Liveblogging journeys with n0tice shared

Over the years I’ve tried a whole host of different platforms for liveblogging with varying degrees of success, so getting the opportunity to help shape a platform from the start, as I have atm with www.n0tice.com, is a bit like being let loose in the proverbial sweet shop.

One of the big challenges is how to get multiple bloggers involved in collaborating on one blogpost at the same time with whatever devices they happen to have and without any particular pre-planning.

I don’t mean just curating the activities of others going on in the same place such as random tweets on a hashtag – although that’s essential too – but actively collaborating to produce a multimedia report.

This could be fun for events where there’s lots of people attending such as conferences – but imagine what a powerful tool it could be for breaking news events where the journalists and other participants are unknowingly thrown together at a location.

I’ve been experimenting at a couple of events over the past few days and thought it worth sharing the experience for the benefit of others who might like to try it out and also in the hope of hearing from any livebloggers out there who’ve particular issues which could be answered in a new ground-up platform like this.

The first experiment was the the Salford University Innovation through Heritage  event where I found myself in the room with several n0tice users including the prolific Nigel Barlow who has been busy developing a noticeboard for InsidetheM60. Given that, this was an easy test run and we simply updated some basic text commentary between us and posted a picture. Interesting to see that when I logged in earlier today that it’s been updated since by another user – a story that can continue to develop? Existing users can see the test here.

A more substantial test came at the weekend where I offered anyone attending the Culture Hack North event an invite to join me with a live blog. My volunteer, the wonderful Linda Broughton, isn’t a regular blogger but wanted to give a try – and ended up blogging the whole of the second day of the event!

This was rather more adventurous and the final result was a live blog of 29 updates which contained text from us both, curated other people’s tweets, pictures, a video and a link to a presentation. Existing users can give it a look here.

Five things I’ve learned from the experience;

* Updates can be added as frequently as required using the simple update box –  works a bit like my old friend, FriendFeed.
* Adding pictures can be done from a link, not just a file from a camera or desktop, eg. Flickr, Twitpic.
* Video is easy to add from a youTube embed  added to the update box.
* Curating other people tweets into it is simply a case of dropping the link from the timestamp on twitter.
* It’s more fun when someone else joins in!

If you fancy giving it a try – please do sign up for an invite, www.n0tice.com, and let me know how you get on or let me know what must-have feature would get you using it.