ShiftEdit. This new live blogging service is a complete contrast to the lush and fully featured CoveritLive. Where CiL is high eye candy geared, this service relies on fast bare bones delivery. Sign up, click on Start New Live Event and you’re…well live.

Once you’re up and running it’s just a matter of entering in your text, URLs or video links and you’re live blogging to the world. No muss, no fuss. You get an invite code to send to others so they can join in the fun, and it’s all jolly whizz.

ShiftEdit is nowhere near as fully complete as CiL, but maybe it doesn’t have to be. This could be a nice tool for a simple collaborative blog event, rather than something sophisticated and big media worthy. I still prefer CiL just because it’s a beautiful piece of programming and design, but I’m not going to diss ShiftEdit just because it’s a simple cousin. Definitely worth watching out for (especially if they ever get an embedded code function so you can blog live right inside your standard blog system).