The Liveblog Conundrum
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After exploring the world of available chat software I've come to a surprising conclusion: a moderated chat room is really expensive. I know. I don't know how this is the case either. Our main options are…
Cover It Live
Status quo on software. Price: suddenly massive. The 61,000 "clicks" registered by CIL last November would run us 840 dollars. If the site really needs it I guess that's something we can afford, but that money would be better spent on a dozen other things instead of moderated chat software.
Scribble Live
Different software that may or may not work as well but probably works just fine because it's moderated chat software. Pricing: slightly less massive but asking for a year commitment, which makes it still eye-blinkingly expensive. Like, the amount of money the companies want here is on the order of running the server for a year.
So… this would be slightly hacky but I'm intrigued at the idea of creating an mgotwitter that acts as the user moderation system. You tweet at it, it retweets you if you're the one of the first couple to go "WOOOOO" or "AAARRGH" or says something funny or smart. We bundle those into a twitter list and embed it on the site:
[ED: hmmm. hopefully in a fashion that, you know, works.]
[ED: This is the same stuff that's on the list on twitter itself so I assume it'll work itself out once the thing is older than a few minutes.]
This has the attractive feature of not costing multiple thousands of dollars a year for moderated chat, but does require anyone who wants to participate to have a twitter account.
On the other hand, that could actually be a benefit. People who aren't sitting at their computers could participate by following the list and we could take tweets from the stands (when they get out). We probably add the list to the mobile app as part of an as-yet fuzzy initiative to have a "live" tab on those apps. And it would be nice to have people's avatars and usernames connected to something instead of being essentially anonymous. We can keep the content of the liveblog in a permanent fashion by using Storify, and we could even add in some images/videos to help provide context for the WOOS and ARGHS. Those could be provided by the readers as well—twitter would allow the contributions on the site to be more than just text.
So… what I'm asking is if this sounds cool to the people who were Cover It Live regulars last year. It'll be a different window you type into, but I think it'll be pretty much the same otherwise.
Anyone have:
- potential downsides
- cool ideas not yet thought of
- gibbering rage at the very idea?
Hit the comments.
Those that don't want to mix their professional accounts with MGoBlog could just open a second twitter for MGoBlog purposes.
This sounds like a good plan. Although the thought of 61,000 new twitter accounts just for the MGoBlog chat amuses me.
It's familiar and it was one of my favorite parts of watching games. Twitter opens it up to anyone with Twitter, takes away the anonymity of MGoBlogers, and bars a fairly significant number of MGoBloggers from participating.
CIL may be expensive, but it works well and I'd happily contribute to a fund for it, as I'm sure others would as well. You'd be able to keep the excess funds raised for next year's Live Blog expenses and then do a little funding whenever necessary.
really liked being part of the CIL moderator crew last year..was looking forward to it again..are you accepting any sponsorships to cover the fees?
Have you SEEN an Alabama football game? It would be like live-blogging grass growing.
I've never used the live chat and don't plan on doing so in the future either (I'd rather focus on the game than typing and following comments), so I'm obviously biased here, but I'd rather see that money go to improvements elsewhere on the site. I have no factual basis for this, but I'm willing to guess that the majority of users on this site would agree with me. It seems like only a small subset of mgoblog users actually participate in the live blogs. Maybe I'm wrong, but perhaps a poll would be in order to find out?
I keep one eye glued to the tv and one eye glued to the CIL feed during games.
It works flawlessly and is the best way I can think of for enjoying games (short of being there).
The only problem is the 9 hour skull splitting headache that can only be blunted by consuming dangerous quantities of alcohol.
keep CIL, hooves down on the twitster.
I really like the old chatroom. An IRC could probably work as well, and I guess twitter if you can get that to work, it would be more difficult to start up than the others (getting an account, etc) and it wouldn't be as easy to comment, not to mention no more voting, but if it works it's better than nothing. I would understand not using the old system if it's too pricey.
And give yourself a raise.
So I say no to twitter, IMHO. The new live tab on the mgoblog app sounds pretty intriguing though.
...but couldn't you get some michigan EECS major to write you code for your own version for less? i'd think some football nut would be pretty happy to do it in exchange for the CV line.
also, there are some other alternatives (and links to more) here: http://www.mediabistro.com/10000words/3-free-alternatives-to-coveritliv…
Not a bad idea. From what I can gather, however, the CIL interface is second to none (which is why they are rightfull money grabbing). It might take some time to duplicate something similarly effective.
Another point, I'm pretty surprised that CIL is charging so much. They have to know that they'll push away 90% of their business. This is the internet, afterall. Unless you're one of the big 4 (Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter), there's bound to be dozens of cheaper alternatives.
MGoBlog
The thing itself wouldn't be hard to build, but I have no idea how hard it is to get it to work well for a large number of users at once. It's one thing to build a chat-client type substance, and another to build something that can handle thousands(?) of commenters/viewers I would think.
That said, yeah, unleash the nerds. Would make a great CS term project for EECS 485.
Check out a site called SwiftRiver. It is still in its infancy/beta, but it will accumulate tweets by things like keywords (hashtags, etc.). It will catch every last one, unfortunately, and maybe that is overwhelming. On the positive side you can uprank/downrank "trusted" sources (it's been created to aggregate information from sources in places like 3rd world countries having disasters, elections, etc.) so if someone is annoying and you've downvoted to "untrustworthy" you can just ignore them. Worth a look, probably.
I don't livechat once the game starts, so it doesn't matter too much to me.
As long as Play By Play can tweet his journey to drunkenness I'll be happy.
The CIL live blog was awesome last year; it made watching the games without other Michigan fans around much more fun. Twitter could be ok, but there will be the problem of trolls and that you only get 140 characters to comment. For some of the stats updates that the moderators would put out, that may be a problem.
There is absolutely no reason to pay that amount to CIL or scribbler for a live chat. For that amount of money you could pay a programmer to integrate a live chat framework into your site. That is what I would would be looking at. I am sure there are Jquery / ajax libraries out there that give you decent head start in getting this going. It's not that difficult.
Can we find one that automatically blocks people who post "game over" when Michigan goes down 3-0 in the first quarter? Cause that would be great.
I'm unofficially giving you a sixth point for that.
2nd place: IRC.
Otherwise, I'm down with teh twitterz.
I loved the CIL last season. Not sure about the Twitter thing because I prefer not to see the avatar everytime someone posts something.
No offense, but I can do without seeing that Maize hardhat everytime Mispogon posted something. Also there is extra clutter with the time stamp, reply, retweet, favorites at the bottom.
I am also in favor of CiL. I live in Kalamazoo and I enjoy being able to talk with knowledgable Michigan fans on gameday.
Go with the twitters. It's better for those not in front of the computer. I'm usually in the stadium and would like to participate / share photos, etc.
I'm wondering why you get reception in the stadium and I don't.
Open threads on the board are still the way to go IMO. I will still utilize that feature of the board fully during game days unless I am otherwise occupied.
...but you don't need to bother with a 'bot. Just set up a hashtag and go from there.
Anyone "watching" the conversation can just search for the tag. Anyone can block anyone they don't want to hear from. Win/win.
But it would quickly get unbearable without moderation. Even though you can block people, when 100 people tweet "Touchdown!", do you really want to bother with blocking all of them. Or even worse, parsing through who to block and who not to.
Moderation is key, which is why CIL is pretty good.
Liveblog Conundrum is my yacht's name
The idea of creating your own system is feasible... perhaps starting from an existing open source project, or enlisting MGoProgrammers to help with the effort. The advantages of this are: you would never be subject to cost increases; you could make it look and act exactly how you wanted; and, you could tie it into existing MGoBlog user identities.
The downsides: you probably wouldn't get this up and running in time for the 2012 fall season; you will probably have problems with server capacity with nine thousand simultaneous AJAX-connected users; and you'd have to deal with all the issues of security and robustness that CIL has already got covered.
So with all that being said, perhaps Twitter is the easiest way to go for now. And yes, we'll probably all have to create separate Twitter identities specifically for this purpose.
I do see a potential business opportunity for anyone who wants to create a CIL clone that costs less than they do...
if we can avoid it.
As a very active twitter user, I have seen many events attempt to do something like this and fail miserably. As others have mentioned, twitter feeds and get clogged up with trolls and spam very quickly. I think something like this would be way harder for moderators to successfully control and still be able to enjoy themselves watching the game.
I would support a kickstarter campaign for the CIL. My second vote would be to figure out a way to embed an IRC channel. I've seen that used successfully for many live events and people didn't have a clue they were using IRC and didn't even know what IRC was
was the $840 for CIL for the month of november? or just for ohio? assuming the latter, and assuming that the traffic would be at that level for all games, you're looking at <mathissoveryveryhard> $10,920 </math> for 12 regular season games plus bowl. how many individual users logged into the chats last year? 61,000 clicks does not easily translate to individuals in my brain.
but the HTTV kickstarter raised, what, $50,000? i bet if you made the CIL cost a kickstarter -- especially if you included something like "guest moderation for one game" as a reward level, "guaranteed posting of all non-pornographic comments" as perhaps the highest reward level -- you could raise a significant portion of that $11k pretty quickly. i'd donate.
that or IRC.
i don't get twitter and kind of like it that way.
give the twitter thing a try. I swore off the liveblogs because of the douchey mods picking and choosing what to let through. God fobid anyone say something negative during a game. No real Michigan fan could sit through that Iowa game and not lose it a couple times.. then i got to get called a troll by some young punk!
Also people keep trying to calculate the cost of CIL based off 13 games..but it was used way more then that...basketball games..signing day..you need a permanent cheap solution that people enjoy and wont make you think of price when you whip it out.
/getoffmylawn
So I was going to suggest going back to haloscan, but apparently they were bought by a company called Echo in 2009. Echo, however, does offer live-blogging but doesn't list prices on it's site.
I'm sure Brian has already checked into it, but they can be found at www.aboutecho.com
Don't have much to contribute but if by chance a tally is being taken I'd vote against Twitter as well. Doesn't mean I wouldn't sign up for an account to participate but I'd rather not.
I primarily chimed in to state how much I do not understand the talk in this thread. Like, I could translate Russian or Mandarin Chinese easier than the terminology thrown around here. Computer lingo and programming is some sh*t I do not get. Props to those of you who do and especially those who help with this site in particular.
#1995FTW
does actually give you the ability to reply to someone and not hijack the entire chat or spend a ridiculous amount of time scanning for the @ symbol every time you walk away from the screen to pick up or drop off food.
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