The New Media Diva

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):

Session is here.

So for some strange reason, CoverItLive will initialize on my Windows machine using FF 2.0, but not my Mac. Seeing as if my Windows machine is acting wonky right now, this isn’t good. I’m still going to try it though.

Hmmm. Maybe I should backtrack a bit. I’m not a big fan of liveblogging. Either I take part in something (and enjoy it) or I liveblog: I can’t do both. Via The Next Web, I learned about CIL, which may make liveblogging a tad bit easier for me. I decided to try it out today.

One uh-oh about the service is that, at least according to CIL’s website, the iframes in the code don’t play nice with WP. Actually, that should be reversed: WP doesn’t play nice with iframes. CIL recommends giving your users the actual link to the code instead of the embed. Users paste the link in the browser and the liveblogging session pops up in a window. Not really keen on that.

In any case, I’ll try to test this thing out some more.

I’m trying out CoverItLive during Clinton’s concession speech. Throwing caution to the wind and not testing it offline first.:-)

Update: Having trouble getting the console to initialize using FF 2.0 on my Mac. Will try Windows.

Update II: Still having trouble.

Why it wasn’t part of the initial rollout of Gmail Chat I have no idea, but I’m tickled pink at the prospects of Group Chat. My editor-in-chief, who lives in Sarajevo, and I communicate by Gmail Chat throughout the day.

If you’re wondering why we don’t use an instant messaging service, my shop doesn’t allow unauthorized programs to be downloaded on work computers. Since Gmail Chat works in-browser, I get around that rule.