Note: This post was written in Google Docs as a live blog.
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Amit Agarwal from blog Digital Inspiration has a great guest post on the Official Google Docs blog today outlining how anyone can use the service as a live blogging tool. The writing format, which has become an increasingly popular way for bloggers to cover events as they're happening (mainly useful for things like Apple keynote speeches), but also manages to work for smaller conferences and events, too.

Agarwal's suggestions are to either set it up as a special page on compatible blogging platforms so that your writings will show up like a regular post, or to simply embed it on the page as I've done here. One of the platform's strong suits is that it lets several people work on a document at the same time, which your standard blogging platform likely won't allow.

Other small things to note are that your blogging tool might not pick up your byline or give the post a time stamp. Agarwal suggests you use Google Docs' inline comment system (hitting CTRL + M), which will add a timed notation. Also, your readers will need to manually refresh the page to see any updates since there's no way to set your individual post to do that automatically.

We've covered several live blogging tools on Webware before. Rafe's favorite is CoverItLive, which we've used with great success. There's also competitor ScribbleLive. Both offer live updating, and options to let your readers get notifications and reminders on when live coverage will begin.

Joshlowensohn 7/9/08 1:49 PM