My business partners and I have been using Cover it Live software to run our live racing chat on NascarView.com since the season started and I have to say we really like it a lot. Not only does the software allow for visitors to chat with one another in real time during the races, but it also gives you the ability to incorporate Twitter into your live events.
If you want to see this software in action, checkout our Live Racing Chat during the Nascar Cup series races. I got this message today from Cover it Live and thought that it was worth sharing, apparently their software is growing in popularity!
Last year at this time we were sending these updates to around 2,000 registered users of CiL. Today, it’s over 25,000 including everyone from regional television stations, to niche bloggers to global media companies. Thank you for your continued support and feedback.
Some new features have been rolled out over the past month so I thought I would point them out to those of you who are interested:
Panelists no longer require CiL accounts: Many of you have ‘one-time guests’ on your events and found it cumbersome to have them register with CoveritLive. This has been removed and they now have the option of signing in as ‘Guests’ if they do not want to register with us. We still require this for Producers because it provides more security for you given all the things we allow Producers to do during an event.
The limit on Producers and Panelists has been raised from 10 to 25: A small portion of users wanted a few more contributors so we raised the limit to well beyond what most people asked for.
The limit on unmoderated (what we call ‘Always Allow’) readers has been raised from 10 to 25: Same reason as above. Moving to a completely open environment might sound like a good idea…but we need to be very careful with the development of that product feature so you don’t all spend your time ‘whacking’ unwanted ‘contributors’. More on that in the coming months.
Add contributors on the fly: by clicking on the ‘Always Allow’ icon during an event, you can instantly turn a reader into a Panelist or Producer.
The Scoreboard: A simple but effective way to keep an updated score for your readers at the bottom of your Viewer Window. Run as many as you like to keep them up to date on any number of events. There are options for classic Team v. Team games or Race/Standings where you need to show readers a ranking. Use it and no reader will come in and ask, "What’s the score?" again.
The News Flash: In the same place as the Scoreboard feature in the Console. This lets you create important entries that display at the bottom of the Viewer Window and stay where your readers can always see them.
RSS Feeds: RSS feeds aren’t the most exciting things in the world but with a little creativity, you can use them to provide up to the second listings of your live events, or pull your CiL content onto a television screen or set up an ‘auto-Tweet’ every time you launch a new event or put your content into another format for SEO benefits.
We offer three feeds: An Event feed with all the content from a specific event; a Writer feed which provides a list of all upcoming, live and completed events; and, an Enterprise feed which is like the Writer feed except it provides a listing of all events from all writers included in your Enterprise account. There are hundreds of good third party RSS applications that can do all kinds of interesting things with these feeds. We had one that ran a ticker along a blog page with all the content from a live event. That was pretty cool.‘Smart’ Autoscroll: Readers can now scroll up to read earlier entries without having to toggle the autoscroll button. The autoscroll will activate when they are reading current content and leave them alone if they are reading older content.
Sports Pack in Media Library: To highlight the usefulness of the Media Library, we populated it with some sports sounds (buzzers, whistles) and images (yellow card, baseball umpires) so all of you could see that with a little effort, you could put some commonly used items in there for your own use. Think about your team’s fight song or stock images you would want at your fingertips.
New investor and advisor: We are very pleased to now have Dan Gould as an investor in our company. Dan is VP, Technology at Fox Interactive Media (the parent company of MySpace, FAN, IGN, and FoxSports.com). He previously founded Corridor, the first modern social network, and Newroo, which was acquired by News Corp.
Thank you all again for your support and feedback. Look forward to hearing from many of you soon.
Thank you.
Keith McSpurren
President, CoveritLive
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Questions or Comments?