Live blogs

A recent episode of Cal Newport's podcast got me thinking about live blogs. He tells the story of how the Washington Post recently experimented with a new live blog format for covering Washington Nationals baseball games.

Previously, the sports writers who were covering the game would simply live tweet what was happening on Twitter. In this experiment, they instead would live blog on a dedicated page on the Washington Post's website. Once the game was over, all of the live blog posts would then be preserved as permanent content.

I think this approach makes so much sense for anyone who is covering live events in any shape or form. Why would you want all of your hard-earned, original content that you created covering an event to be directly handed over to Twitter? Not only do you lose the spike of live traffic that could be coming to your website rather than to Twitter, but you also lose the ownership of that content that could give you backlinks and some smaller amount of residual traffic in the future.

The key here though is that you need a place to host this live blog, and many publications smaller than the Washington Post might not be set up to do that. This is something that got me thinking - maybe there's a need for a tool that will enable smaller publications to easily create live blogs.