Observations of MacWorld Blogging

Today was the keynote address at MacWorld 2008.  I observed quite a few things this year that didn't happen in years past.

For instance this year seemed like everyone was live blogging the event. From Fake Steve to Valleywag to the normal web information outlets for MacWorld Keynotes: Engadget, MacRumors and Gizmodo.

But it seemed the first timers didn't have much luck with keeping their servers up.  Fake Steve was using a third party web app to stream the live blogging directly to his blog.  Unfortunately the app crashed almost as soon as the keynote started.

Fake Steve then went to the back up plan of using Twitter. Valleywag had also planned on live blogging via Twitter.  MacRumorsLive had planned on also posting it's updates to twitter as well as on their website and IRC channel.

Ok so with these big names live blogging on Twitter as well as countless others at the keynote and with millions of people trying to refresh to get the latest from twitter on what was happening....well let's just say Twitter buckled.  It went down hard for at least an hour. Even now they are rate limiting the API calls to less then the normal 70 an hour to try to take the pressure off.

With all the live blogging, I found a few who tried to stream video from the Keynote. We watched this stream until someone asked the guy to lower his Camera/phone.  The picture was crappy and the sound quality wasn't the greatest but at least you could sort of make out what was going on and related back to the MacRumorsLive notes.  We observed at the peak the stream had over 9000 concurrent viewers.  The most surprising thing heard in that stream?  A baby crying in the audience, seriously who brings a baby to an event like this?

I heard iJustine tried to Stream as well.  Seems like she suffered the same fate as above.

But that brings me to my next point live video streaming seemed to be big during CES but it was really noticable today.  I caught Scoble recording most of this evening with his Nokia N95.  Here he is with Leo Laporte at MacWorld.  Here Scoble interviews Qik founder when a Video streaming orgy breaks out by four different people one being iJustine.


So who had the best info this year. Engadget had the best write ups but their server were starting to buckle from people constantly reloading.  Their page took forever to come back up.  MacRumorsLive had an awesome AJAX solution that didn't require you to do anything photos and updates "magically" appeared on your screen when updates occured.  In my opinion MacRumorsLive won the bragging rights.

It's fun to see how the new technology made today a much more interesting event to watch from a far.  It was also fun to see how the old technology players struggled as they are the now go to outlets for this event.

Either way with everyone sharing information it makes it easy for everyone to experience the keynote as closely as they do.  Thanks to you all for your hard work.