There is an interesting article in today’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about Presidential hopeful Russ Feingold’s (D-WI) popularity in the blogosphere. Excerpts are below:

On His Popularity:

“In an online poll last month on the nation’s most widely read liberal blog (DailyKos. com), Feingold led the Democratic presidential field, picked by 30 percent of the 11,000-plus people who visited the Web site and voted.”

On Tactics:

“To cultivate such support, Feingold has an Internet coordinator on his political staff, consults with a team of Internet advisers, has held conference calls with Democratic-leaning bloggers, offers downloadable video podcasts, and allows supporters to vote online for which congressional candidates should receive contributions from Feingold’s political committee.”

“Feingold also frequently posts his own comments on liberal blogs, blasting the Bush administration and accusing his own party of timidity on such issues as the Iraq war and the USA Patriot Act.”

On Limits of a Blog Strategy:

“But Dean’s collapse in 2004 also has colored the debate over the role that online activists could play in the next presidential contest. While some view the Internet as above all a democratizing force, others see it as polarizing as well, fueling candidates who tap into the passions of activists and ideological voters but not the broader electorate.”

“‘It’s great, because it creates a lot of energy and helps broaden a movement, but the downside is you can also get pulled in a more extreme direction,’ said Erik Smith, who worked in the 2004 race for both Dick Gephardt and a multimillion-dollar independent Democratic ad campaign.”

Technorati Tags: Feingold Politics Election Presidency

Update: We have added a page to our Wiki that serves as a running list of PR firms that blog.  If you aren't listed, please feel free to edit the Wiki and add yourself.  Original post follows.

For years I've watched some of the best, brightest and biggest PR firms in the world get the web wrong. Traditionally, most large PR firms have viewed the web as a designers medium, housing their interactive capability in their creative department. The design folks would come in and build a website, and then move on to their next project like they would if they were designing a postcard. The result is website as online brochure. Slick and shallow. The other result is PR firms full of account managers that don't know much about the Internet. Due to the blog craze, I think a light has gone off for many large PR firms and, at the very least, they are talking about the web differently. But given what I've observed over the years, I'm skeptical. As Mark Rose writes in this piece, "Big PR agencies are like super tankers; they are set on their course and they take a super effort to navigate a new direction." After reading this post from last summer, I decided to do a quick survey of the 20 largest PR firms (adjusted down to 18 since two of the firms on the list I have were acquired) and see if they had blogs on their own corporate sites. Here's what I found:

• Four of the 18 firms have fully functioning blogs that have been updated in the last two months (Burson Marstellar, Edelman, Hill & Knowlton and The MWW Group).
• Twelve of the 18 firms didn't have a blog that I could locate through a Google search or off of their main corporate sites (APCO, Brodeur, Cohn & Wolf, Fleishman-Hillard, Golin Harris, Huntsworth, Ketchum, Manning Selvage & Lee, Ogilvy, Porter Novelli, Ruder Finn and Weber Shandwick).*
• Two firms put up blogs but have neglected them (Schwartz Communcations and Waggenner Edstrom).

I'm not one of those people who believes that every company needs a blog. Not having a blog is preferable to having a bad blog. For some companies, it just doesn't make sense. I also know that many of these firms that don't have corporate blogs have individual employees that maintain personal blogs. But I do think the decision to blog makes a powerful statement about where your priorities are and where you think the world is going. And I think its obvious that the ability to implement a successful blogging strategy for yourself is a pretty good indication you can implement one for a client. *Note that Ketchum has this site which looks like a blog but is really a marketing piece and Ogilvy has this list of blogs. Update: I found that the Horn Group has a blog as well. I updated the post here with more data. Technorati Tags: PR Edelman Burson Fleishman Hill & Knowlton

In a recent post, I breifly mention the notion of a smart crowd. I started to talk about this in the context of Web 2.0, the term coined in large part by Tim O’Reilly. He identifies a number of principles to help explain what this is. Omitting the more programming specific, he describes Web 2.0 as applications as platforms, continuously updated, centered around deep data, where participation is central and users call the shoots, which get better as more users take part, and harness the collective intelligence of the users. For example, eBay, Google Adsense and maps, Wikipedia, Flickr, BitTorrent, and blogs (especially with the advent of RSS, permalinks, and trackbacks.)

O’Reilly does make reference to the wisdom of crowds, in talking about “harnessing the collective intelligence” of the user community. So what doe this have to do with the media?

Well imagine starting with news feeds, such as Reuters, the AP, ESPN, etc. Enable users to add content to these stories, and allow the user base to vote on the top stories — sort of like a Web 2.0 attempt at USA Today.

NewsVine is trying to do this. The site is in private Beta currently. Send me an email or leave a comment if you want access - I have a few invitations left. Will be very interesting to watch over time.

Microsoft has launched a teaser website promoting the release of something called the Origami Project on March 2nd. There is ongoing speculation on some well read blogs about what exactly The Origami Project is. Engadget actually dug up pictures revealing it to be a personal device. My two cents: the “Touch Me” reference on the website is a pretty clear indication that it has something to do with touchscreen technology - I say its a touchscreen controlled media player. Regardless, Microsoft has gotten people’s attention.

I think its fantastic that Microsoft is using word of mouth marketing to generate buzz prior to the official launch. However, they could have done more. The Flash piece on the Oragami website isn’t all that interesting and the site doesn’t give you anything to do beyond subscribing to a RSS feed. They could have given away advance samples to the first 500 people who registered or at least added an email sign up. Something more. A smaller company without Microsoft’s brand would have to do a better job to get people’s attention. Who knows though, the site teases at a three week online campaign, so there may be more to come.

Update #1: Here is a video of the device - looks like a small tablet PC.  Video is also available here.

Update #2: Here’s a story detailing what it is in more detail.

Technorati Tags: Origami Microsoft PC Tablet

Single touch screen displays are pretty common at museums, airports, bookstores, etc. But the technology hasn’t been there for the kind of multi-touch interfaces hinted at in movies like Minority Report. Researchers at New York University are working on it and have a great video demonstrating what’s possible.

I’ve spent some time this week micromanaging the relaunch of The Bivings Report (TBR) and as part of the process I’ve been taking a fresh look at various blogging tools and add ons. I figured I’d provide a rundown of what tools we’re using on the off chance its of interest to someone in the process of setting up a blog.

The original version of TBR was custom built in late 2001 by our in-house developers. There were a few blog tools around at the time, but they were pretty primitive so we just built something ourselves. In redoing it, we decided to switch to WordPress after investigating all the usual suspects. We chose WordPress because it has almost all the functionality we wanted built in, has a robust set of accompanying plugins, is highly customizeable and utilizes our preferred programming language/platform. Its also free.

We used this plugin to create the weighted display of categories we are using to classify posts. We decided to run our RSS feed through feedburner to make it easier for people to subscribe. And we ended up using BlogBeat to help keep track of the hundreds of thousands of visitors that will surely start flocking to revamped The Bivings Report. In the future we may add a listing of Digg stories and/or maintain a list interesting bookmarks on del.icio.us.

Anyway, let us know if you’ve heard of anything cool.

For those of you who would like a copy of the PowerPoint from the Lincoln IABC Blogging presentation, please email me at fgb@bivings.com.

Came across this political campaign site that incorporates Google Maps. It’s for Ming Campbell’s campaign for the leader of the Liberal Democrats in the UK. This is the first one I’ve seen so far doing this. Pretty cool.

This book by James Surowiecki shows how, under the right curcumstances, crowds can make better decisions than individuals, and individual experts. I want to spend the next few posts talking about his insights in the context of Web 2.0 and the media.

Talking about smart crowds, Surowiecki, means an assembly of people that meets four critieria: 1) it needs to be diverse, with different people bringing different info to the table; 2) It must be decentralized with no leader at the top; 3) there needs to be a way (the web, say) for aggregating everyone’s opinion into a result, like a vote; and 4) members of the crowd have to be independent, so that they care more for themselves than what other may think of them.

And as Surowiecki shows, you get some interesting results; from the simple, a group accurately estimating the number of jelly beans in a jar, to the more complex, scientists in groups around the world identifying te SARS virus, to the very complex, investors in the marketplace.

So what about Web 2.0 and the media?  Next posting.

I wanted to share with you the article from the San Francisco Chronicle about the DVD shop who’s been able to double its sales with a blog. You can find it here.

The Bivings Report started out in late 2001 as a blog that focused exclusively on online marketing and promotion. The site built a loyal following over the years, but the content we were publishing only reflected a small part of what we do. So we’ve redesigned the site and are going to try to talk about all the things we are passionate about. Its an exciting time for the Internet and The Bivings Group as a firm, and we want to write about it.

Note that we wrote a lot of articles for The Bivings Report over the years. We loaded those into the site archive since some people might find them interesting/useful. We deleted most of our old posts since they tended to function as links to the news of the day.