The Dying Art of Live Blogging
by Regnard Raquedan on December 3rd, 2009 
11 Comments
No one is questioning the speed of technology today– what may be innovative today may be junk tomorrow (or worse, junk by lunch time. ) Blogging is no exception.
One of the impending casualties of the blogging space obsolescence is live blogging. Yeah, there was a time when people blogged real-time in their respective blogs and kept updating one single post in rapid succession to cover an event. A couple of years ago, as blogs were slowly gaining prominence, live blogging was the apex of covering an event live via blogging.
But due to the emergence of microblogging and platforms such as Twitter and Plurk, live blogging is on its way to extinction. Microblogging is fast and automatic, making the process of constantly updating a blog post cumbersome and clunky. Add to that the proliferation of third-party sites and apps that support micro-blogging, live blogging can be officially be considered a dying art.
But before we say “good riddance” to live blogging, I believe it can still have a place in the blogging ecosystem. Remember that one key limitation of microblogging is the number of characters (e.g. Twitter’s 140 character limit). Live blogging is essentially free from this constraint. Another is the multimedia aspect of live blogging, such as the ability to post audio and video streams into a blog post.
Live blogging may not be hottest thing right now, but I believe it still has a use in specific situations to keep it from becoming completely obsolete.
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UPDATE: Nah, I change my mind. Live blogging is dead.
Ha! I see what you did there! ;-)
Well I still liveblog. And it gets links and traffic via Twitter. And people blog links to my liveblogging articles in their event summaries.
And they even do that if I ‘just’ liveblog short notes and keywords from speeches (and specially in the events are in English here in germany it sometimes helps peple and they thank me for it.)
So no, I have to disagree: Liveblogging still works. If people negelect it because they thhow heir content into the ‘big blue trashcan’ (Twitter) – bad for them.
(I love twitter, but it does notcreate long term content for you)
Hey Oliver!
IMHO, live blogging still works for a niche, but that niche is getting smaller by the day.
I definitely agree with Oliver that live blogging is still alive. However alive and well is debateable. That said, those that really “get it” understand they need to continue to live blog while still making use of other social media. I’d personally say that twitter, with its higher wordcap and ability to make very large, multimedia integrated notes is FAR more of a threat to live blogging than twitter ever will be.
Thanks for the great post!
Kimberly
Hi Kimberly!
I didn’t get your last statement… What’s the bigger threat to live blogging than Twitter?
You now compared twoitter to twitter. Did you want to say Posterous? Or Tumblr or so?
I think live blogging is still alive. There are big brands like Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, and Techcrunch who practice live blogging, and it works for them. Yes, you have microblogging sites like Twitter, Plurk, etc., but people still want more details than 140 characters.
Here’s the question: Will you live blog knowing Twitter is around?
Your post made me laugh, thanks for that.
I am inclined to agree with you, I don’t sit on a page refreshing over and over to see what’s new on the post ala live blogging. Twitter is great for that, and it comes right to me. Why would I come to the content? I also use RSS feeds, and tend to be about a day or so late in my news anyway, so again why am I going to it when it could come to me?
Hey Tyson!
No problemo!