Comedy Central’s signature fake news programs, “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” are focused firmly on the final stretch of the race for the White House. A glance at Indecision2008, the network’s website devoted to the year in campaign coverage, will reveal as much.

For those who feel that on-demand video clips aren’t satisfying enough to have on Election Day, however, the network has tapped the Web-based IM engine Meebo to power chat rooms on Indecision2008 to enable live discussion among its users.

In addition to the standard set of Meebo rooms provided for visitors, Comedy Central will host a live blogging session featuring Patton Oswalt, a regular of the American standup comedy circuit, and it will also present interviews with correspondents of “The Daily Show.”

Naturally there will be an attempt by various broadcast and cable-based networks on November 4th to seek out the most viewer engagement possible for the final hours of the election. And with Comedy Central’s fairly recent enhancement of its websites to cater to increased demand for video content, it seems to be a sensible course of action to introduce live communications to the Indecision2008 channel.

As Meebo and Comedy Central explain, their partnership for Election Day is intended “to increase user engagement and time spent online.” So long as enough awareness is made about the new features (the network will market the availability of chat rooms through on-air promos on November 4), real-time chat could well be the next best thing to a 24-hour style news video broadcast.

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When the CEO one of the most followed companies on the Web goes on stage for two hours, you can bet that the press will be listening to every word, looking to break a major piece of news for their respective organization. But yesterday, with Mark Zuckerberg on stage at F8, why did we all (including us) feel so compelled to “live blog” the event, given it was being broadcast live on video – quite publicly - via Facebook’s own web site? In retrospect, it seems rather ridiculous.

While plenty of big news came out of the event – the launch of Facebook Connect, Facebook Translations for Developers, and the Great Apps program, just to name a few things – it seems like those who cared enough to get these announcements “live” were most likely either in attendance or watching the video stream. Beyond that, if people wanted to discuss the announcements, Twitter or Friendfeed offered a perfect medium. This is all besides the fact that the press release itemizing Facebook’s major product launches was distributed to the media moments after Zuckerberg took the stage, leading us (and a number of other tech blogs) to publish stories detailing the news before Facebook even got to that part of their presentation.

Liveblogging certainly has its place, especially for events where not everyone has access. But what are we gaining by liveblogging something that everyone else can see? And it’s not just keynote speeches at conferences either – blogs now routinely liveblog conference calls, press conferences, and other events that anyone can tune into, usually by going to a company’s investor relations or press page. While news does often break during these events, the people who really care are already tuned in, while the few people reading the liveblog have to sort through paragraph upon paragraph of unimportant notes to find the one piece of potentially breaking news.

Beyond the overkill of liveblogging public events, I also don’t see what good it does from a business perspective as a publisher either. Versus listening to an event or a conference call and making a post detailing the news when it’s over, a liveblog usually offers a boring headline (“Live: F8 Keynote with Mark Zuckerberg”), is very difficult to read, and has minimal long-term value. Compared to a post where you cover and analyze the news, write a headline that articulates what the story is about, and create long-term value in terms of content that is indexable and can be backlinked, liveblogging just doesn’t make sense.

Proponents of liveblogging such events would likely argue that it offers not only breaking news, but instant insight into the event from the perspective of someone in attendance. While that is true to some extent, there is a ton more insight taking place elsewhere, via discussions on services like Twitter and Friendfeed.

I’m sure we’ll continue to liveblog events here on Mashable, and I’m sure others will continue to do so as well. I’m just not sure why.

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