I’m sitting here reading Bill Simmons’ play-by-play of the NCAA Tourney and it reminded me why I hate livebloggers more than slamming my genitals in a bank vault.
Liveblogging. At first blush, it sounds like a great idea. “Wow, I’m going to get soooo much traffic because people who aren’t at the conference can live vicariously through me.”
If only it were that easy. The problem with liveblogging is that most people can’t write for shit when they have no publishing pressure and they turn into complete and utter disasters without serious time for revisions.
I mean, I do appreciate people who do think it’s a good idea to fork over roughly $83,000 to go to each conference. I appreciate that they take those things seriously and call it a night early so they are sober enough to fire up their epic 20 WPM typing skills on some Sales Hack’s 15 minute preso. I appreciate it because the only value I’ve ever found at conferences was getting hammered at the parties and then looking across the breakfast table of my peers the next morning asking each other, “Did we really rewire the lights on that police car to show Toolbar PageRank?”
That’s the shit people need to liveblog. If I weren’t heading to SES NYC next month, I would like to fire up my feedreader and get the Perez Hilton breaking news blow-by-blow of all the funny stuff. For example, I would like to know how many times Hagans gave the infamous double thumbs up pose and then threw in a pair of middle fingers after the picture taker turned their back. I mean, is that not what liveblogging and YouTube were made for?
Also, Liveblogger Guy. The following is not doing anybody a favor:
“Dan3y Sulvan is now talkking about the stait of th3 industriousness. Fourcasts call for 830% proffitable increasings to SEO’s that can speLLt. [I will come back to this later].”
No, you should go back to that now. You should not even hit the Publish button until your liveblogging horseshit doesn’t look like a ransom note. And why is it you people can always spell, “I will come back to this later” correctly but everything preceding it looks like a WAP key?
Stay in your shoes, livebloggers. We can all wait until you are ready to give us your best.
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Brian
you just don’t read the right live blogs (or follow the right sport)
http://football.guardian.co.uk/news/matchreport/0,,2037718,00.html
Yahoo has a pathetic liveblog of the final four done by wetzel or whatever his name is and its crap - he even gives up part of the way through. If only the US sports media would look at what other people are doing they’d find a model that works.
BTW that link above is NOT a specially chosen one - it’s the most recent from today - and is pretty lame by their standards.
I am a fan of Bill Simmons, but I agree that SEO conference live blogging is typically mind-numbingly tedious. I’ll be sure to live blog our meeting if we run into each other in NY. “Ran into dood frum Skorbord Meedya Groop. I will come back to this later…”