Thursday 18 September 2008

PersonnelToday.com embraces chogging


The big event in the HR calendar is the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development's annual conference which for yonks has been held in the spa town of Harrogate.

This year's (currently running) will be the last in the Yorkshire town so it's something of a milestone (Harrogate, on the other hand, transport-wise was always something of a millstone).

Anyway, I'm delighted to see that PersonnelToday.com are chogging (live blogging) some of the sessions using CoverItLive.com. They're doing a great job with it - here's an example.

CoverItLive made released quite a few enhancements this month and amazingly it is still a free service. New features include (I quote from their own email):

Private backchannel messaging for you and your Panelists/Producers: Now you can send a private message to the other people running your live blog without your readers knowing about it. In the past, many of you have had to use a separate messaging product or email to say things to each other like:
"Let me handle the questions today"
"I need to take a break for 10 minutes"
"Are you ready to go live with that Qik interview?"
This feature is particularly useful for covering a conference where someone is coordinating several contributors throughout the day.

Cosmetic changes that make a BIG difference:
- Pictures now come with a 'zoom' feature if there is a larger or higher resolution picture available (Gawker Media...that was for you)
- Pictures are now shown in the body of the live blog; not as a popup window (Liverpool Daily Post...that was for you)
- Polling questions are now shown in full in Replay mode; not as a popup window (No one asked for this, but it looks much better)
All they need to do now to make it fantastic is to introduce a feature which enables you to suck out the results into a text file so that you can offer an edited text version to your users (and to the search engines)...

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