puffbox

Liveblogging the election results

Interesting to note some of the attempts to ‘live blog’ the election results last week - with Guido Fawkes, Slugger O’Toole and ConservativeHome all using CoverItLive’s fantastic liveblogging ‘app’. Needless to say, there’s significant variation in the tone of each site’s usage.

Of course, it’s ironic to note both having a pop at Gordon Brown’s leadership when, dare I mention it, it was a Downing Street website - produced by yours truly - which first brought this technology to the attention of the UK political scene.

Now Iain Dale’s gone a bit CoverItLive-crazy, using it as an ad-hoc chatroom facility. It’s not really what it was intended for, and it’s probably quite hard work for Iain and colleague Shane Greer to moderate, but it does the job I suppose. They’re making good use of the popup polling mechanism, it must be said.

Correction: It took a heck of a lot of digging to find it, but I discover that ConservativeHome did use the CoverItLive tool back in January. My apologies; a straightforward Google search didn’t reveal it. I’m grateful to Guido for the advice to the contrary.

• Guido Fawkes at 11:49 pm on 4 May 2008

  ConHom used it ages ago. You are a follower, not a leader. Bit like Gordon.

• Simon at 7:47 am on 5 May 2008

  Thanks for the advice, Guido: duly corrected.

• Tim Davies at 10:54 am on 5 May 2008

  Was interesting to see the UK Youth Parliament live blogging from the Lords on Friday also…

  http://www.ukyouthparliament.org.uk/liveblog

  Following the trend… and would have been, but for trouble getting net access, the first live blogging from the chamber I believe… (of course, only a secondary first to the UKYP being the first elected body to ever sit in the Lords….)

• paul canning at 7:47 pm on 5 May 2008

  I’m still to be sold on the value of this simon. I wasn’t interested in the local election stuff, so convince me otherwiseon the worth of these eforts, but I tried to watch the liveblogging plus the fox news feed or super tuesday and live TV won hands down. there’s simply too much information on the liveblog and until/unless it’s really edited properly the brain can’t cope. when you read it back it’s also a rather weird take on the night, as i saw looking at other liveblogging of super tuesday the next day.

• Mick Fealty at 12:41 am on 6 May 2008

  paul,

  Horses for courses.

  Personally, I found my own live blog useful after the fact (the twitter feed similarly). My problem with TV and radio is not always the quality, but that they deal in ephemeral material. Once broadcast they are gone.

  Text is granular and searchable in the way a live feed just isn’t. In this case I have a record of some of the verbatim of the night, which proved useful in doing further work..

  What my readers made of it? Most of the comments were positive. But I am not about to proselytize any doubters.

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