ScribbleLive: Two Guys In Canada Launch Sweet Liveblogging Platform

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Erick Schonfeld
TechCrunch.com
Thursday, May 22, 2008; 12:09 PM

I am at the Mesh conference in Toronto right now sitting next to two guys liveblogging the event on ScribbleLive: Michael De Monte and Jonathan Keebler. They are the founders of ScribbleLive. Jonathan is typing notes while StumbleUpon founder (and semi-famous Canadian) Garrett Camp is being interviewed on stage, while Michael is adding links and photos. (Earlier in the morning they liveblogged Club Pengiuin co-founder Lane Merrifield's keynote). The Ajax-based platform automatically updates the page as they add more content.

It is a pretty sweet platform for something they cobbled together in their spare time for $1,500 (Canadian). De Monte is the director of online production at CTV and Keebler is a technology manager there. I am just sitting here watching them liveblog and it is definitely an improvement over typing in Wordpress and constantly hitting save, and forcing readers to constantly hit the refresh button. For people watching the liveblog, it updates automatically without having to reload the page.

Since it is Ajax, you can watch liveblogs on your iPhone and it will just scroll. Another nifty feature: you can e-mail text or photos from your phone (or anywhere) and the content appears directly in the post. Also, readers who are logged in can reverse the order of the entries, so they can read the liveblog from the beginning, or see the most recent additions up top.

This is something I would want to use for liveblogging events, if only they offered an embeddable widget that I could put directly into a TechCrunch post. Right now, the posts exist on ScribbleLive's Website. But De Monte whispers that an embeddable widget is something they are working on. Other features on the roadmap include the ability to post from Twitter and comment that will travel with each entry.


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