Coveritlive.com is a pretty nifty (& free) tool to let’s you provide live commentary from an event. (Live blogging. blogcasting?) You type your notes into a browser based interface and your commentary is streamed out to a viewer you can put on your blog, wiki or web page. Your virtual audience can comment back to you as well.
Even though it’s been around for a while, I first heard of it yesterday when Kathryn Greenhill posted a note to twitter that there would be live coverage of the Bridging Worlds conference in Singapore.
Today Buffy Hamilton, another twitter colleague, was providing live coverage of the COMO 2008 conference in Georgia.
How could I resist setting up a test and having a little conference with myself. Within minutes of setting up an account, I had a viewer embedded on the wiki page I use for testing things like this. And I started broadcasting my coverage, which consisted of notes about the different features. You can see those notes in the embedded viewer below.
ScribbleLive appears to be a similar tool. But I don’t have time to test that today. Really need to get some other work done!
I just tested ScribbleLive and thought I’d add a note here rather than write a full post. It’s a handy tool. Not as full featured as Cover It Live though. I embedded the live coverage widget on a wiki page. As a viewer of the event, it seemed the only way I could contribute was to sign in to ScribbleLive, too much of a barrier. Might be I just didn’t find the right option. As a simple way to just post updates without any other bells & whistles, it works. Cover It Live has many more features, but if you don’t need them, then either tool will work.
Cover It Live now lets you bring in the twitter stream for up to 12 people – that’s a pretty handy way to incorporate the input of people who you know will be twittering at an event. Others can also be added as panelists and producers. And people following the event can contribute comments at the moderator’s discretion.
Like the ability to amass a bunch of text, audio, images and more ahead of time in the media library. Handy to be able to drop an image or bit of text in at the appropriate time.