Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Sam's liveblog

Liveblog of Yahoo! Live stream of Against! Me concert
Maybe it was the fact that I've livetweeted many times that I found liveblogging refreshing and more fun. I enjoyed being able to ramble and link as much as I wanted to without being concerned with length. I think livetweeting and liveblogging work together to teach the skill of covering an event so it's both informative but also succinct.

I'm glad that I had experience with livetweeting before liveblogging because it taught me the value of keeping it short and choosing words wisely. But now that I've gotten that down, it felt good to do some more long-form posts, even if it was maybe over 140 characters by a word or two. It was quicker to just freely type and post without playing around with phrasing, abbreviations and words.

My liveblogging experience was also better because I was doing something that other people were also watching live, as opposed to my livetweet of the album which didn't have an interactive element. I got into a conversation with a fan of the band who checked out my liveblog and was also a journalist. I got retweeted TWICE by Yahoo Music which has 144k+ followers which drove a lot of traffic to my site. I also was following the #YahooLive hashtag on TweetDeck and favorited tweets of those watching it in an attempt to get them to look at my liveblog.

I was initially expecting it to be pretty boring because it's just a concert – but the longer post format of the liveblog gave me a lot of room to inject my own voice and comment on things I don't think I could've in tweets. Plus, the band has a lot of social issues surrounding it (the lead singer is transgender) so I was able to do some research on that, provide some links and give my own opinion.

The only thing I disliked was that there's no way to engage a community on the liveblog, there's no hashtags. I wish my posts were being filtered into some larger system of everyone liveblogging on WordPress and you could track tags or something.

I had 37 posts over the course of about an hour and a half which is about par for the course for my livetweets, so I was still having the same general timing and thought process, but I just didn't feel as stressed or as rushed to get it out quickly and keep it short. I could flesh out ideas and do some research before publishing a post. It was a cool experience and a lot of fun. I was surprised by the interaction I got, I promoted with about 4-5 tweets using the hashtag and tagging Yahoo and the band which got me a lot of attention.

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