Tom Pimental : Web Creative

Live Blogging (the process of blogging about an event as it happens) is still relatively new, but with the amazing technologies flying around the web today you’d think someone would have come up with a good way to handle this “as it happens” format, but even the bigger blogs still fumble through live events.

Take Gizmodo and Engadget’s coverage of the September 5th Apple Event. They both blogged the even as it happened. Engadget’s entry simply went down the page chronologically forcing a reader to refresh and scroll to the bottom of the post every few seconds to see an update. Gizmodo’s coverage wasn’t much better, but at least posted in reverse-chron.

Here are a couple suggestions, some easy, others not so, that would greatly enhance the Live Blogging experience for any event.

• First, to Engadget, put a “Jump to recent” anchor link to the end of the post for pete’s sake! I know anchor tags aren’t as flashy as Ajax or, um, Flash, but it would greatly improve your functionality.
• Now to single out Gizmodo, having multiple bloggers in one blog post is confusing. Separate them visually or go without. One person can handle a Steve Jobs announcement.
• Why not take advantage of Web2.0 technologies and display these threads in one place like a slide show or IM conversation? How great would it be, instead of having to refresh hundreds of times, you could see when the blogger was typing, just like AOL IM and Google Talk?
• Why doesn’t Apple let people video tape the damn thing? With the amount of live video blogging going on around us, how difficult would it be to encourage video blogging of live events?

Maybe none of these techniques would work well, but I want the importance of thinking outside the box when it comes to live blogging events… I wasn’t at the Apple event today and the jumbled and poor-execution of the live bloggers didn’t make me feel like I was either. Make the event online nearly as compelling as the live one and you’ve got something.