Locus Awards Live

[kevin_standlee]

I'll be acting as one of the "studio moderators" for the live coverage of the Locus Awards this afternoon at 2 PM Pacific Daylight Time. I'm not in Seattle; I'm just helping manage the CoverItLive coverage.

The last time I pointed people at a CoverItLive event (the Hugo Award Nomination announcements), at least one person looked at the page in question, said (approximately), "I didn't click on it because it looked like some sort of video streaming thing." CiL is not a audio/video streaming thing (although you can put such things into a CiL event). At its simplest, CiL is an online text chat session, and it's not a bandwidth hog as far as I can tell. The Hugo Awards coverage later this year is likely to use the same technology, so if you're thinking of watching the Hugo results come in live but can't get to Reno for Worldcon, you might want to watch the Locus Awards coverage this afternoon to get an idea as to how the live-chat technology we're using works.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Oy. Posting the Hugo nominees on Usenet and Genie was complicated enough, back in the day.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, but nowadays, if you don't have the results the moment they're announced, people yell at you. One good thing about CiL is that if you just want to watch, you can do that without even having to refresh your screen. The results just roll up on the screen as they're announced.

I'm a little concerned about the Hugo results and updating TheHugoAwards.org immediately following the ceremony in Reno, because I have to be hosting Match Game SF right after the Hugos, and can't spend a bunch of time getting the Hugo posting nicely formatted for the web site. And if I don't do it, it probably won't happen for an hour or two thereafter, which will cause people to criticize us for being so slow. Ideally, I expect people think the web site should be updated 1 second after the last winner is announced, but no sooner, of course.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Assuming you won't have advance access to the winners: Do the formatting with placeholder winners (last year's, or obviously imaginary ones) before the con. Then do one of the following, depending on what combination of convenience and security works best:

1) Give the formatted file to the Hugo administrator, have them plug in the actual winners after the voting closes, and have them give the file back to you after the ceremony, and then you'll require a minimum of time to upload the file.

2) Or, if your time is even more limited, and the administrator's not so much, give them the formatted file and the keys to the website and have them upload it.

3) Or, if the administrator's availability is more limited and yours a little less so, you needn't involve the administrator at all: do the formatting with placeholders beforehand, and then type in the winners right after the ceremony. That way you'll have to spend the time typing it in, but not the time formatting.

This is approximately what Mark Olson and I invented for the newsletter in '96 and has been done in subsequent years. He gave me the layout format for the newsletter, I plugged in the Hugo winners pre-con, and then I gave him the master under embargo just before the ceremony, and he spent the ceremony time running it off, so it was ready to hand out to attendees as they left the hall.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm going to do some of that. (One of the Hugo Administrators is on the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee and has access to THA.org, but her time is likely to be as limited as mine post-ceremony.) I'll create the blank and put the winners into it as I can. The challenge is that I'll be also managing the online live coverage, and while some people think the Hugo ceremony is too slow, it's blazingly fast when you're trying to keep up with the live coverage and also drop winner names into the winner announcement. But I'll manage.

Ever since being involved with a technical glitch on the web site a few years ago (SF AwardsWatch posted the nominees a few hours earlier than when they were formally announced due to a "post at X time" direction to the software not working properly, which is not quite as bad as posting the winners early, but still bad), I've been cut off from embargoed Hugo announcements.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

My scenarios don't require your being privileged under embargo ... though it's a shame about that glitch; depending on the reason for a mistake, the person who made it might be the most, or might be the least, likely person to make the same mistake again.

The main point is, which you surely already know, is that there's all kinds of prep work for something like this which can be done before the necessary information arrives, where one might think that you can't do any of it without that information.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

The unfortunate lesson learned by us was that the post-at-future-date/time feature doesn't always work as a delayed post, and sometimes will generate cross-links (to, say, Twitter, Facebook, and LiveJournal) as soon as you hit Publish even if you told the software to not do so until, say, 12:01 AM the next morning.

Although I still use the delay-publish feature now and then, I don't risk it with anything that would cause a fuss if posted early. I've mainly used it when we've had multiple pieces of information about Westercon to publish and I haven't wanted to make three posts in five minutes but instead spread them out over three days. (Convention news has tended to come to me in spurts, coinciding with committee meetings.)

[crookedfeet.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this.