For the last couple weeks I have been live blogging here – but not in the traditional sense of being at an event and blogging about it in real time. I am talking about blogging in real time – writing, discussion, comments, everything. Let’s call it Real-Time Blogging so as not to get confused.
Why? Aside from real-time being the craze, live blogging in this manner creates a discussion around a topic rather than just writing something and leaving it for the Google robot and the long tail. I am an avid comment replier – If you comment on this blog you are likely to get a response within an hour, unless its the middle of the night. By blogging in real time I am able to re-purpose those comments into my post – making it that much better. I like to create conversations and discussions, not blog posts. I don’t want to write about something, I want to discuss topics to solve problems and develop new ideas. This method of real time blogging facilitates that.
How? No need to reinvent the wheel – you just need FriendFeed… After you post something to FriendFeed, just click the “Share” link and a popup will appear similar to the one below. Just copy the “Embed” code and drop it in your blog post. Now you are liveblogging on FriendFeed… Pretty cool right?
How Does It Look to Your Blog Readers?
Here are some examples of recent posts where I used this “Real Time Blogging” method…
I love this method – it creates diverse ways for people to consume and interact with your content. Take your content to the people!
FriendFeed Discussion
very cool and superior to just commenting on the blog. I wonder where your network of contacts and commentators actually hangs out? In Friend Feed or on your blog or both?
@Jo – The community on FriendFeed are big commenters – but they mostly do the commenting on FriendFeed… I wanted to bring those comments and that discussion into my post so that’s where I got the idea of embedding the post from FriendFeed. FriendFeed is a top 5 traffic driver to my site so I felt bridging the gap would help the engagement on the blog.
hello again – how does the tweetback link work? I used it is still showing that no-one has tweeted yet.
The Tweetbacks plugin is actually pretty flaky and has not been working lately to pull the list back in. I haven’t had time to look into fixing it – but I am looking for alternatives – I love the idea as it gives incentive to Tweet the post
I don’t know if you’ve tried it yet but the tweetmeme button has been working pretty well for me: http://tweetmeme.com/static.php?page=button.
[rq=38451,0,blog][/rq]Overview: Conspiracy Entertainment
The coverage of Apple’s recent WWDC 2009 on friendfeed was exceptional. Anthony Ha created a new item for each announcement or interesting section of the keynote, and the comments poured in.
Yes that’s an awesome example of real time blogging… When Google Wave was announced I did the same thing.. See here.
Wouldn’t this be more like real time commenting/discussion? ……… because you might as well embed the whole FriendFeed blog, the whole stream – example http://friendfeed.com/petrbuben/embed , instead of just one post with rt comments ……………… or, post a FF group widget , at http://friendfeed.com/embed/widget …. :] ..example of embedded FF group widget – http://petr-buben.blogspot.com
[rq=3310,0,blog][/rq]Realtime News, Twitter. and http://TwitterGadget.com, http://Twitscoop.com – live search and cloud
I prefer to use the embeds for that specific post. I realize there are embeds for your profile, etc and you can embed those. The issue I wanted to resolve was real time discussion / blogging around a specific topic and bringing your entire stream into the mix would be noisy within a single blog post.
I love Friendfeed, but this embed didn’t quite do what I thought you were saying it would do. I tried it with another FF user and the window did not update in real time – we had to refresh or go to the conversation on FF to get a real-time effect, which took away the appeal of having a real-time conversation in an embedded blog post window. Am I missing something? I’d like to use this option, but for now, embedding something like coveritlive seems a better solution.
[rq=34434,0,blog][/rq]Why you’ll need a bigger, faster iPhone
Chris – Not sure how you implemented it but it is working in real time for me…
Anytime someone updates on FF, the embedded widget on the blog post updates.
Vice versa – if someone updates via the widget on the blog post it’s almost instantaneously updating on FriendFeed…
You seem to be missing something… If you want to email me at abrudtkuhl[at]gmail.com I may be able to help!
thanks andy, i’ll give it another shot, if it doesn’t work i’ll get back to you, cheers chris
[rq=34490,0,blog][/rq]Why you’ll need a bigger, faster iPhone
Interesting. Alas, if you want to monetize your website, iFrame is the worst way to implement content in your posts.
I realize that an iFrame is less than desirable for monetization, SEO,
etc… But I wanted to further the interaction with the community and the
best way to do that is to take the content to them rather than try to pull
them in. And in order to bridge the gap back to my site I needed the iFrame.
If they came out with a better solution I would use that.
Set the width to 100% and change to border=0 and it looks even better.
Thanks for the suggestions on the FriendFeed iFrame… I've implemented both and it looks much better – thank you.
Now if I could just get a script to work to auto expand the height of the frame so there is no scrollbar it would look perfect. I've tried several jQuery experiments and cannot get anything to work.
hey Andy,
Nice post i must say but i am little confused. if you have a live discussion friendfeed thing on the post then why you have comments section ?
Discussions are comments at the end of the day, isn't that stealing the thunder of commenting ?
Commenting is still open for people who don't use friendfeed. The idea is to
open up the conversation to as many people as possible in whatever way they
want!
[... - getanewbrowser.com is one another relavant source of tips on this issue,[... -