Last Thursday at BlogWell held at General Mills headquarters, the Minnov8 Gang used a tool that I had stumbled across a couple of days earlier: ScribbleLive. While not a Minnesota startup, they’ve so nailed the sweet spot of what’s needed in today’s liveblogging–Twitter integration, turning http’s in to links, embed codes in to instant presenting of the video or whatever else is embedded, audio and video uploading–that the entire Gang was basically blown away with the tool.
So many of us either watch live events or, increasingly, participate in them, that the ability for the creator (i.e., admin) of the ScribbleLive liveblog to turn comments on or off; find tweets and choose ones to insert (in to a middle pane that, like a baseball manager queueing up those next at bat, the batter is now “on deck”) and then inserting them at the correct time. Check out all of their features here.
The best part?
For me it was the fact that it worked…flawlessly! The next best thing was the ability to embed an iFrame on Minnov8 (it was here but has been replaced with *another* cool feature they offer, the ability to replace the iframe with HTML after the event so it’s now archived on your own site) so that viewers were at Minnov8 vs. the ScribbleLive site itself.
The day before I’d had some hiccups using it, so reached out to their tech support folks who were not only very responsive, but patient and we got everything worked out and some stuff, like uploading audio, video or photos from my iPhone via email, resulted in my avatar NOT showing up which looked goofy to me (if you, like the Gang, log in with your Twitter account, your avatar photo is pulled from your Twitter profile). I’d prefer the ability to setup an account and associate my various services with it, similar to how Posterous functions in this manner.
The Gang agreed on some protocols for ensuring we didn’t write redundant posts so split up tasks. To make it easier for viewers of the liveblog, we prefaced *each* post with the name of the presenter and their company in bold. In that way, viewers didn’t have to stop and wonder who said what…it just flowed.
We figured out a bunch of other workflow stuff with immediate photo uploads, taking video, submitting to YouTube and embedding the finished video in a post (yeah Phil!), and what to capture. Of course, our combined years of experience covering events like this one made the entire event coverage better and for me–someone a bit nervous about how the technology would work in a liveblog environment–was incredibly pleased to have three super-savvy guys just grabbing the ScribbleLive engine and running with it.
Is there anything different we could’ve done? Did you like it? What would you have changed? We’re definitely doing this again with this tool, so any feedback you have would be fabulous.