Hi. Welcome to a humble little blog about a humble new blogging service.
“A new blogging service,” you might ask, “what on earth do we need another one of those for?”
Well, the story is quite boring, so I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that a while back it became apparent that LiveBlogging was a pretty sad way to blog. Oh, sure, the idea sounds good… it’s like a mix between being on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and sitting at a network news desk, but you don’t need to spend an hour with a make-up artist… or get stuck on a ship where you’re forced to watch crappy old movies.
So, with all of your good intentions, you round up 100 of your closest friends, you send them all to your website, and then you update one post every so often with new information about something. Usually that something is a ball game, TV show, or press conference… you know… some kind of EVENT, that people might want live commentary on.
Unfortunately, blogging systems are just not setup for this sort of thing. When you try to have a liveblog a number of problems crop up. First, you have to keep editing this one post over and over. That means you have to devise a system for differentiating the updates. It also means that your 100 friends have to keep checking in to see if you’ve dispensed any new wisdom.
After a few minutes of that, the 20 folks who are not so frustrated at staring at an unupdated blog post that they leave and never speak to you again, are probably spending their time screaming at each other in the comments. If you’re lucky, some of their comments are going to be in response to your updates. Of course, you’ve got to be pretty clever to figure out which comments go with which updates, especially if the discussion gets heated. So you end up half-way through the event, disenchanted with the whole process, frustrated because your whole post has become a confusing mess of quotes, quips, and one-liners… and you have a serious case of blogger’s remorse.
And a headache.
The same headache your readers will have when they show up to read the liveblog after the fact. Oh, sure, they can read your updates… but trying to keep up with the comments turns into an exercise in comparing timestamps and creating make-shift timelines of everyone’s commentary.
So that’s LiveBlogging. It doesn’t have the punch in practice that it does in theory. Which is sad, because if there’s one thing we all want, it’s to find a group of people who are willing to wait with bated breath, salivating for our next little granule of thought-provoking prose.
But that’s not LiveBlogging’s fault. We just don’t have the tools to really conduct a liveblog properly. It’s a bit like trying to paint glass miniatures with a power sprayer.
And that’s where this humble blogging service comes in: PostFresh aims to create a sane, easy-to-use way to conduct a liveblog that won’t turn your brain to jelly or trample on your will to live.
