Thoughts on live blogging

Published by rodfather on January 13, 2008 02:21 pm under Inkblog, Moblog, Social Networks

I was surprised there wasn’t much live coverage of CES.

Live Video Streaming
Justin.tv wasn’t there lifecasting.  We did get sporatic coverage from Robert Scoble using Mogulus and Qik.  Other than that, there wasn’t much effort to put out 24/7 live coverage. 

This is surprising since ‘lifecasting’ has been blowing up in the past year with ustream.tv, justin.tv, operator11.com, stickam.com, mogulus.com, and blogtv.com.  Are these sites now just being used for simple web cam chatting?  It would be great to see the cam get out of the house sometime.
For those who prefer to do live video streaming from your cell phone, there’s qik.com and comvu.com.  Both work amazingly well.  Qik is the new kid on the block and has an easy to use web 2.0′ish front end to make things easier for the end user.  At the moment, it currently only supports Nokia S60 based phones.  Comvu has been around the block for a while now and has the advantage of supporting both Symbian and Windows Mobile based phones.  If you have GPS in your phone or have a bluetooth GPS receiver paired, you can even have viewers track your location.  Unfortunutely, this is only supported with the IE browser.

Moblogging
James Kendrick of jkOnTheRun was moblogging with his HTC Advantage, but I wouldn’t call that live.  Moblogging is nothing new either so I’m also surprised more people didn’t do it.
I have been posting moblogs for some time now by taking photos with the iPhone and emailing flickr, which then updates my blog.  Lately, I’ve been micromoblogging by emailing photos to Utterz which then crossposts to twitter.
One of my favorite activities is inkmicromoblogging (!) by using Loren Heiny’s Ink Grams web app.  You ink a message staight from your web browser and have the image cross post to flickr and twitter.
Moblogging isn’t limited to photos either.  If you have a phone that can record video (Come on Apple, add video recording already!), you can email the video as an attachment to sites such as blip.tv.   Blip.tv will automatically convert your emailed video to the format of choice (Flash is the default) and you can set it up to autocrosspost the video to your blog with the embedded video in the post.