Flixwagon, one of the companies offering the ability to broadcast live on the internet from your mobile phone, has added the feature I’ve been wanting: a widget-player you can put on your blog or web site so people there can catch your live broadcasts. Now, you have to put up a link to sites like Flixwagon’s and Qik’s and embed your video in your blog after it’s over.
Between this and Twitter, it begins to turn blogs live. Of course, we often live-blog events. But now we can also have a live flow of text and video from anywhere, anytime.
I’ve written about the challenges and opportunities live broadcast from anywhere brings to news. It’s also interesting to see the impact this will have on blogs. I can’t watch 10 bloggers at once. How can I know who’s live doing what where right now? It’s another need for live search — or call it live discovery. It makes me think I want an alert service — but then, the last thing I want is a bunch of those irritating tweets that tell me that so-and-so (you know who you are) is broadcasting live. I want context: the live TV Guide. But that’s hard, too: As I’m broadcasting, how can I tell you what I’m broadcasting? If someone else watches and alerts others to the fact that I actually have something interesting to say, then that’s necessarily syncopated; it’s not live.
All that aside, I’m glad to see Flixwagon’s widget and I look forward to seeing how YouTube handles live.
