Macworld Expo 2008 Keynote Live Coverage: Web, SMS, iPhone
With Macworld San Francisco Expo less than a week away, MacRumors is gearing up to travel to San Francisco to cover the event with our traditional MacRumorsLive keynote coverage as well as expanded floor coverage at http://www.macrumors.com/mwsf/.
Context & Ripple Effects
The eve-of-keynote ritual is now a two-site affair: alongside the rumor-cycle pieces that precede every Expo, such as Think Secret's earlier eve-of-Expo rumor recap, the liveblogs themselves have become part of the show. Engadget set that template with its live keynote coverage from Macworld 2006, and MacRumors' announcement that MacRumorsLive returns for 2008 — plus expanded floor coverage on a dedicated mwsf site — shows the format hardening into an expected service rather than an experiment.
What has changed since 2006 is the audience device mix: the iPhone's first year put thousands of browsers and SMS clients into one hall at once, a load profile that already knocked out dozens of Wi-Fi access points at Duke University in July 2007.
First-order effects
- MacRumors readers get real-time keynote text, photos, and floor reporting from San Francisco next week, while competing outlets like Engadget run their own parallel liveblogs — speed of posting becomes the differentiator between otherwise identical source material.
Second-order effects
- Venue networks face a stress test before the keynote even starts: if Moscone West's Wi-Fi behaves like Duke's did under iPhone load in 2007, livebloggers will lean harder on SMS-based dispatch, which is why MacRumors is explicitly listing SMS alongside web coverage.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the keynote becomes a distributed broadcast event — Apple supplies the stage, but the de facto distribution layer is a handful of fan sites racing each other in text, setting up liveblogging as table stakes for any tech-media outlet covering a major launch.
The trend: Tech keynotes are shifting from press-conference events to competitive real-time coverage contests among enthusiast sites, with the audience's own devices shaping how those reports get filed.