For the past few years, it's become a bit of a tradition for me to have an Oscar party but it requires early planning and the sending out of e-invites in January. Unfortunately, you may recall that in January, the writer's were on strike and there was talk that the Oscars might be all-together canceled. I made the decision to not have a party and instead, looked for some other way to make the event more enjoyable (I find some bits of the show nearly unbearable).

I talked with the fellow Row Three contributors and passed on the idea of live blogging the Oscars and everyone was pretty keen about it. I'd never live blogged before but I knew that I didn't much like the idea of having to update the same post 400 times throughout the 3 hour show while keeping track of the discussion in the comment section of the site. This left me in a conundrum - how on earth am I going to manage this?

I looked around on-line for a solution and stumbled on Cover It Live. Looking over the site, it seemed too good to be true but lo-and-behold, it wasn't. You may have seen my live coverage of NV, mostly as a testing platform, and the event last night went off without a hitch. I had read that there had been problems with the CIL service during Macworld but that may have something to do with the fact that that sort of conference is full of tech savvy folks who probably knew what they were doing. I didn't expect the same problems with the Oscars but I did devised a backup plan just in case of disaster.

The event turned from a 'live blog' to nearly a 'live chat' but either way you cut it, it went very, very smoothly and all because of a little Canadian company. I think it's particularly notable to note that our coverage was indeed live and instantly interactive whereas most of the other big sites 'live blogging' the event resorted to traditional methods and therefore lacked true audience interaction.

I think this is a positive notch in my belt.

Update: I think it's worth noting that the Film Junk crew used my back-up plan.