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Wednesday October 14th at 15 GMT.

First session of beWeeVee’s Real-Time Blogging Test.

We are starting… GMT 15:01
Ending time… GMT 16:29

—— Title: What is realtime blogging, and why we should care about it ——

The last months after the arrival of Google Wave, there has appeared lots of ideas on how to use Co-Operation (aka. Real-Time Collaboration). The idea of using the same artifact is quite of natural in the real world, like when writing in a board. However, we get used to the idea of tokenized access (exclusive access) to resources because of artificial restrictions imposed by technology. Why? There are millions of reasons, but we can resume them in 2 simple keywords: complexity and scarcity.

Solving how to access unique resources with writing actions happening simultaneously is indeed a very hard problem, and everyone that has worked in the field have experienced it first hand. We also have scarcity, the idea that you can have as much bandwidth and computing power as you like may have sounded far fetched 5 or 10 years ago. At the time the seeds of blogging and social networks were sowed most wouldn’t think based on those terms. And now a new seed is in the horizon, that is online co-operative services, Twitter is a first step into this space where access is tokenized but you have an stream of data flowing directly to you (the consumer). Other online services are migrating into this always connected, always alive, environment. Mostly because, it is a real-time service that do not differ much, in the sense that the world is still tokenized. That is all the fuzz about Google Wave, Etherpad and other providers of this technology like beWeeVee itself. We are seeing the transition between a tokenized world into a fluid world where access to resources is shared among the participants.

Blogging and news will not be obnoxious to this trend, there are certain aspects that will definitely change but we think is for the greater good. For example, today, we are real-time blogging as an experiment even though you can read this now as a blog post. We know first hand, that this process would cause fear of embarrassment into almost everybody (we do have it too). It is not easy to be exposed in front of an audience, but most importantly like if you where on TV. Blogs do have audiences today, but what if blogging moves into a real-time environment, where you can go and see what the author is doing, what he is writing, what he is deleting, what he is changing? You start to be like a TV watcher reflecting into the character of your favorite actor, you start to understand his writing processed, you can question it, while it is happening. You then are one among others in the audience, and a real-time information source. In the process, we can derive ratings and audience metrics that may guide (or not) the author in his stance.

Other examples, like multi-author blog post, would require writing policies and methodologies on how to write. Some of them, we had experienced first hand. When one writes and the rest correct (what we used today). Or everybody writes, like we use when doing distributed note taking, may be just a couple among other very different methodologies. From the publisher standpoint there are certain qualities like being able to have complex access control and WYSIWYG support, spell checking, etc. But what about the consumer? We think that the most interesting part is, what the consumer gets. If you allow playback of the session, you allow your consumers to see how you get into that distilled experience that they are reading (if they are interested in knowing more). They can see exactly what you wrote, what you left out, and how you modified it. They can have what we call a TiVo for Text. Now, let’s suppose you are reading a masterpiece from a Nobel laureate. Seeing how he wrote it, how he changed the plot multiple times, how he tried out alternate endings, etc. The potential for learning is huge, it is a very experiential way to learn. There is certainly other uses like correcting essays at school, but that is a topic for a different post.

To summarize, blogging and news will probably be affected by the availability of streams of information and technology is already moving to make that happen, whether you like it or not. What we can do with that technology is what really matters. Real-time blogging like in a movie may or may not work, but the potential for experiential learning is here to stay.

Corvalius beweevee, realtime blogging