I was at ILI08 today and decided to try out a live blogging experiment using Twitter (as described in this post).
I had some issues with the wi-fi during the day, and for a bit was reduced to blogging on my iPhone, but in general I was able to post to twitter quite well. Using http://search.twitter.com I was able to get the output in a few formats. At this point I was unsure the best way of actually presenting this on-screen as a live blog – I was thinking of something similar to the CoverItLive format, but wasn’t sure how to acheive it.
I fiddled around a bit with Yahoo Pipes to bring together a few separate searches from twitter search (because it limits the number of results returned in a single search to 100 tweets) and also used this to sort the tweets into the correct date/time order. Having done this I could get the results as a single RSS (http://tinyurl.com/43glub) or JSON (http://tinyurl.com/4zeygw) – but I was unsure the best way to display them in an easily consumable format – I was thinking of something like the CoverItLive format.
I’ve tweeted for some help with this, and if you have suggestions, you could leave a comment here, but what my first attempt is using Grazr, and here is a Grazr gadget displaying the liveblog account, with any comments directed at the live blogging account by other twitterers using the @ostephensili08 syntax.
As a bit of a test, I tried Dipity
http://www.dipity.com/chriskeene/Internet_Librarian_International_2008/
I added the tweets from ostephensili08 (the yahoo rss feed would not work so had to get the tweets direct from twitter, which for some reason show up with my photo). I also added photos on flickr tagged ili08 and a google blog search for the conference.
Clearly, this is not an ideal format, even when you display the timeline by the hour, it can’t show all the updates, and there is no facility to comment. However it does allow the various sources of information to be merged.
When creating this, I noticed Brian Kelly already had one for his own involvement in the conference
http://www.dipity.com/briankelly/ILI_Brian_Kelly_s_involvement
Replying both to this, and the thoughts raised in Brian Kelly’s recent post, it seems we want:
– to allow people to comment quickly and without overhead
– to somehow bring the various live blogs together for a given event.
– make it clear when we are reporting and commenting.
– produce rss feeds etc
I wonder if Friendfeed is a good fit for this. Create a new friendfeed account, add the twitter feeds of those using twitter (both conference specific accounts such as ostephensisi08 and perhaps those who are using their normal account during the day), add the blogs of those live blogging, and perhaps add a flickr tag or even a blog search for the conference name (ideal for catching comments from a wider community).
Friendfeed allows users to comment on updates, and this works very well. The website can also show new updates without the need to reload the page, and produce an RSS feed for it all.
See Richard Akerman’s scilib friendfeed for a good example of comments.
http://friendfeed.com/scilib