How can we make the Live Blogs better?
27th March 2008, 13:00 by Keith Collantine 26 Comments »
The new F1Fanatic Live Blogs of the practice, qualifying and race sessions have proved really popular, with hundreds of you joining in the Grand Prix comments.
But I think we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what we can do with this feature so please give me any feedback on the service so far. Here are a few thoughts I’m working on at the moment:
Covering the sessions
What makes Live Blogging really powerful is that loads of people can contribute at once. So how can we harness that to cover F1 better?
One way, which we’ve already started to use a bit, is to have feedback from people watching F1 via different sources – television broadcasters around the world, radio announcers, plus online coverage such as the live timing screens and Renault’s excellent live telemetry.
Another way could be to have different people tracking the progress of individual drivers. So if you’re a Nakajima fan you could be out appointed Nakajima specialist, keeping a close track on his progress and making sure the rest of us don’t miss anything.
Would you be interested in helping us follow the race this way?
Another way might be to divide it up by roles – have one person keeping an eye on pit stops, another monitoring track and weather conditions, another changes in the running order and so on.
Software
At the moment F1Fanatic Live Blogs is run using CoverItLive. How well do you think the software worked? Do you know of any alternatives that might be better?
I’m in discussion with the CoverItLive people at the moment and will pass any relevant feedback on to them, especially if you encountered any technical problems.
Share the Live Blog
If you run an F1 website then you’ll be able to place the F1Fanatic Live Blog on your site from next week. I’ll post the relevant code closer to the time (to make sure you don’t miss it why not subscribe to the RSS feed?).
Wanted: Moderators
Over 1,300 messages were posted during the Malaysian Grand Prix alone and the moderators who helped out last weekend played a vital role in making the Live Blog a success – thanks to Ollie, Duncan, Journeyer and Arun.
We do need some more moderators, however, so if you can spare a bit of time during any of the sessions to help ensure people’s comments appear on the blog as quickly as possible, please contact me via the comments below or the contact form.
Wanted: Friday hosts
After the Bahrain Grand Prix I won’t be able to run the Live Blogs for the practice sessions as I’ll be at work! So I need at least one person to run each of those two Live Blogs.
If you’re interested in doing this, please contact me
Anything else?
What more can we do to make the live blogs better? What did you think of the live blogs so far? Please leave your comments, suggestions and ideas below.
You can also send feedback to F1Fanatic.co.uk via the F1 Fanatic Facebook Group:
cyanide said on 27th March 2008, 14:02
I tried joining the live blog last week, but the interface didn’t seem to work well for me. It kept jumping to the top – the first message. It would then jump down again to the last posted message, then jump back to the top. Kept doing that for the 10 minutes that I tried to join in. Made it very annoying to do pretty much anything. I guess that’s not how the interface works and is surely due to problems from my side (maybe because of Firefox 3 b4).
Like I commented last week (don’t know if you noticed my comment), and since you’re open to other alternatives, I’d recommend IRC for this kind of live commentary/interaction. Me and my friend already run an IRC server (related to PSP hacking, but can be changed as need be, also have another dedicated server which could be used as a standalone F1Fanatic IRC server) and would love to have other F1 fans on the server. Most of our current visitors are Europeans and fans of F1. We also have a webinterface allowing people to join in from their browser (without having to download a seperate IRC client).
Thanks for listening, and bye!
Pranav.
cyanide said on 27th March 2008, 14:04
Forgot to mention btw… Apart from the web interface, most multi-protocol instant messengers like Pidgin, Adium, Trillian support IRC and would work just as well.
Craig said on 27th March 2008, 14:19
I quite like it as it is! I didn’t mess about with the window all that much, but then only thing I would suggest would be if the comment window could be made bigger – quite often I would find myself watching the TV and then would have to scroll up a bit to read what I had missed. Sounds a bit petty when you see it written down lol.
As for watching the drivers in turn, roll on the interactive digital channels so we can do that for real and give it some justice!
milos said on 27th March 2008, 14:26
the CoverItLive works fine. I like those little polls
nuzzaci said on 27th March 2008, 15:12
One idea would be to use an existing services and just filter the output. For instance, use Twitter.com as a service and their API to filter out every entry containing a certain word (or letter combination) during the race broadcast.This way everyone store there own content on their own account (probably remove the need of moderators) and all your doing is aggregating data.Here’s an example when Twitter has been used to monitor the president candidate in the US. http://politweets.com/.Think something similar could work really for covering live F1 events.The good thing with agreeing a certain word or letter combination to filter each race (for instance all post mentioning ‘F10801′ (being F1: Formula 1, 08: year, 01: GP number)), means that you can later extend this gathering of data. And later on start aggregation other services, as photos from Flickr, or Blog post via Techonrati.
doctorvee said on 27th March 2008, 15:45
I think the liveblogs have been working really well. It has to be said though, moderation is an absolute pain and I do wonder if we would be better off using plain old IRC. Another little niggle is that I would like to be able to send my message be hitting enter rather than having to click the submit button all the time. It is really annoying when you are trying to send messages as quickly as possible, but you have to faff around with the mouse! ISTR this was possible when I wasn’t a moderator…
Clive said on 27th March 2008, 15:47
The CoverItLive gizmo worked just fine for me – I was actually quite impressed with the way I just had to click on the link in your post, Keith, and was immediately thrown into the action.
I had the ITV feed and Live Timing open in other windows and found that everything fitted pretty well, not requiring me to constantly switch from one to the other. What might be an idea for the future (I know it’s not possible now because of jealously-guarded copyright) would be to have these feeds embedded into the chat window so that we only need to have one window open.
At this rate, we will be able to throw away our TVs – wouldn’t that be nice?
Scott Joslin said on 27th March 2008, 15:51
Great idea about having people track individual drivers, I would be well up for taking 2 or 3 drivers to cover over a weekend. One thing I think we might need to consider in time is as the number of people increase, we are going to get a lot of people saying the same thing during the session. To ensure everyone gets a quality experience, perhaps we should consider having more than one live comments session – Maybe one where regulars go – they would be invited or have to respond to a RSVP to a session reminder and would gain access to a session limited to say 50 people, where as the occasional users can come and go freely in a public session. I say this as sometimes when a piece of action happens we will get 5 or 6 people saying the same thing and this might dilute the impact of the comments in the session. Other than that I think it is a great feature.
KB said on 27th March 2008, 15:55
I did go onto the live blog, but when the race started ny eyes were on the live timing screen at f1.com and the TV, I would have loved to join in but just too much going on for me
Even I cant do that amount of multitasking!
Gr8 idea though
Scootin159 said on 27th March 2008, 16:10
I used the live blog for Australia practice (not the race however as I watched it DVR time-delayed), and really enjoyed it. I tried it again in Malaysia, but it kept crashing my computer (fresh WinXP install w/ FF2.0.latest). After a little messing around, I gave up.
Generally though I will not be watching the races live however, as most of the European races run at about 7am Sunday morning here (at which point I’m at church).
Ollie said on 27th March 2008, 16:22
Duncan, the enter key thing is annoying. Interestingly, people who aren’t mods are able to do this because they don’t have the tinymce (?) text box thingy. But mods do. It annoyed me as well.
I’m with Clive and impressed about the whole ‘being thrown straight into the action’ thing. Generally speaking, I think it is fine, but I do agree that there needs to be a way of showing information about the race or viewing options without the need for users to persistently ask "How can I watch F1?" A sort of FAQ that is always around.
Given the popularity of all this I have a few ideas that I’ve been mulling over, but I won’t waste space on the site with a overly long message. I’ll shoot you over an email at some point in the next few days.
Journeyer said on 27th March 2008, 17:22
It works great, but I couldn’t moderate on Sunday because my Net was not fast enough and the site kept timing out. But that’s out of your control, Keith. What I would suggest is that we have special guest moderators and/or chatters from race to race. It would be great if we could get some F1 people past or present to join us.
Otherwise, you’re doing perfect, Keith.
doctorvee said on 27th March 2008, 17:53
Clive:
I almost managed it! F1.com doesn’t work – they must have code on their site to prevent this sort of thing. TBH I’d imagine ITV would take a dim view of this sort of thing as well, but it’s nice to think about. Click here to see, but I’ll take it down soon in case it annoys anyone! Maybe we could keep the frame on the right though – embed the Coveritlive window in a bigger page with all the FAQ etc in it?
Alianora La Canta said on 27th March 2008, 19:19
I might be able to start doing the Friday sessions from Bahrain onwards, but it would have to be on a race-by-race basis because my job situation is currently in flux.
alan said on 27th March 2008, 20:45
I enjoyed the blog experience and it was fast and furious the way that comments were coming in – I had trouble watching and reading and adding small comments – but great idea and well done Keith again