Our Live Blog experiment yesterday was an interesting one. Some of us at startribune.com had been talking for a while about when to try out the software and we figured an afternoon baseball game, when a lot of people wouldn’t be able to watch on TV, would be a good time to give it a try. More than 5,000 people — “unique visitors” is the web term — stopped by during the game and I want to thank those of you who joined in or read along. Often, there were more than 400 people at a time on the blog.

If you want to take a look at how it went, you can find our chatter by clicking here. If you weren’t watching along with us yesterday, take note of the “instant polls” that we ran throughout the game. According to a majority of those who weighed in, Thursday’s game was, in fact, over before it was over — if you scroll down to the final question. I was intrigued by how many of you said that you’re planning to take in a game on the road this season — and if someone wants to file a guest post from Colorado next weekend, I’d be thrilled to have it.

One improvement we’ll try to make next time is to put a box score and game log on the screen.

For the record, you sent in 946 messages during the LiveBlog — and almost 60 percent of them were published. The blog is a moderated forum, so all messages are looked at before being posted. I tried to keep discussion moving and not go over the same ground again and again and again. Also, some comments were simply outdated by the time I saw them and posting them on could have been confusing. It’s a little bit like talk radio, or buying concert tickets on the web, in the sense that not everyone gets through all the time.

Many of your comments were thoughtful, some of them made me (and people in the office looking over my shoulder) crack up. A few were web gems. Again, thanks for hanging with us yesterday. According to one of theinstant polls, a vast majority said they’d do it again.

Live blogging has a lot of applications and we’ll figure out how to make best use of them. I’m interested is hearing your thoughts, too.

I’ve gotta go ice my typing fingers now.

other people are here too

This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 7:00 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.