Live Blogging Tools

I’m researching how we will be doing Live Blogging for Be2Camp coming up in London in October so I did a bit of hunting around for tools.

This may be a bit ambitious but this is what we want to do:

• Have people participate live in the room and have a twitter backchannel (hopefully up on the screen)
• Have people participate virtually via streaming video and live blogging and be able to contribute to the discussions
• Have people participate virtually via SecondLife and be able to contribute and have discussions
• Have people present to all audiences from SecondLife
• Maybe have people present to all audiences from the web (we haven’t had a specific request for this yet, but it would be good to offer it).

So here is some of the products and services I found.

Live Blogging

• CoverItLive – this one looks really good and really polished – and it can go on our website and it can have multiple people commenting . Not sure if you have to log in to comment however.

• Tangler is an Aussie Startup from here in Sydney and they have quite a mature product, but it’s a pain that you have to log in. Here is a look at a Tangler discussion embedded in a website

• The other suggestions are Scribble Live, Google Docs and even Windows Live Writer , but none of them have the interactivity that CoverItLive has, and CoverItLive auto refreshes with every new update.

However, one advantage of twitter is that people can join in the discussion via text (CoverItLive has a mobile site), so I think it’s still good to have a twitter back channel and to promote upcoming sessions on twitter (and maybe via CoverItLive also).
For the twitter feed Hashtags is great as you need to opt in, and it tracks private accounts like mine but it doesn’t work at the moment due to issues with the Twitter API, so I’m not sure if it will work for us. Of course you can follow any hashtag or word via Summize (aka search.twitter.com) but for me that is useless as there is no way for me to join in as it does not track private accounts (I would love a twitter escape code that if this character was in the tweet then that tweet will join the main twitter stream).

One simple way would be to just show the @be2camp twitter stream up on a screen with an auto refresh using TwitRefresh and people just reply to @be2camp to join in the discussion – but, Like CoverItLive this requires someone to drive it, so not sure if it’s worth having both, but as this unconference was born from twitter, it would be a shame to not use twitter as part of the event.

Video

• One of our unorganisers mentioned on twitter a few days ago that she successfully managed to import Veodia video into Second Life – this is great. See it in action here http://www.veodia.com/solutions_sl.html

• Video updates from Mobile phones or camera’s on laptops can be done via Qik and 12 Seconds and both will autopost a link to twitter.

• Live streaming can be done via UStream it works quite well and there is Mogulus which is much more polished and can be embedded on your site – but it also looks like it’s much more work than just set and forget.

Ustream is interesting – here is a link to a previous 2 web crew podcast that was recorded live and had a chat in Tangler and Ustream at the same time – it was a bit of a test and it’s a pain to log into either Tangler or Ustream or both, but if people are keen to contribute it works.

Suggestions

So right now my suggestion would be to use CoverItLive for text and hopefully Veodia can be used for both Live Streaming into SecondLife plus onto the website… it would be good if we can get a page with both of them together on one page for people not at the event and a page with just the text for people at the event.

Does anyone else have any ideas for Live Blogging and Live Streaming from our event?