Live Coverage of Scientific Conferences Using Web Technologies

A number of platforms are potentially suitable for live coverage of conferences. The most common ones are compared in Supplementary Table S1, and include dedicated services such as CoverItLive (http://www.coveritlive.com/) or ScribbleLive (http://www.scribblelive.com) as well as other more general platforms such as wikis, blogs, Twitter (http://www.twitter.com), FriendFeed (http://www.friendfeed.com) or the upcoming Google Wave (http://wave.google.com). Blogs have been used for a long time to report and reflect on conference talks. Blog posts usually have only one author and are posted after the talk. In contrast, recently emerging services such as Twitter and FriendFeed provide the opportunity for instant coverage of the conference from many angles, broadcast to a world-wide audience.