Bloggers Give Us Front Row Seats at MacWorld 2008

While some of the public buzzed Tuesday about the start of new American Idol auditions, many of us in tech were buzzing about MacWorld 2008. This is the annual conference in Northern California hosted by Apple where last year they unveiled the new iPhone. This year, rumors were already circulating about a new ultra-thin laptop that would be showcased.

As Steve Jobs took the stage at 9 am to deliver the keynote address, it wasn’t just the lucky few that had piled into the sold out expo in San Francisco’s Moscone Center that anxiously tuned in. Thanks to the power of real-time blogging, the live RSS feed on Gizmodo.com broadcasted the events.

Gizmodo bloggers Jason Chen and B. Lam kept us up to the minute–literally. The timestamps of their day-long posts are sometimes not even a minute apart.

For example:

10:19 am: Chen reports on the new MacBook Air as the thinness of the CPU is announced.

10:21 am: Chen shares some of the new features, such as the flip-down door, head phone jack, and WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities.

10:21 am: Another blogger, B. Lam, posts live screen shots of the PowerPoint presentation, complete with shadows of people’s heads that are blocking his view of the bottom of the screen.

10:22 am: Chen explains how the new optical drive will work to play movies, install software, and remotely play CDs and DVDs, even though there is no CD/DVD drive.

10:22 am: B. Lam posts the next set of PowerPoint slides.

These sorts of posts go on well into the afternoon. You could easily follow along from the comfort of your desk. Even though the screen shots were being captured from within the audience, they were sophisticated and watermarked with Gizmodo branding.

As I sat at work today, I heard people yelling over cubicle walls as the play-by-play progression of the expo unfolded. It was as if they were listening to the Super Bowl on the radio. They were completely enthralled. I wondered, what was spurring on the buzz: the cool new technology or the fact that the announcement was being transmitted moment by moment by people sitting in the audience?

Maybe it was the allure of rogue expo-goers who were posting live footage from the secret, elite gathering. Apple didn’t set up a live feed, so perhaps we felt like we were getting something before the rest of the public. After all, the press wouldn’t get this story up until the end of the expo, so those of us watching from our home computers were on the cutting edge. As of Tuesday evening, there are over 431 diggs on the live blog.

The emergence and prevalence of blogs has changed the way we consume news, and the informality of the medium allows people to attend events and stream content, both text and photos, in an ad hoc manner. I’m thrilled to see this evolution and can’t wait to see where bloggers give me real-time access to next.

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