Officially Lucky

Jacqui and I (and others at Ars Technica) have done the live blogging thing enough to know that orchestrating the whole affair can be a challenge with only two people in attendance. Unlike the mega-sites Engadget and Gizmodo who can afford and finagle up to four people to sit in the press area, take photos, transfer them, format and upload them, manage the live blogging itself, et cetera.

When we go to an event like WWDC, MacWorld, or TechCrunch40, we generally only have two people in the keynote (if we’re lucky). Most of the time there is only a single reporter who has to manage the posting, photography, and associated formatting/uploading of those photos. We also maintain an IRC chat room for live updates as well. In many cases, there is poor to non-existent internet access in these conference halls to boot and you’re doing all your work over an unreliable EDGE or EVDO data plan connection (like everyone else in the hall).

So in the case of a single person in attendance, we organize a remote support team to help ease the pain. The person in the hall will typically send the updates, in real time to either IRC or IM. It usually ends up being over IM because our IRC server always fills to capacity (1000+ users) during these announcements. The person on the other end of the IM session relays those updates to IRC and perhaps even transcribes them, in reverse chronological order to a post on the front page of Ars. This same reporter is also responsible for snapping photos during lulls in the announcements, formatting them en masse, uploading them into our CMS system and providing URLs to those images to the person making updates.

With two people in attendance, the job gets a bit easier. In this case, one person will typically get online to their cell data connection, and re-share that connection to their partner, either over WiFi or Ethernet. One person will exclusively transcribe the live happenings to a post on the front page of Ars, and the second person types directly into IRC (if possible) or to someone who is in IRC, via IM. The duties for snapping and uploading photos is a somewhat shared duty in this instance.

I think what’s obvious here is the issue of taking photos, importing them to iPhoto / Image Capture (plugging in the USB cable, waiting for the OS, download, et cetera), exporting to a small size, uploading to the CMS, and getting those images inserted into a post. These are actions all on top of the normally hectic job of transcribing a fast-moving, energy filled keynote / event.

So, I’ve been thinking about ways to eliminate the hassle of “the photo issue.” Since we do shoot with a Canon DSLR, there are a few hacked together solutions shooting in tethered mode and various Canon utility programs, Lightroom watch folders, etc. That stuff is just too complex, almost as complex as the original issue.

Then I heard about a memory card for a camera that has a built-in WiFi chip. At first I was excited, but then dismayed because it turned out the be an SD card. We do have a camera with an SD slot, but it isn’t the DSLR. I checked out this product’s site regardless and it turns out that there is a CompactFlash adapter. Instant excitation!

The product is called the Eye-Fi Wireless Camera Memory and it is a 2GB SD Card that can be pre-configured the auto-attach to a wireless network and access a variety of photo sharing services, including Flickr. Fantastic! In essence, what happens is that if this camera and card come within range of a usable WiFi network, it will unload all previously un-uploaded pictures directly to Flickr. FANTASTIC!

So my idea is this:

I’ve ordered the Eye-Fi card and CF adapter and will use it in our Canon DSLR. During a conference at least one person will be sharing their cell phone connection over a private, encrypted WiFi connection to one or both the second person in the hall and the Eye-Fi card in the camera. As photos are taken (at the lowest possible resolution for saving/uploading speed, which is still pretty high) they will be automatically streamed to a Flickr account for use in the live blogger’s posts. No uploading to CMS. No reformatting (Flickr does this for you!). Just pure unadulterated live blogging and photo snapping.

I’ll be receiving the Eye-Fi next week, so I’ll see just how well it works in this scenario and report back to the site. For now, check out this short video by Chris Pirillo showing, in a basic sense, how it works: