Live-Blogging City Hall

Tuesday, April 05, 2005, at 03:59PM

By Eric Richardson

This afternoon I attended a City Council Budget & Finance Committee Meeting, and live-blogged it. You can find both my live-blog and my post-meeting summary over at blogdowntown. I thought I'd come over here, though, to post my comments on the whole idea of live-blogging.

Starting with the tech: I brought my laptop, bluetooth adaptor, and cell phone. Cingular's EDGE network gave me connectivity with 1000ms ping times and fairly low packet loss. Both phone and laptop lasted through two straight hours of connectivity, though the phone battery was about done afterward.

I basically blogged the contents of the meeting raw as it happened, filtering a little but on the whole recording wholesale what I found interesting. I was IM'ing with Alan during the meeting, and noted that I was probably getting a little too in detail. He agreed, and said looking back a lot of the specifics probably wouldn't be that important. To me, though, it seemed best to record everything and then summarize it later. My summary's probably still too in depth, but oh well.

All in all a fascinating experience. I was amazed at how much I could type during a two-hour meeting.

I wouldn't doubt that this was the first live-blogging ever to be done from inside Los Angeles' City Hall. I doubt that will be recorded in the record books anywhere, but I figure that more times I say it the more google will pick it up.