This year the ONA student newsroom experimented with live blogging using the online software CoverItLive. Saturday morning's keynote speech by Robert Scoble was live blogged by Stephanie Lim in collaboration with Jackie Hai. The following are Lim's reflections on the experience.

An experiment in team blogging, live

This was our first opportunity to live blog a major event for a wide audience. My first attempt at live blogging was at a teaching and learning session yesterday. It served in part as a trial run for today's keynote speech by Robert Scoble.

Scoble is an active participant in the evolution of online video and its convergence with social networking, so many of his followers outside the conference were tuned in from around the world. He also invited people to ask questions via Twitter, which he could answer live.

Given the intermittent wireless connection, our team was concerned about dropping the live link. This happened yesterday during the trial run and we had to finish blogging by editing and re-posting the final entry.

The importance and prominence of the story created a lot of pressure to not disappoint the student newsroom and online followers.

The benefits of team blogging

Live blogging is difficult to do alone, but not impossible. On the other hand, blogging with a team made it easier to be accurate and timely. On our team, we had Jackie Hai to take photos and notes, our mentor Curt Chandler to edit photos, and myself to write the blog entries.

If I were doing this alone, I would've been listening, summarizing, writing, linking, uploading photos and files, and responding to incoming messages from online viewers all at the same time. It would've been a multi-tasking nightmare.

"Every entry needs to be instantly ready for consumption," Hai said.

She is right. Live blogging appears to be like instant messaging (IM), but it's not. It's not as forgiving. Viewers expect blogs to be more accurate, and sentences to be well structured.

Without my team, I wouldn't have been able to capture all the important moments. Hai was my extra pair of ears. While I was uploading files or finding websites to link to, I might have missed questions from the audience or words from Scoble. But Hai was there to help me as a back-up transcriber and I would add her entries after everything else was loaded.

Photo quality is just as important as writing and summarizing key moments, so the pressure was on. Chandler came to our aid on this front. After photos were taken, he quickly edited them on Photoshop, saved them to a USB flash drive and handed it to me to upload them to CoverItLive.

Overall impressions

Live blogging is an interesting concept, but we need to consider which platform is most appropriate for a particular story.

Live streaming video is more complete if you want to cover a story in its entirety. With live blogging, there will always be a slight delay, and information is summarized.

On the flipside, live blogging is a more interactive tool. A follower can talk to the blogger in real-time, click on links for more information, vote in polls, and look at photos taken at the event that the video camera missed.

Live blogs can also be useful as a record of the event after it has ended. However, it is not as accurate as a verbatim transcript. In a sense, it's like selective hearing. Entries on a live blog are what the blogger felt was important or relevant enough to be posted.

This can be good or bad, depending on the blogger. A good live blogger can filter through the noise and summarize the main points of a presentation, which makes the content easier to consume. Ultimately, viewers interested in following live blogs should try to find a blogger who processes information in a way that works for them.

Team blogging gave us a chance to cover this event more accurately than if it had been done by a single person. That was important for this story because the role of the student newsroom is to generate an archive of the conference. Blogging as a team made it possible.

Live blog replays

Tina Brown's keynote address (by Cynthia Yoo)

Devin Wenig's keynote address (by Allison Cross)

Robert Scoble's keynote address (by Stephanie Lim)

Want to Create an Interactive Map? (by Katrina Fleming)

Web Journalism and College Curriculum (by Stephanie Lim)

Online Video: Fireside Chat (by Jackie Hai)

How to Make Crime Pay (by Alex Kowalski)

Ethics 2.0 - Live Blogged on Wiki (by Morgan Phelps)

ONA08 Super Panel (by Cynthia Yoo)