The Huffington Post's Religion page completed the longest live blog ever this weekend, wrapping up their coverage of all 40 days of Lent. Paul Raushenbush, the Protestant minister who edits the section, says it was "long."
"But it was good," Raushenbush told BuzzFeed today. "There was a good community that was involved." Raushenbush said the liveblog spurred the Huffington Post to hire a community manager for Religion.
"We're going to do another liveblog and it's even longer," Raushenbush said. Raushenbush's associate editor will liveblog the counting of the Omer, the 49 days between the second day of Passover and the day before the holiday of Shavuot. Like the Lent blog, the Omer blog will consist of contributed posts, reflections on the holiday, pieces of scripture, and user comments elevated into the blog.
As for whether his Lent blog was playing fast and loose with the definition of "live blog," Raushenbush compared it to a longer Super Bowl.
"It's exactly like that only it's just spread out over a lot longer time," he said. "And of course people going through Lent were not only staying on the Lent live blog. With a live blog of the Super Bowl, if you waited three minutes between posts — this was a little bit more spaced out."
Huffington Post top brass deemed the live blog a success, Raushenbush said: Arianna "loved it." After Omer, the next marathon holiday to be blogged will be Ramadan.