CoverItLive test
So I used CoverItLive to liveblog Senator Hillary Clinton’s concession speech as I watched it. A couple of things to note:
Pros
1. CIL is a great application for those of us who aren’t as adept at liveblogging as some others out there. It’s a cross between straight blogging and Twitter. You don’t have to worry about going through the motions of continuously updating a blog at a fast pace.
2. The interface is intuitive. It’s like being in a chat room.
3. One can moderate visitor questions on the fly.
4. Popping in media like video and pics is a breeze. For pics (but only from Google search it seems and I’ll get to that in a minute), one can just drag and drop. For video, input the embed code from YouTube.
Cons
1. I had trouble getting the interface to initialize on my Mac (I was using Firefox 2.0). I had no problems on Windows. Half way into the blogging, I looked over at the Mac and saw that the interface in the browser on that machine had initialized. I have no idea what happened.
2. The fact that I couldn’t hit the return key to post my comments bugged the heck out of me. I had to keep using the mouse (on both machines).
3. It seems that I could only drag and drop pics into the interface from Google search. I tried dragging pics from flickr and skitch but it didn’t work.
4. A big one here (I mentioned this in a previous post): Since the embed code uses iframes, one can’t embed the liveblogging window directly into a Wordpress blog entry. The window appears as a pop-up. There *has* to be a way around this.
All-in-all, I like the service…especially with it being free (not sure how long that will last though). I just may give liveblogging a second thought.
Note: You can watch the “replay” (just scroll through it).
Update: The embed of the replay seems to work even with iframes! Not sure how, but it does. See below (use the scroll bar on the side):