Get with the times!

I have spoken previously about speed and accuracy’s place in online news.  Getting your scoop out to the wide world before everyone else is paramount to becoming successful in the media industry. With a plethora of outlets, the online and tangible, it has never been a more competitive environment to get ahead in. It is survival of the fittest and certainly of the fastest. 

Online news and entertainment blogging is one of the most heavily saturated modes of journalism. It can also be one of the best ways to promote yourself as an avid journalist. With so many different blogs and online news sites the need for a cutting edge take on it has never been so important. 

Live blogging is something that is relatively new on the scene. It’s all about getting the news as you see it, (getting the front row seat to whichever event may be on the agenda) and grabbing the largest audience before any other bloggers/journslists do. 

The format can be interpreted in which ever way suits you. However, a live blog generally consists of time codes accompanies by a brief, snappy summary of what was said and what was happening at that moment. 

The aim of a live blog is to enable and engage the readers/viewers. Make them feel as though they are actually there and ultimately get the scoop as it is happening, thus being one of the first to cover it. 

I have encountered some great live blog’s, the notion being something that is still quite fresh and changing. I have also seen some poorer examples. The best ones all seem to integrate important information with obvious clarity in writing. 

A live blog that works doesn’t try and document absolutely everything, rather just the key information. 

The Brisbane Times now has a live blogger who often jumps online, though mainly for sports. It is great to see traditional news sources converting to online to widen their readership, hopefully there will be more news and current affair related blogs popping up on Brisbane Times. 

For many tech heads, if not at headquarters at the release of last weeks iPhone 4S, were poised by their computers for live updates of the big reveal. Apple did’t have an official live stream of the event so it was up to guests to keep the less fortunate informed. 

The Washington Post covered the event. Joshua Topolsky summed up the key moments, though I believe some were too brief. The information is at times too hard to decipher due to lack of detail. Summaries are great but for those who aren’t avid iPhone fans not every time stamp would hold a lot of meaning.

An even better example is the coverage by The Wall Street Journal. 

The appropriate use of visual and easier to read time stamps are more to my liking. There is a lot of unnecessary information at the start - but I guess that just comes with the genre and excitement of the event for many. Shorter but more frequent sentences also add to the clarity. There is also an icon to add a comment to the different time stamps. Overall, the more visual, legible and interactive a live blog is the more views it will (often) gain. Speed is of course an important factor. Live blogs are becoming more and more popular and have been utilized by a number of platforms, attracting an ever-growing audience

There are some great tools emerging to keep up with the changing ways of online news.

Wordfaire is a hosted service, similar to Blogger and Wordpress, but is purely devoted to LIVE blogging. It is an exciting new piece of the social media pie. 

The liveblogging platform is made to be easily read and very user friendly. Users can create simple and aesthetically pleasing live blogs for free. Just sign in using one of your existing social media such as Facebook or Twitter and create blog-style live updates. 

Coveritlive (cover it live) is a much more complex platform for the live blogging enthusiast. Used by world known organizations such as Sky News and BBC, it is another free service and is leading the way in blogging hosts. It is great for covering large scale events, and is up to dat with all embedding capabilities and reader participation such a crowd sourcing. 

A really good review of Coveritlive says using it couldn’t be easier and it has the ability to handle thousands of users online at a time. 

Blogging is already a hugely popular outlet of news and entertainment. Live blogging looks to be the next big thing online. Many blogging portals already have Apple and Android applications and the phenomenon looks to maintain and build its popularity and user-ship as technology continues to adapt and grow. 

The Empire that is Google

Your home screen. Your go-to news source when out and about. Your quick-fix fact finder. 

It is every where and it is undoubtedly one of the most recognizable names in the world. Google is one of the highest grossing companies that the world has seen and continues to grow by the nanosecond. 

Assisting this growth are the new programs and initiatives Google has come up with, cementing its place in our daily internet-ing routines.

Iv’e always had an bit of a grudge against these kind of multi-billion dollar corporations. Knowing full well that I frequently utilize them and that they help me in my day to day dealings, I just think that there is something not quite right about ginormous enterprises that have the potential to control and produce all the world’s information, infiltrating each and every aspect of our lives. 

But it’s a love/hate relationship.

Google News for example, being so brilliantly simple and informative is fast becoming many browsers’ go-to hot spot for whats happening in the world. Able to be tailored to your own personal taste, so that you see only stories which would be of interest to you, could there be an easier way to secure a snapshot of all the major news and affairs of the day? 

My only gripe with GoogleNews as a simplistic and on all counts reliable and accurate source is the notion of power to the powerful. The big name publications will always take priority over the smaller name publications when a user types in their news search. 

Founder and Chief scientist, Krishna Bharat commented on the revolutionary algorithm that Google uses to display unbiased search results, in the context of political reports.
"The algorithms do not understand which sources are right-leaning or left-leaning," Bharat said. "They're apolitical, which is good."

However, Google’s algorithm doesn’t assess the content, it assesses the ‘popularity’ or ‘most clicked’ factor in deeming something worthy of the top space of the search results. This means that the displayed news stories will be mostly those from the powerful, big names in media, excluding the minority and less known sources. 

On a whole, the innovation by Google is a smart one. What better way to get more people clicking on those six colored letters more that they already did. I can move past the fact that Google has encroached into all kinds of online and news territory. Google News really is a good news sight, compiling reputable news stories from a wide (ish) range of different sources. 


Able to select from local, nation or international news, a user really has a one stop shop for all the breaking news stories.