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Nanocontent convergence: Twitter meets live blogging in CoveritLive

Now you can update a live blog from Twitter.

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Rafe Needleman Former Editor at Large
Rafe Needleman reviews mobile apps and products for fun, and picks startups apart when he gets bored. He has evaluated thousands of new companies, most of which have since gone out of business.
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Rafe Needleman

Webware's favorite live blogging tool, CoveritLive, is getting a new tool for its authors: the capability to update a live blog via Twitter.

When setting up a live blog, producers can tell it to monitor Twitter accounts for updates.

It's a simple, if slightly crude, implementation: when a live blog producer is setting up coverage, he or she can tell the system to monitor specific Twitter accounts and post the Tweets in the live blog window. As a Twitter and a CoveritLive user, I'd prefer a bit more control, such as the capability to tell CiL to take filtered Twitter feeds (using #hashtags, perhaps), but this is a good start.

What I like most about this feature is that it sets up CoveritLive as a conduit or platform, not a closed system. If you're a Web producer and want to set up a live blog, but your authors are happy Twitter users and don't want to learn a new tool, fine. Just tell them to cover an event from their Twitter account using their favorite Twitter app, like Twhirl or TwitterFon. (Twitter live bloggers will still be subject to the platform's 120-character limit, of course.) You can mix up Twitter posts with text from the standard CoveritLive writer's interface. It's easy.

Just in case I wasn't clear about this at the top: CoveritLive is a fantastic tool for covering live events. I am very happy to see it developing with new features and capabilities.

We are using CoveritLive today to live blog the Under the Radar: Mobility conference.

CoveritLive viewers see the Twitter updates inline with the other content.