2008 Testing, Testing, 123… (Or: A Happy Unintended Consequence of Schmader and Showgirls)
posted by on November 7 at 14:55 PM
True story: One day a web developer in Toronto was forced by a friend of his to watch Showgirls. He hated the movie, but was inspired by the (indeed truly inspiring) David Schmader narration option that came on the Showgirls DVD.
He thought: Way to stretch the potential of a technology! And then he thought: Well, liveblogging an event-in-progress (a speech, a debate, a sports match) is a lot like commenting on a movie-in-progress. And why does liveblogging have to be so clunky anyway, with all that refreshing on the part of the blogger and the audience? Couldn’t it display more like an IM chat?
It can, it turns out. After my liveblogging of the Democratic debate last week, this web developer wrote me, told me about the Schmader connection, and suggested we check out his new web-based liveblogging application.
We’ve checked it out, and now we’re testing it out. If it works well, I’ll use this for my liveblogging of the next Democratic debate on Nov. 15. Help me put it through its paces, please—there’s a feedback function where you can message me and I can incorporate your comments into the liveblog if they’re worthy. Here we go…
In Safari 2, at least, every time there's an update, anyone looking at anything above or below it on the page gets jerked back to the liveblog widget. It would work a lot better behind a jump.
firefox on xp here... same bug.
ACK! make it stop! it's impossible to read anything else on Slog in firefox too!
The Slog was unreadable for me until I right-clicked on this thing and picked "Adblock iframe...".
My impressions before I blocked it: it's small, visually cluttered, and of questionable value.
a slog chatroom?
horrible! horrible! horrible! horrible! horrible! horrible! horrible! horrible! horrible! horrible! horrible! horrible! horrible! horrible! horrible! horrible! horrible! horrible! horrible!
and i should add: please don't put this thing up on slog. it makes dumb sounds and keeps forcing my browser to do strange things.
Christ you guys.
I thought it was brilliant ... with the huge obvious exception of the whiplash.
I thought it was cool. Instant gratification and all that. More interactive, real-time shit is always more entertaining.
having my speakers muted and NOT running OSX made my experience divine.
Can we set fnarf up with one of these, and a web cam? oh la la.
it is a chatroom. with logging. not impressed.
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