter feeds (using #hashtags, perhaps), but this is a good start.

What I like most about this feature is that it sets up CoveritLive as a conduit or platform, not a closed system. If you're a Web producer and want to set up a live blog, but your authors are happy Twitter users and don't want to learn a new tool, fine. Just tell them to cover an event from their Twitter account using their favorite Twitter app, like Twhirl or TwitterFon. (Twitter live bloggers will still be subject to the platform's 120-character limit, of course.) You can mix up Twitter posts with text from the standard CoveritLive writer's interface. It's easy.

Just in case I wasn't clear about this at the top: CoveritLive is a fantastic tool for covering live events. I am very happy to see it developing with new features and capabilities.

We are using CoveritLive today to live blog the Under the Radar: Mobility conference.

CoveritLive viewers see the Twitter updates inline with the other content.

Former Vice President and presidential candidate Al Gore is scheduled to talk to attendees of this year's Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco at 4:30 p.m. PST Friday. Here, you'll find our take on his speech, in real time.

Update: The talk is now finished, but you can catch up on the entire thing by clicking the replay button below.

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.

Amit Agarwal from blog Digital Inspiration has a great guest post on the Official Google Docs blog today outlining how anyone can use the service as a live blogging tool. The writing format, which has become an increasingly popular way for bloggers to cover events as they're happening (mainly useful for things like Apple keynote speeches), but also manages to work for smaller conferences and events, too.

Agarwal's suggestions are to either set it up as a special page on compatible blogging platforms so that your writings will show up like a regular post, or to simply embed it on the page as I've done here. One of the platform's strong suits is that it lets several people work on a document at the same time, which your standard blogging platform likely won't allow.

Other small things to note are that your blogging tool might not pick up your byline or give the post a time stamp. Agarwal suggests you use Google Docs' inline comment system (hitting CTRL + M), which will add a timed notation. Also, your readers will need to manually refresh the page to see any updates since there's no way to set your individual post to do that automatically.

We've covered several live blogging tools on Webware before. Rafe's favorite is CoverItLive, which we've used with great success. There's also competitor ScribbleLive. Both offer live updating, and options to let your readers get notifications and reminders on when live coverage will begin.

Update: While Google Docs works just fine as a live blogging tool, there are some things to note about the embed option that some might consider shortcomings.

For one thing it will auto-publish any changes when it auto-saves (something you can turn off, but having it on takes some effort out of the equation). This might be troublesome for some users who are simply jotting down ideas and don't want them to go live yet. Also, whatever you write might not get picked up so well in your RSS feed, or for mobile readers. The post nearly locked up Safari when viewed on an iPhone.

I've embedded the original live blog after the break, which is simply the same post as what's seen above (sans update).

... Read more

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.

Kyte.tv is a new service that lets people create their own TV channel. It's a bit of a mashup between a live blogging tool, a social network, and some of the live Internet TV channels we've been seeing lately with Justin.tv, and UStream.tv. Although, instead of strapping a camera to your head, you can use a cell phone.

The mobile client is a small Java application for several Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones that allows Kyte.tv users to upload photos and chat with others in a Kyte.tv channel. The mobile live blogging component is called "Lifecasting" which lets users upload pictures from their camera phone in real time. You can set it to automatically take a picture every few minutes, or every time you click the shutter. Either way, photos will show up on your channel instantly and viewers will get a visual notification that you're "live."

Kyte.tv's interface lets you swap between programs, chat, and live polls.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Kyte.tv channel owners can create as many channels as they want and add music, photos, videos, polls and text. A channel consists of a display screen, a playlist, and integrated chat room. Each channel also gets its own custom URL and branding, which is chosen by the channel owner. Alternately, there's embed code to place the entire Kyte.tv experience on a social networking profile or blog post (like we've done after the break).

One thing to note about adding music: you can't upload your own tracks. Instead you have to pick from a small selection of music from indie music service IODA. It's a lot like the music integration you get with Photobucket's video Remix tool.

What Kyte.tv has done really well is the live chat room. While it's lacking admin controls and private conversation options, you're getting the same chat experience on your computer and your phone. It's also really easy to use, as long as you're handy with your phone's keypad.

Kyte.tv is a fun service that opens up a lot of options for live blogging. Like we've seen with Twitter, mobile blogging has exploded with the help of easy-to-use tools that can be used and accessed on multiple platforms. Likewise, live video broadcasting has become something normal people can do with services like Pocketcaster and UStream.tv. Kyte.tv is happy medium between the two.

We'll be broadcasting live at various points during the day, so to visit our Kyte.tv channel, just click the read more link below.

Justin.tv-- the live helmet-video blogging site we wrote about last month--went live this morning. The site combines a live video feed, public chat room, and head blogger Justin Kan's daily schedule--which loosely resembles a content programming guide. Entertaining bits of content are archived for later viewing, complete with a blog post with context for what's going on. The entire production is run through Kan's backpack, which holds a laptop hooked up to an EV-DO card.

Chatters can discuss what's happening on the show with other viewers (using Lingr, the live updating chat service we covered earlier this month), and they have the option to call or text message Justin with feedback or comments about what's going on. Earlier this morning, Justin and his buddies were talking to a man on the street, and one of the chatters text messaged Justin to move closer so we could all hear better. A few seconds later Justin got the message and moved closer. It was very surreal.

Mundane moments aside, Justin.tv is pretty entertaining. In about 10 minutes of watching I felt like I was inside his head, in a Being John Malkovich kind of way. Whether they can keep the quality going--as they dodge the inevitable stalkers flurry of phone and text spam they're bound to get by making their number public--is questionable. In the meantime, I expect the site to grow as long as Kan and crew keep it up.

Justin.tv lets you embed the live feed in your blog, Web site or social networking profile, which I've done above.

A little Web service called IMified caught my attention this morning. It is an ambitious service that lets you access several popular Web applications from your instant-messaging client. IMified is a messaging bot (like SmarterChild) that lets you manage your apps via text commands. In theory, it could also be used on any IM-equipped mobile phone to turn the phone into a remote control for your Web apps.

Signing up to the service requires no site registration or passwords. To begin, you just add the messaging bot to your buddy list and send it a message. Adding additional services (like Blogger, Basecamp and Wordpress) is done through a special section of the IMified home page. Besides these services, IMified doubles as its own productivity tool with notes, reminders, and to-do lists.

There are some interesting real world uses for IMified, particularly using collaborative apps like Google Spreadsheets. Here at Webware, we created a couple of Google Spreadsheets to share our ideas. Theoretically, IMified could be used to add items to our spreadsheets. IMified could also be used to live blog from your phone using a service that wasn't intended to do so, such as Backpack from 37Signals.

Adding services to IMified

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Accounts are managed through a special section of IMified's Web site. There you can set up user names and passwords for each service. Compatible IMified sites are set up to work through the developer's API, so if your favorite service doesn't have one, it likely won't be added to IMifieds list.

Having a group of Web apps to access while on the go is an exciting idea. What piques my interest is whether or not the casual user can handle a text-based interface for multiple and visually rich apps. After thoroughly enjoying Google's mobile Gmail application, I'd like to see IMified evolve into a downloadable Java app for phones that could incorporate an easy-to-use graphical interface, yet combine the simplicity and the ease of use that IMified was designed to provide.

[Found on Museum of Modern Betas]