| Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Last night, I told you about the first step in my ‘creative destruction’ plan to get from where I was to where I’m going to be in a few days time. Now I’ll tell you about the second step—live blogging—which is related to link journalism.

The first step was something called ‘link journalism‘, of which the Drudge Report is probably the best example on the Internet. Link journalism involves trawling through lots of information and making an editorial decision about what’s important enough for you to read.

I’ve already started doing that for you via my homepage, which now has a nice big table covering most of the page, is set to refresh automatically every 15 minutes and is full of the very latest global current affairs links I can find.

I can publish them instantly—two seconds after I find them you can be looking at them on the homepage and clicking through to the article or video to find our what’s going on in the world.

I will always try and link to the best quality articles, videos and photos I can find.

Step two: live blogging

The next step, after immediate, good quality links to everything important, is to start slowing the information down a bit, and to start to give it some context.

Live blogging helps us do that: live blogs are single blog posts which are updated throughout the day with micro thoughts, a bit like you might write or post on your Facebook page.

Here’s an example I did today to practice a little.

If I give you a link on the homepage which reads “Interview with Gustavo de Arístegui”, what is it that Gustavo de Aristegui said exactly? What’s the key quote from the article? Why is that relevant? In our Libya example from today, I thought that was this:

Spanish opposition Popular Party foreign affairs spokesman—who was the Spanish embassy’s deputy station chief in Libya at the start of the 90s—has said that how long Gadafi lasts will depend on how long the mercenaries he’s contracted last.

If I give you a link on the homepage to a video—Cameron announces Libya airlift, for example—why not just embed one or two of the most important or interesting videos in the live blog as we go along so you can watch? Like this:

If I give you a link on the home page to a photo, or a map—Map: Libya unrest: Tripoli fights back—let’s have a bit of that on the live blog as well, almost as soon as I find it, like this screenshot of a bit of the Guardian map about Libya today:

Why not just embed the whole map? First because it doesn’t physically fit on the live blog page and secondly it was made by the people at the Guardian, so you should go and visit the full thing over there. But a photo highlights it’s interest a bit more than a lonely link and livens up the page.

Liveblogging: a great way to follow an event as it unfolds

If you’re interested in ‘the Libyan revolt’ and would like to follow the updates during the day, it’s tiresome to have to keep scanning through different news sites and RSS feeds to work out what the latest event is; wouldn’t it be great if you could just go to ONE trusted page, refresh it all day, and have the important quotes, videos and thoughts come to you, as soon as they can be found, transcribed and, well, thought?

That’s what a live blog is. Lots of micro updates on one topic, published on one page, throughout the day, as the event is happening, so you don’t have to go anywhere else to fin out what’s going on.

An extended link blog for the main story of the day.

So we now have the first steps to the new plan: 1) live link journalism + 2) live blogging.

Tomorrow, I’ll explain step three.

If you sign up for my new global current affairs newsletter (on the home page or on top of the sidebar, up there on the right), I’ll send you a quick e-mail whenever I start a new live blog so that you can follow along and join in the fun.