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Reporters and bloggers at MLive have tested a few different ways of covering live events (e.g. football games, press conferences) using our blogging software.

Here’s a couple of the ideas we’ve used:

• Write a new entry in a blog every time you have a new item to post (problematic because of the high number or RSS sends)
• Continually update the same entry (problematic because the old entry won’t send out updates to RSS subscribers)
• Twitter badge updates (my favorite, but doesn’t integrate with our blog software and most reporters reply with “you want me to what?”)
• Cover It Live - Looks snazzy, but I don’t know much about it.

Upon first glance, CoverItLive may be the best option yet (I say without doing too much research)!

Says Smashing Magazine:

CoveritLive is a service which allows you to blog in real-time. Your commentary publishes in real time like an instant message. You can drop polls, videos, pictures, ads and audio clips. Comments and questions from your readers instantly appear but you can control what gets published.

Our Wolverines (University of Michigan) blogger Chris Burke used CiL to cover the Senior Bowl on the NFL Network. The liveblog shows reader comments that Burke chose to publish and also it has a nice color-coding scheme so users can easily track who is talking.

How much does it cost?

How about FREE!

For now, anyway.

It sounds like CiL has plans to one day serve ads through this model and create some revenue for itself, which could be problematic for most online news orgs. But this isn’t a bad idea for a niche startup. I’m predicting the online news world will see a huge bump in entrepreneurs marketing to the journalism world this year.

UPDATE: I got an email from CoveritLive that had an interesting tidbit about expanding the reach of your liveblog. When you use CiL, they give you a script that you can embed on your page which creates an iframe. That’s where the liveblog appears. Well, you can also embed that script on many pages - pretty cool, huh? That means you can show off your chat in multiple places, maybe even a chat blog and also on other blogs on your site.

Says Keith McSpurren of CiS:

The Viewer Window can sit on an unlimited number of sites at once effectively syndicating the event to tens of thousands of readers who can all experience it the same way.

Syndication makes the blogosphere go round.

What do you think about CoveritLive? Have you used it? What have been your experiences with Liveblogging?