live blogging

From IndieWeb


Live blogging is when you write short social posts or status updates in response to an ongoing event as it happens, and something various IndieWeb community members have done on their blogs.

Why

Live blogging lets you capture your thoughts about an event in the time it is happening. You can refer back to the notes you have taken later to see how you felt about a particular event.

You may also choose to live blog to factilitate interactions with other people who care about the event you are following. For instance, live blogging an event such as the Academy Awards might encourage other people you know who are watching the show to share their thoughts with you too.

How

You can live blog by writing short posts on any social platform while an event is still happening. You may choose to write posts on your own site and syndicate them elsewhere using POSSE so you will own the main copies of each live post you write.

You might choose to use a particular hashtag to group your notes. If you are live blogging on your personal site, you might want to use a dedicated tag or page so all of your notes on a topic appear in a single place.

There are many topics you can discuss through live blogging. Here are a few:

  • a conference
  • a major news story that has come out
  • a sports event with personal significance
  • a television show you are watching
  • or anything else that you're attending or watching and find interesting

Your live blog may include reactions, quotations, or anything else that comes to mind while an event is happening.

IndieWeb Examples

  • Live blogging and sharing live commentary to an event was discussed in the 2022 IndieWebCamp Popup: Analog Meets Online pop up.
  • Murray has live-blogged a few conferences and online events, including IndieWebCamp London 2020, Jamstack 2020, and Sparkbox 2020. They used a combination of Noter Live and manual POSSE to simultaneously publish threads on Twitter and collate those into longer-form, more personal notes/articles published on their website. Tweet threads are often linked at the end of a section for posterity. Whilst live-blogging proved to be a useful way of engaging with a wider audience (particularly for online events) it is also extremely time-consuming and can make absorbing information harder.
  • Add yourself here… (see this for more details)

IndieWeb Tools

Other Examples

  • The Guardian is known in the UK for its live blog news coverage on key events.
  • The BBC creates live blogs for key and evolving political events.

See Also