I’ve been live blogging conferences for a few years and I can say it is extremely rewarding and frustrating. The appreciation generated by your effort of sharing information from a live event is fantastic because a good conference live blog is useful to everyone, from conference organizers and participants to interested people elsewhere in the world.The frustration is very few platforms lend themselves to live blogging. They either lack real-time updating or they aren’t robust enough to be useful. Then I discovered Google Wave (again). Riding the Google Wave to Live Blogging Heaven A few days before a recent conference I discovered a post by ReadWriteWeb, How to use Google Wave for Live Blogging. RWW highlighted how they used Google Wave to live blog a press conference and I knew I had to give Wave live blogging a try. I mentioned the idea to my good friend Cotton 20min prior to the keynote and in typical “we’ll figure it out as we go” fashion we jumped right in. Soon we were both sharing thoughts and notes from the speakers in real-time on each of our blogs. Within the hour a few friends we’d just met saw our tweets about the live blog and asked if they could help. This little moment snowballed into an amazing collaboration of an entire team live blogging a conference. Later that day as we had people in 2 different talks sharing notes and participating in an amazing backchannel conversation I knew I’d finally found my live blogging platform. It offered every feature I needed

Real-time updating Embedding on any website Collaboration & Formatting Tools

It worked wonderfully and we learned a lot. Tips for a Successful Live Blog Getting started with a Google Wave live blog is easy but to maximize it’s usefulness here are a few tips to consider. (The basic setup instructions can be found in the RWW’s article or see my demo video below for full instructions and a more thorough explanation of the points.)

Live Blogging with Google Wave from Keith Crawford on Vimeo.

Set the Ground Rules If you plan on having collaborators you need to communicate your expectations.

What type of info are you looking for? What should or should not be included? Are backchannel conversations welcome? Who is allowed to add others to the wave?

Formatting Matters To make sure the live blog is readable and useful you’ll need to focus on organizing the information. I was born to write outlines so my live blogs naturally reflect an outline format.

Conference Title

Keynote Talk 1 (speaker,links)

Primary Points

Subpoints Notes

Talk 2 (speaker, links)

Primary Points

Whatever method you choose make it easy to find the information. Use Font size and weight to create visible breaks and highlights. If you don’t use Google Wave much play around with how the replies are threaded so you are comfortable with its use. Takeaways You’re already taking notes so why not share them with the world? Live blogging with Google Wave can create a rich environment for valuable content. Let me hear about your next live blog and share your tips with the rest of us.

If a couple hundred Digg votes on Open Wi-Fi 'Outlawed' in Digital Economy Bill mean anything.

I still have no idea where these are leaking in from ... and no time to track it down right now ... maybe my friends delicious feeds? Maybe Jory?

This is why I'm an instant Abraham Williams fan.

The life of a workshifter just isn’t complete without a mobile RSS reader. However, I find most RSS Readers for the iPhone slow when it come to Google Reader synchronization. Either that or they’re buggy. I’ve been using the Google Reader web app up until a week ago. Here are 3 Google Reader mobile clients that are changing the RSS mobile client space and help you kicking your RSS’ butt! Reeder

Reeder carries on the visual simplicity of the iPhone experience and brings the best of Google Reader’s features in play such as share, note, star, and mark for later. After a recent update, the app now supports sharing to InstaPaper, ReaderItLater, Email, and Delicious. Not to mention synchronization with Google Reader feeds is blazing fast! Reeder was able to handle heavy media content without any problems. It even has the most nifty and quick web app guide in the help section. Reeder is well worth your $1.99 change from coffee. MobileRss

From the team behind Twitbird Twitter client for the iphone, comes MobileRss, an iPhone Google Reader client that packs an impressive punch! MobileRss features some premium features for the steal price tag of $3.99. The list is pretty extensive: RSS Views

Shared Items Starred Items Notes People You Follow Comments

Social Sharing Features

Email (without leaving the app) Twitter Instapaper ReadItLater Add A Note

Additional Options

Unsubscribe and Delete Feeds Unshare Items Star An Item Open in Safari Save images to photo albums Recover screen to last usage

There’s also a free Ad-Supported version if you’d like to try before you buy. Newsie

The Newsie Google Reader client is a beautiful mobile RSS reader for the iPhone. With well designed features reminiscent of of the experience with Tweetie, Newsie focuses on making it easy for you to filter your news in a digestible format. Starring items for later reading automatically triggers the app to stored the article offline. Newsie also supports recovery of where you were last reading.  The app finishes off with an time-saving toolbar to switch between shared items, starred items, notes, and your feeds. It helps to ensure you get back to those items you starred for later. What Would You Suggest? Do you have some of your own favorite mobile RSS readers? I’d love to hear what you’re using in the comments.

Are you reading RSS on your mobile phone? What RSS clients are you using and on what phone?

It's hard to lose weight without a scale. That's more or less the idea behind Google's PowerMeter program, enabling users to view real-time power usage and unplug things accordingly to both reduce their demand and increase their feeling of eco-cockiness. Before today you needed to be getting your juice from one of a very few utility companies to audit your infos, but now you can break free thanks to a partnership with The Energy Detective. That company makes a line of straightforward power monitors that simply plug into a power outlet then connect to the internet via Ethernet to dump your kilowatt gluttony online. The TED 5000-series devices start at $200 and go up from there with optional displays and packages that allow the detection of solar or wind generation, and while they previously allowed online monitoring of power usage, this Google partnership ups their hipness by a factor of at least 10. And, if you were so cool you already bought one of these trackers before they went mainstream, you're just a firmware update away from tracking it with the Googs.Filed under: HouseholdGoogle signs PowerMeter partnership with The Energy Detective, lets everyone play along originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 06 Oct 2009 07:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

1. "I think Wave's capabilities actually exceed human capacity to interact."
   
   
2. "It's probably best to pare down those exorbitant expectations."
   
   Both quotes are from previously posted Engadget write up at http://u.nu/9snt

Early explorations of Google Wave Sandbox are pretty exciting. There's a lot of activity already and for my niche interests, I see great promise along two lines:

1. Lifestreams could give way to, or become hybrid with LifeWaves. What I will be dabbling with is the ability to create the next generation lifestream, along with the extended capability of multiplexing and filtering your life[stream|wave] with others. This could be one route to accomplishing the goal of individual digital stream autonomy and ownership, while fostering robust, extended, collaboration. Potential conflict of interest: AdSense vs. other User As Content / Conversation As Content monetization methods & platforms.

1. Proposal and Project Management. All too often completed under intense time and collaboration compression, Wave technology could be used to create extraordinarily efficient proposal machines that bring together the diverse, disparate data and expertise required to create winning proposals. Task or purpose-specific Wave Robots could stand at the ready of various databases to suggest pertinent content, reference projects, and resources for specific projects. Along side realtime human peer-review, and with everyone on the same wavelength throughout the entire proposal development or project management process, this could result in higher quality proposals and more efficiently executed projects. Zero "didn't get your email/attachment" excuses. Zero "that's not what we agreed to" excuses. Zero "i guess i don't have access to that mapped drive" excuses. You're either paying attention and contributing to the wave, or you're not, and everyone can see who's making proportionate contributions at all times. No more poser pseudo-managers siphoning off your work as their own.

Oh, oh. They let me into the sandbox. Just please don't kick sand in my eyes and I won't kick in yours, okay? ;-)

Seriously though, first hour's glimpse looks like it could take what we're experimenting with here to an entirely new, inclusive, fractal-interactive level. Stay tuned for something you can interact with, soon.

This applies to aggregate COMMENT VIEW. I'm assuming we'd all like to be able to do these two things, as opposed to visiting each and every friend's shared items, individually? Well, at least if we're helping Google to crush Friendfeed via our feature requests, anyway. ;-)

Yes, this is where it becomes a HCI design challenge again, because it will fast become YAHHF: yet another hydra-headed firehose. Hint: See @PeopleBrowsr approach and create multiple levels of functionality so that users can quickly pick the level of complexity they prefer. Something like: Basic, Reader, Social, and Firehose modes.

While it seems the pinnacle of tautology to say once again that open source standards must Hold The Center for web development; here I am, repeating the obvious once again, for the sake of the oblivious, who will never even see this. . File under #fatal #futility I suppose. . Yet, the risks to the individual and society of failing that core mission continues to fuel whole NPO’s and even NGO’s. Itemization of risks is not required, but obviously hold paramount the requirement  ”to protect the user’s security and privacy online ...” as reminded by Jay Sullivan @ 36:15 @ Google I/O. . Meanwhile, as of just this week, there is now apparently no longer even the chance to clear your Authentic Human Existence with CAPTCHA on Google. Last week, they’d hammer you with a CAPTCHA for the unsavory act of protecting your own traffic, credit card data, SSN’s, etc. by daring to use an anonymizing proxy for search. . Today, you’re just apparently OUT OF LUCK, all because you’re protecting your ID from theft using fully paid, commercial, off-the-shelf encryption; at least that’s the case with Safari 4 on Mac OS X 10.5.7. . If I turn off my privacy proxy, the exact same request goes right through without a hitch. Turn it back on, we go back to this:

Please, spare me the condescending, “well, you might have done this or that …. or multiple requests that might look like bullshit … or whatever.” I’m using search like I’ve always used search, nothing out of the ordinary whatsoever. Google is simply becoming increasingly intolerant of privacy. Why do you think Google started crowing about how they defend privacy against backwater regimes? Because they want you to compare your baseline expectation to North Korea, rather than to your own historical norms. Help me Obi Wan Templeton, you’re my only hope.

Wow, are you serious, Google? Really? Excuuuse me for being too efficient with the automation of my absolutely, not even remotely a risk of being a spammer blog site. And how about that presumption of guilty until proven innocent? Yeah, that’s nice. It’s not, “you’ve been flagged and we’ll have a human confirm this.” No, it’s “you’ve been flagged and now you’re OFFLINE unless a human decides otherwise.” FAIL.

——– Original Message ——– Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2009 19:27:06 -0700 (PDT) From: Blogger <no-reply@google.com> To: me Subject: http://myTotallyLegitSite.blogspot.com/ - ACTION REQUIRED     Hello,     Your blog at: http://myTotallyLegitSite.blogspot.com/ has been identified as a potential spam blog.  To correct this, please request a review by filling out the form at http://www.blogger.com/unlock-blog.g?lockedBlogID=1234567     Your blog will be deleted in 20 days if it isn’t reviewed, and your readers will see a warning page during this time. After we receive your request, we’ll review your blog and unlock it within two business days. Once we have reviewed and determined your blog is not spam, the blog will be unlocked and the message in your Blogger dashboard will no longer be displayed. If this blog doesn’t belong to you, you don’t have to do anything, and any other blogs you may have won’t be affected.     We find spam by using an automated classifier. Automatic spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and occasionally a blog like yours is flagged incorrectly. We sincerely apologize for this error. By using this kind of system, however, we can dedicate more storage, bandwidth, and engineering resources to bloggers like you instead of to spammers. For more information, please see Blogger Help: http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42577     Thank you for your understanding and for your help with our spam-fighting efforts.     Sincerely,     The Blogger Team     P.S. Just one more reminder: Unless you request a review, your blog will be deleted in 20 days. Click this link to request the review: http://www.blogger.com/unlock-blog.g?lockedBlogID=1234567