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Cover It Live: Live Blogging Tool

By John Conroy

Feb 27. 2008

Filed Under: cover it live live blogging web publishing

Cover It Live,blogging

Looking for a live blogging tool for covering conferences, sporting events and such? Here’s a real contender: Cover It Live. It provides a web based platform for blogging to the masses in real time, complete with rich media support, polls, comments and filtered questions and comments.

Implementation is as simple as embedding a snippet of code into your page and no download is necessary for your viewers to access the broadcast. Sweet as a nut.

Live Blogging Tool Features

Instantly Published Commentary
Bash out your snippets of wisdom in an IM format. ‘One-click’ publishing of video, images, audio and advertisements. Rich media publishing.

Embedded Google Video/Image search for finding a resource, which can then be published to the ‘console’ with one click. If you’re live, time will necessarily be a factor, so this is a nice touch. Photos etc. pop up with a nice ‘lighthouse’ effect.

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Polls aplenty
‘Quick poll’ button allows for more one-click embeds. Polls update in real time and can also be created ahead of time and stored in your Media Library.

Streaming Questions and Comments
Firstly, every time some knucklehead bleats something rude or off-topic, it’s not pushed right onto the blog. You get to moderate. Comments come to the blogger in a separate window that only he/she sees. From there they can be ignored or published easily.

For big events where you are expecting thousands of viewers, a third party can also be logged in to sift through comments and questions.

Back in 10 Minutes
Going to the can or out for a cigarette? Set the timer which pops up to tell your viewers when you will be back. Don’t leave ‘em hanging, man.

Instant Replay
The blog becomes an archived item which can be replayed in future. Archived material is stored on Blog It Live’s own servers, can be deleted if required, and all multimedia content, polls, etc. is also archived.

Pricing
Free, for the moment. Not even embedded ads as of yet. Enjoy it while it lasts.

A very nice, clean, thoughtful solution, this. Sign up or check out the video demo at Cover It Live.

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Comments

I belive Cover it Live crashed big time when 'fake steve jobs' tried to use it for a steve jobs speech.

Posted by: Rick on February 27, 2008 1:51 PM

This is a pretty new service -- just around since November I believe. So I'd wonder if high traffic volume was the culprit for these growing pains? If they wander past here, perhaps they'll tell us what the problem was and if it's been sorted out.

Posted by: john conroy on February 27, 2008 4:55 PM

Thanks for the review of our software John. Really appreciate you taking the time to go through it thoroughly.

We came out of beta in mid-November last year and quickly ended up in the hands of Crunchgear and then FSJ who were nice enough to give us a try. The MacWorld issue we experienced was thought to be capacity related (i wrote an apology to users/readers) as it took down Twitter and others that day as well. After we examined it, we found it to be a ridiculously small QA bug (there's your growing pains John). Still our mistake, but not a structural one.

Our technology (and more importantly our business model) is based on the idea that hundreds of thousands of simultaneous readers will eventually be on line most every day (spread among large, medium and small writers). We use Ajax and a proprietary mix of some other things that help us accomplish this economically. If we were strictly Ajax or Flash driven or built on what most common chat widgets are built with, we couldn't offer this type of capacity/reliability. Additionally, when it comes to a larger blogger like FSJ, CiL actually takes the burden off his site (no longer has 50k readers hitting 'refresh' since CiL handles it all) which, we expect, makes us one of the only cost effective solutions out there for 'the big kids' as well as the microniche bloggers.

...anyway...since John took the time to write us up, figured I owed him some effort to make sure any of his readers get the full perspective if they ask.

anyone with additional questions/thoughts can write to me at keithm@coveritlive.com.

thanks again John.
km

Posted by: Keith on February 27, 2008 9:13 PM