Channel 9 Live at PDC10 - How Did We Do?

Honestly, it was the best online coverage of any event that ive seen.

if i was to provide any critisism is would be for the inline twitter client and q&a that didnt seem to work, but that was just a minor bug imo (although probably significant)

One thing you could revise though is how questions get from twitter to the interviewers. if i understand things correctly, someone is reading the twitter feed and copy-pasting the questions to another window for the interviewers to see.

i think that system could be a little more refined, perhaps an app where the twitter guy puts upp the questions that people have asked and allows user to vote on them (perhaps by RT:ing or clicking something in the viewer app) This would also reduce the risk of questions getting lost. it would also provide a more instant feedback for viewers posting questions, you'd see that your question was infact recived. Another neat thing would be if it was a more ordered way to follow up questions that was previously asked.

Perhaps the twitter moderator(s) could have a more active role as intermediaries between the interviewer and the audience? more sort of like a screener for a calls on a radio show

 -edit-

One possible reason for the lack of questions on c9 live [dont think that applies to me though ] might be that the c9live sessions had to compete with the actual sessions this year. Not that im complaining though, having the sessions live is geat, but that also ment that you had to choose betweening watching those and watcing c9live. im not sure how to solve that though..

@aL_:I just wish that there had been more questions actually answered. I was kind of disappointed by that. It's great to hear some of the chit chat, but a lot of it was just rehashing what we already know.

@kettch specifically on c9live i agree, (im looking at you hanselman ) but the overall pdc coverage was really awsome i must say

I am finding c9 more and more over produced.  You guys said access was great, and I tried it and found it really hard to use and understand.  The dropping of windows mobile is very confusing - all this computing power in a phone, why can't it run .net and c#? - C9 has not explained it.

I didn't get to see any live coverage this year, unfortunetely.  However, I will say that the set up with the channels and everything looked awesome.  Too bad I didn't get to experience it beyond just checking it out.  Also, I'm in the middle of a move and haven't got internet access yet, so I haven't been able to watch any pre-recorded stuff yet either.    Soon.

@nic: I created a Twitter account because none of the questions I submitted in the Q&A panel got asked. The twitter feed got spammed with other messages or stupid questions as "What if Azure becomes Skynet?". In the end, my questions still don't have an answer.

@nic: On day 1 the player was confusing.  The video feed didn't play.  Ever visit to the root meant steve balmer's keynote video started playing.  Figuring out what was possible to play LIVE was difficult.  It seemed like the sessions where the play button showed up were the ones but 1/2 the time they didn't play.

I didn't attend day 2.

The schedules put into Outlook for various sessions had a link to jump straight to the session.  At first that didn't work and steve balmer's keynote always came up.  There was some discussion about viewing in the silverlight player versus an alternative.  It was not readily apparent how to switch players.

Once I learned how the SL interface worked, it was the best online conference I've seen. I think the Q&A wasn't used much because most of us were watching while working (which made the "jump back 15 seconds" feature very nice).

As far as the C9 content, it was fine but I was more interested in the sessions than the informal interviews.

@nic:Where the interviewers watching the live question/twitter feed, or did you have somebody picking out relevant questions and throwing them up on the screen?

@nic: not e-mail but a working q&a panel would have been better.

You can find my twitter link in my profile.

Well this is about the site during the live event not the Ch9/content portion which was all very well done and presented so not much to say there.

After the initial hickup with the web page making live view of the keynote complicated it was mostly smooth. I have a decent network so I suspect the few times where the playback was interrupted and restarted (sometimes from earlier position) were problems on the other end. Quite often the stream also went to lower quality.

Biggest issues (probably nothing new I've seen few other mention same):

Readability of demos when the server can't push the full quality.

Twitter was the chosen live chat mechanism requiring registration at 3rd party site and it barely worked in IE8 (I tried 2 times sending 2 messages in a row and it only sent the first each time). The dedicated Q&A appears to have answers now but at the time of the event it didn't really say whether message was received etc or when/if they'd be answered - quite poor, confusing experience unless one happened to immediately figure what it was about.

So doing the Channel 9 live question stuff through some better mechanism than Twitter would have been nice. Have those questions in the Q&A and a text explaining that in some sessions (ch9) the Q&A is going live and in others it's answered later and you'd have to check back or enter your email to get the answer or something.

@zippy *zing recived* but you should note that i also asked a whole bunch of questions that never got on the show too

your comment releates a little to my feedback though, it would be great if there was some feedback to the user that your question has been seen.
That way you could also present feedback as to why a question is not accepted (its about dates for example) and perhaps reduce double posting of questions by putting a stream bookmark at the time where the question is answered

you could even have a commenting system on questions, lets say someone asks an obscure question about some class deep in the framework, the moderator could mark the question as "unclear" and that would show up on the question in the player, then either the poster or someone else could post a comment on the question, clarifying it. you could even do a wiki-style editing on [unanswered]questions, allthough that might be overkill.

That kind of stuff is probably outside whats feasable with twitter hashtags though, but you could still listen to the twitter feed and take questions from there as well as from the player app it self

Having the questions "in" the app would present other oppertunities for other awsomeness as well, having stream bookmarks for questions would make browsing the 16 hour offline feed much easier. you'd also have the unanswered questions recorded so it'd be easier to go back and do followup interviews later

actually a "question-posting-app" would be great for c9 in general tina and others often post threads taking questions, but i think they are often lost in the general c9 forum chatter, having that in a separate place would be great