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):
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.
If you’re a Mac user and have a Flip, you’re probably having issues with audio on your clips….meaning…there’s no audio. According to the folks at Pure Digital, there are some compatibility issues with Flip and the latest Quick Time update. (Quick Time 7.4.5 on 10.4 Tiger).
After contacting PD about the issue, they suggested that I try Perian (suggested, but couldn’t officially recommend). I did and it fixed the problem, at least for me.
Also, if you check out the tutorials on the site, there’s a wicked one you can use for YouTube. I’ll let you discover it.:-)
By the way, if Perian works for you, please donate to the developers!
I played with Yahoo Live for a bit tonight. Don’t know about this. Reminds me a tad bit too much of JennyCam or JustinTV. But, it is gosh-darned fun if you’re in the mood. Yahoo Live could probably be used for video conferencing (tried with Skype but the echoes drove me batty) or just keeping in touch with family members. But since none of my family members would probably dare step in front of a web cam, the latter is probably a lost cause.
Discovered via George and Liz. Sorry I missed the karaoke session.:-)
On another note, for some strange reason this message shows up in the output results of my del.icio.us daily blog post settings:
Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 233472 bytes) in (yadda…yadda)
I googled for a solution and found one that required me to edit my htaccess file, which promptly took my entire site down. Now I’m trying this. The funny thing is that this only started happening with WP 2.3.2. I don’t have *that* many plugins, so they shouldn’t be the problem, should they?
Grrr.
