Toronto-based CoverItLive got some love from Webware's Rafe Needleman yesterday. Needleman was been smitten with CoverItLive's free hosted live-blogging platform for awhile, but now he sees a business model in their new "always on" feature called CoverItLive Enterprise which they will to major online news outlets.
The idea is that instead of (or in addition to) running story pages that embed individual CoverItLive live blogs, a site can maintain one blog page with a perpetual live blog window. It will come alive with content when writers are participating in a live blog. A big advantage, for writers, is that they don't have to get an embed code from the CoverItLive system and then create a story to include the code in. They just start writing in the CoverItLive tool (which is simple).
The advantage for the publisher is they can just have one page with the always-ready live blog placeholder, and users can get used to going there for regularly scheduled live blogs or for breaking news; advertisers can also sponsor the live page easily. Given that the time users spend on a live blog page is likely to be much greater than the time spent on a static story page, these could become valuable ad vehicles.
Click thru to Needleman's coverage to check out the working mockups of CoverItLive Enterprise. In a mockup for Philly.com, the site's live blog page is running ongoing commentary about the Obama inauguration.
Looks cool. Congrats to CoverItLive CEO Keith McSpurren and his three person team on some great coverage and an endorsement for their business model.
Since its release in late 2007, CoveritLive has been used by thousands of writers to engage millions of readers around the world. It has been well... [more]
Rob Lewis
Rob is the President of Techvibes Media Inc. and Editor-in-Chief of Techvibes.com.
His diverse background includes stints in International Trade Finance, Web Development, and Enterprise Software and he is a graduate of the University of British Columbia, British Columbia Institute of Technology, and Simon Fraser University.
When not blogging on...[more]
