Review – CoverItLive as a tool for liveblogging
Cover It Live as a live-blogging tool has started to gain momentum in recent months, I think. Even the newspaper The Star and (I think The National Post but not sure) used it to cover the Inauguration of President Barack Obama (link is to The Star).
Well, yesterday I tried my first live-blog using CoverItLive – I think that it turned out really well. I had heard about CoverItLive from my friend Rebecca Bollwitt (she’s been my liveblogging role model, so I trust her opinion on these tools). I noticed that Tris liveblogged Rebecca’s talk at Third Tuesday using CoverItLive, but it isn’t until you actually use the tool that you know whether it will be useful to you or not.
Things that sort of confused me that need work with CoverItLive:
- When you approve a comment, it stays in a window. Unless you’re getting very few comments (which NEVER happens to me, at least) the window stays and hovers. Confusing. Two or three times I thought I needed to approve comments that had already appeared on the stream.
- Sometimes, if your mouse hovers accidentally over the question (?) button, you get an explanatory window. That’s rather annoying.
Tips to best use CoverItLive
- Use the timer to announce that you’re taking a break. I took a 5 minute break while Colleen took other notes that will be added to the wiki.
- Remember that hitting the ENTER key will NOT publish the text. Make sure your mouse is pointed on the “Send” button.
- Accept all comments immediately – will save you time while you’re trying to make sense of the text.
- Insert the code for your liveblog BEFORE you start liveblogging.
- If you really want the SEO, you might want to export the text of your liveblog and uploaded using WordPress’ interface.
- Use the Twitter and hashtag integration tool to save you time and enrich the blog.
My summary
CoverItLive it’s an excellent tool, but of course, it DOES require you to be online all the time and have a solid internet connection. If I weren’t doing a liveblog, I’d just go with BlogDesk, which is rather reliable. I also concur with Rebecca’s opinion – it doesn’t give you any SEO, and I think that’s totally bollocks so I’d appreciate if the developers of Cover It Live would change the settings or something.
UPDATE – Cover It Live just tweeted me that you can indeed download locally the content as HTML. I am quite positively impressed that they are on Twitter and that they have a Summize search that allows them to monitor what is being said about it. Yes, sir. That’s how social media should be done, IMHO.
UPDATE – As per the comments on my post, Scribble Live could be another possible choice for a liveblogging platform.
Related posts:
I used CoverItLive last year at NV and then for my Oscar live blog and it worked really well. I’m looking forward to using it for this year’s Oscar live blog again – especially since they’ve updated and fixed some of the quirks and issues I had with last year’s experience.
Good review, Raul — we’ve used Cover It Live a number of times at the Globe and Mail, including the inauguration and a recent shooting in the Toronto subway. It’s a great tool.
My may want to try out ScribbleLive some time as well. As you approve comments and Tweets they are removed from the list. Cheers
http://www.scribblelive.com
sounds great! I wonder if I can use it on my wordpress.com blog…