One of the frequent features of this site is the Liveblog. Just this week, we've had active liveblogging of the Sonia Sotomayor hearings and of the various House healthcare markup sessions. Liveblogging both creates a record of an ongoing event and helps Kossacks communicate with each other about an event as it's happening.
Over the years, the practice of liveblogging has developed on dKos. Liveblogs require multiple diaries, or they quickly become ungainly. And in the past, this would require frantic, coordinated recomends and unrecommends to push the active liveblog onto the recommend list, and take the inactive liveblogs off of it. To deal with these problems, Kossacks have adopted the Mothership system. But we can do better.
Motherships attempt to take advantage of the existing diary infrastructure on dKos. And they work OK. But they are still, in effect, a workaround. Setting up a Mothership takes time. Setting up a Child Diary (or Shuttlecraft, as some have been calling them) takes time. And both take babysitting. This is a particular issue for the Mothership: the author of the Mothership needs to be present to update her diary throughout the liveblog or the whole system falls apart.
We can do better than this. The Mothership system is probably close to the best way to handle liveblogging using the current dKos infrastructure. But we ought to be able to create liveblog-specific infrastructure that will handle liveblogging more effectively and efficiently than standard dKos diaries.
This diary, then, is an infrastructural metableg for our administrators and an invitation to a brainstorming session on the part of other Kossacks.
What would be the best liveblogging infrastructure for dKos to build? What would an effective liveblogging diary template look like? Please share your thoughts and ideas.
UPDATE: Thanks, Rescue Rangers, for putting this on the frontpage last night!