So today my lunch was spent tracking Steve's keynote at MacWorld 2008. Since there's no live video stream, that left me keeping up via those who live blogged the event. No problem, if only those sites stayed up. Here are the sites I tried to use and how they worked for me:

• Engadget - My first choice for keeping up. Worked about half of the time and that half when it did work the page would take minutes to load. Super.
• The Unofficial Apple Weblog - My backup plan which sadly worked about as well as Engadget.
• Valleywag via Twitter - Well, let's just say the reliability of Twitter pretty much sealed their fate.
• TechCrunch - TechCrunch really pulled through. Pages loaded quickly and the updates were concise. Hooray TechCrunch.

My biggest gripe is that sites like Engadget and TUAW gave no consideration to the fact that thousands of people would be sitting on one page and hitting the refresh button every 15 seconds. By this I mean that the usual images/backgrounds/navigation/styles were all there as normal. Is it really necessary that all of this is loaded? As I and thousands of others sit and hit refresh do we care about other "Breaking News" or "Featured Stories"? No. I understand that the ads need to load so they can pay the bills, but everything else should be low frills.

After the fact, Engadget recognized the problems, which was appreciated. Let's hope next MacWorld will be different.

Oh, and I'm absolutely lusting after that MacBook Air.