Live blogging for breaking news - The iPhone case

One of the most prominent examples of how Web 2.0 technology can impact PR is the announcement of Apple's iPhone back in January. Apple announced the iPhone during CEO Steve Jobs' keynote speech at the 2007 MacWorld conference.  Popular technology blogs, such as Engadget and TUAW-The Unofficial Apple Weblog, were among the first to break the story by having bloggers produce live coverage using laptops from the auditorium.  The live coverage consisted of short quotes and paraphrases from the speech and photos of the presentation visuals posted and updated continually on a Web page, each update time-stamped. Readers could access the live coverage by continually clicking 'refresh' on their Web browsers to view the updates on the Web page in real time.  The timely detail offered by these technology bloggers was unmatched by mainstream cable news outlets MSNBC and CNN Headline News.  The blog posts received tremendous Web traffic, driven in large part by members of the Digg.com community.

Experience live blogging in action. Monday, June 11 at 1:00pm Eastern, Steve Jobs will be giving the keynote at the WorldWide Developers Conference.  Take at look at Engadget's live coverage as it unfolds.  Just to give you an idea of how much buzz this has generated online already, a Google search for 'WWDC predictions' yielded 303,000 results.

To read more about Apple's iPhone announcement as a test case, check out this article:
Grande, C. (2007, January 29). iPhone presents test case for media buyers. Financial Times.