Actually, Giz did go down for me at least once.

While it's admirable that Giz managed to beat out everybody for this coverage, it would be nice if they put this much effort into the rest of their stories. I find that I visit Giz the most during Macworld, not because I'm most interested in Apple products, but simply because it's the time that Giz puts the most effort in to cover everything in detail, accurately and quickly. It's unfortunate that for the rest of the 90% of the year we have to deal with (sometimes) ridiculously old news, poorly written articles, unsubstantial rumours and pretty idiotic pranks while being peppered with perfect Mac news in between.

Just a disappointing use of their journalistic reach, hopefully it will get better this year.

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Macrumors was faster with images, and Arstechnica was faster with the liveblogging. Though, it was an IRC chat. 2000+ users!

@gabrielradic: really? Nobody else wrote to us about it so I think it's an isolated case. The usual industry pundits watched us (and the competition) closely to see who failed and who didn't, as we kept up with the day with a mindblowing traffic rate. To be honest, looking at the stats I thought we were going to bite the dust, but the site and the liveblog didn't even blink and took it all, even while we were serving images like crazy in the keynote.

@politik:

Yet another reason why IRC will never die!

Seriously, if it wasn't for IRC, I probably would have gotten laid a lot more in high school.

I didn't care for all the Apple news but thats because I'm not crazy about their products. Giz did however keep the info coming in a timely manner w/pics most of the time. Good job guys. O.K. thats your prize now get back to work.

I had Gizmodo, the "closest competitor" and Macrumors open and I feel Macrumors was doing it best.

The main reason is that the Macrumors live coverage updated automatically with no need to refresh, as a side effect presumably helping with server stress. A refresh on Gizmodo could take a considerable time, negating any speed advantage that probably existed on the "blogging end" of the coverage.

I started out looking at Gizmodo, Engadget and TUAW, and shut the latter two down 10 minutes into the keynote, because Giz was doing so much better. Job well done, guys.

Agree with Contaminator. I had both Gizmodo and Macrumors opened before the show started and once things got rolling I stuck with Macrumors. The continuous update was killer. Sorry Giz...I did come back and read you after it was over.

Watch out, you could get injured patting yourself on the back so vigorously...

Now aren't you glad some kid wasn't pointing a remote at your mac to activate front row every 5 seconds while you were blogging the event? Or would you have considered that to be "fightin the good fight"? ;-)

I turned off my phone and net and waited for the spoiler-free video :)

I would like to know how you guys manage to get the text and photos up so quick. I mean, do you guys even have a chance to actually watch the damn show?

Good Job guys! I was hitting the refresh button every minute or so. I was amazed at your speed. keep up the good work

Macrumors was faster, and more convenient. But you were close second.

I'll second or third whatever that macrumors was the best for the live blog as well. Giz you guys need to go auto refresh like they do. There site is lame but the live blogging over there actually is pretty efficient.

Macrumors wasn't faster or more convenient. My buddy and I had both going and Gizmodo was clearly the winner, especially with the pics. The only positive on Macrumors side was the auto-refresh.

We simultaneously were watching the live video feed and refreshing the blogs, and it was sickly at times how quick the stuff got up here on Gizmodo. Now I'm sure that video was slightly delayed, but not that much...

HOLY SHIT! MACRUMORS WAS A FEW SECONDS FASTER?!!? Who cares? Honestly. They both gave good coverage, and it boils down to who you're more of a royal reader to. Giz all day, everyday.

yea it's not like you have to worry about giz's servers crashing because you have too Manu people reading it. That would never be a problem...

@reality.check: What live video feed?

@color_guru:
There were video feeds from different sources at the show on usteam.tv and justin.tv

Some only had audio but some where showing video to.

One of the channels justin.tv was broadcasting the audio of the keynote and had the Giz live blog in the video player. Worked great.

You guys did a great job as far as I am concerned. I refreshed your page and the cnet page. cnet had two problems. 1st it would come back with an error page about 50% of the time. 2nd and equally annoying, it would deliver two pages: a live page and then alternately an older page. I loved the product announcements at MacWorld, my favorite was the MacBook Air. I just love it!

I think that Gizmodo's live coverage was good, but refreshing the page took more or less 8 secconds. Although the MacRumors page said not to refresh it manually, doing it only took 1 or 2 secconds, I think that was the main problem. Gizmodo went down 2 times for me, a connection reset.

Pretty sure macrumors won this one. I couldn't bear to keep refreshing, which would often take pretty long to load.

wait, you guys use wordpress???

I thought this was Blogsmith.

What type of commenting system do you use? (its awesome)

Giz may not have gone down and ma have uploaded things fast, but refresh times made me feel like I was on an old 14.4 kbps modem!

MacRumors was faster with both images and news.

I loaded up several sites. After about 5 minutes in, Mac Rumors was the only one that was still open because it worked and was fast. I also liked that I didn't have to keep mashing refresh over and over.

To be honest, I didn't open Giz's live blog... simply because I knew I'd have to keep refreshing my browser. I might have to remember your live blogging for the developers conference keynote.

I had Giz, TUAW and Macrumors open, and while the Giz pics were WAY better, the constant refreshing was a DRAG. Macroumors won out in the end for me. A few seconds of time advantage isn't worth much if I have to babysit the refresh button the whole time. Watching updates magically appear on the Macrumors was definitely the way to go. I prefer the Giz coverage, but in this case convenience definitely trumps a few seconds of time.

@Shikestarr: I think I can make images smaller next time. More compression. Especially once we start dumping in the product shots.

I know other sites did more traffic than we did, but I'm happy with what we did this time and the next.

Remember, we used to crash 20 minutes in every time.

Thanks for sticking with us through the rougher times, ladies and dude. You keep reading, we'll keep doing what we can to make this a better blog.

Yeah you did better than engadget and with pictures. (and no TVBGone :) )

Arstechnica was faster on text, but Giz had a lot more pictures.

I had the odd server error and the pictures often didn't turn up but no real problems. Engadget failed totally for me about half way in.

For those using FireFox and complaining about reloading - look for ReloadEvery - it automatically reloads the page at an interval you select.

Engadget needs to step their game up. I still have no idea why that site is so popular with its bad interface and their seemingly lazy attitude towards its competitors.

Engadget definitely crapped out more for me than Giz, though Giz did crap out twice... of course, that may have just been my crap computer at work trying to put up with Engadget at the same time, or my annoying need to spam the refresh button. Either way, I vote Gizmodo # 1, especially for pictures. (they were pretty).

I liked Macrumours for their auto refresh. Giz was definitely the faster with pics though.

And yeah Giz went down once for me too. Not for very long, but I got an error non the less.

@Jesus Diaz: I think you're being overly optimistic. On several occasions, "The Giz" crapped out on me. For me, the Macrumor feed was consistently the fastest and most reliable. The quality and accuracy on all fronts was certainly acceptable, and there are no complaints here. Is there room for improvement? Um, yeah. Perhaps in the future, Gizmodo can consider implementing a decent auto-updating AJAX front-end for the liveblogs. Doing so, would improve the reader experience. Not only would it be faster, but you could significantly reduce the bandwidth requirements. I think you'd be looking at a 4x improvement. (conservative estimate)

I agree with consensus here - Macrumors was #1, Giz was #2 (but was better with pictures).

Overall, on events that require live blogging, you need a live system.

Congrats!
Though I don't care that much for Macworld, this is one of the reasons I switched from magazines and newspapers to blogging: The really fast and convenient access to what's happening out there.

Well, not completely switched, but am now using RSS reader as the main source on tech info...

Count me as another with a faster and better experience on Macrumor. Good effort though gizmodo, because when Macrumors was the only game in town, it was not 100% reliable either - maybe Gizmodo was able to siphon off enough traffic in the past couple of Macewrlds? Engadget was not a contender. But Macrumors still rules for now.

MacRumors was much faster because you didn't have to refresh. Gizmodo took forever - I just gave up after the second refresh.

@chrisvick: We had way more images, to be fair. And for most, the refresh was fast.

It would be "Game Over" if you just provided a realtime video feed. Get some of your interns strapped up with a live webcam wirelessly streaming over the internet.