Last week, USA Today published an interesting article about how the television industry is using blogs to provide obsessed fans with loads of extra information about their favorite shows and characters. Blogs are now produced by television shows like Grey’s Anatomy, The Office and That 70’s Show. The trend is for the blogs to be done in character, providing further glimpses into the character’s pysches. Other blogs are written by show writers or producers and provide cool extras like listings of songs played during each episode.

The best example of an in character blog is the weblog written by the character Dwight from The Office. It includes information about a sales piece Dwight is drafting called “How to Literally Kill the Competition”, which features chapters like “The Customer is Always Wrong” and tips on how to seduce the customer with one’s power and to get to know them “Like a small lover”. This blog is written by the actor who plays Dwight while he is on set, sitting at his character’s desk. Most of the other actors on The Office are active on MySpace,including the actress who plays Pam.

Hollywood is also heavily into podcasting. The producers/writers of shows like Lost and Grey’s Anatomy produce weekly insider podcasts that are posted on iTunes. And actor Jack Black is producing a weekly video podcast from the set to promote his new film, Nacho Libre.  It is currently the 5th most popular podcast on all of iTunes.

Despite the rain here in Washington, the dreaded April 17th Tax Day has been pretty uneventful. The line at the post office near us isn’t remarkably long and no one looks particularly panicked. Most people I’ve spoken to have used some form of tax software to prepare their returns. I was going to use one myself, but decided that doing it by hand might be educational. I simply printed the forms off the Internet and asked any questions I had online and on the phone. This morning, as the postal clerk affixed postage to my manila envelopes, I wanted to ask her why I couldn’t mail them for free? Then I started wondering, why can’t I just file them online without using a software program I would have to buy? What about a software program developed by the IRS?

According to the Public CIO Blog, Treasury Secretary John Snow had a few thoughts on this matter already:

“We aren’t tax preparation people. We’re not software development people,” Treasury Secretary John Snow told a House Appropriations subcommittee last week, according to the Associated Press. “There’s a private market out there that does that and does it well.” (Truman Lewis of ConsumerAffairs.org reminded readers in his article that Snow chose to ignore “the fact that IRS runs a huge data processing operation” as it is.) (more…)

There is a good article in today’s San Francisco Chronicle on social news sites like Digg and Memeorandum. The article provides a good overview of this growing space.

I got an email from a colleague pointing me to the MySpace page of Allan Lichtman, a Democrat running for the open U.S. Senate seat in Maryland. This is the first politican I’ve seen with a MySpace profile, although I haven’t looked that hard. With 250,000 new users signing up every day and 66 million total users, I’d look for more politicians to try to tap in to the MySpace phenomenon.

Note: Lichtman (or one of his staffers) was actually logged on to MySpace when I visited and took the screenshot below.

Update: I got an email from a reader and there is another Senate candidate with a MySpace page. Meet Pete Ashdown, who is running against Senator Orin Hatch in Utah.

Update #2 (May 8, 2006): I came across another one. Check out California gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides on MySpace.  There is a San Francisco Examiner article about this candidates My Space.

Leave a comment if you know of more.

I have a bit of an Alexa problem. I spend a bit more time than is healthy analyzing the reach of website A compared to website B. The result is cheap posts, but I’m going to do one more before I swear off the practice. So here we go:

(1) Of newspaper websites, the New York Times is by far the most popular, despite being only the third most popular paper in terms of print circulation. The Washington Post is the second most popular newspaper website (it’s fifth in terms of print circuation).

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As a practitioner and researcher in the arena of marketing accountability, I am impressed with the latest articles in PRWeek, and other places, about the industry’s growing stress on measurement. It is clear that PR must be concerned about accountability measurement if it is to retain its proper share of corporate budgets.

While a recent guide to measuring the impact of PR on sales (Council of Public Relations Firms, 2005) has helped establish some informational groundwork, the buzz around complex statistical approaches to measurement is evident. Having career-long experience in measuring marketing effects, I would like to outline the strengths and limitations of emerging tools.

Market Mix Modeling (MMM)

This approach came to us from economists. It is actually a form of linear regression, a basic technique used in many industries for years. It works by looking at a number of potential variables that could impact something (e.g., sales) and simultaneously considering their individual contributions. (more…)

The first ten years of the Internet are over. The web is no longer a new thing. It is an ingrained part of our lives.Studies show that users form their first impression about a website in 1/20th of a second. What are they going to think if that time is spent watching Flash animation load? Or watching a marquee slowly scroll through a list of headlines? Or searching for creatively placed navigation? They’ll think it’s time to visit another website.

As Internet users get more sophisticated and impatient, the need for designs that emphasize usability becomes paramount. Here are a dozen guidelines for web designers that we’ve developed over the years. We try to have these principles guide all of our design work.

1. Know your audience. Not only in the marketing sense. Know the technical boundaries you’re working within. The user experience for a high school math student in Jersey and a journalist in Zimbabwe are very different. Bear this in mind when making initial decisions.

2. Understand the purpose of the site. The client can lose sight of this, but the designer must not. If the site’s purpose is to raise funds, that component must be ever-present in the design. If the client decides to punch the site up for the sake of visual impact, this must be addressed immediately, before the project loses its focus.

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According to new Microsoft employee Niall Kennedy, Microsoft’s Ajaxy new website, Live.com, will serve as the default homepage for users of Internet Explorer 7 and the Windows Vista operating system. Kennedy says that hundreds of millions of computer users around the world will visit Live.com when they load up their new version of IE for the first time. Live.com is not an ordinary web page - it is an Ajax homepage that allows users to plug in their preferred RSS news feeds and widgets to create a personalized platform right in their browsers.

For web developers and communicators in general, this is significant for at least two reasons:

(1) This development is going to go a long way towards bringing RSS to the masses, as folks smarter than I have pointed out already. Millions of Microsoft users will be exposed to RSS feeds for the first time when they load up IE 7. This is going to kick start adoption of RSS technology.

(2) Maybe just as importantly, millions of Internet users will be exposed to the possibilities of Ajax for the first time, in the context of a website (I would argue that most people see Google Maps and Gmail as applications rather than websites). Live.com does not use Ajax subtlety - it embraces it full on, warts and all. Page elements can be dragged and dropped. The search includes an endless scroll bar. Htting the back button after searching is an iffy proposition.  The Live.com user experience is fundamentally different from the experience most of us are used to when browsing the Internet.

Internet Explorer 7 should come out in the second half of 2006 (it’s already in Beta) and Vista will be released in early 2007, supposedly. As Gary mentioned, companies and organizations should go ahead and get those website RSS feeds up and running. And web developers should get ready for clients to start asking for Ajax the way they ask for Flash now.

I haven’t gotten around to reading Crashing the Gate yet, which is the new book by prominent liberal bloggers Marko Moulitsas (Daily Kos) and Jerome Armstrong (MyDD). But I did check out an extended review in the New York Review of Books. It looks like a good read. However, this quote from the review really jumped out at me:

Now there is no denying the juggernaut that is the DailyKos - it is the most popular political blog on the Internet by a wide margin. But “fifty times the number of visits received by the entire right wing blogosphere?” That seems impossible. Below is a Alexa chart comparing DailyKos to Instapundit in terms of daily reach, which is the metric I would associate with “visits”:

Looks to me like DailyKos gets twice as many visits as one conservative blog, Instapundit. Impressive, but something less than fifty times the visits of the entire right wing blogosphere. I know Alexa data is far from perfect, but am I missing something here?

The Committee to Protect Bloggers has launched an interesting project called Blogswana aimed at helping educate folks about the AIDS epidemic in Botswana. The concept is to have twenty university students at a major Botswanan university become partners with citizens whose lives have been touched by the AIDS epidemic. The students would interview their partners once a month and start a blog on their behalf, writing in their partner’s voice. Blogswana is trying to use technology to provide a megaphone for folks who otherwise wouldn’t be heard. Sounds like a fantastic and worthwhile project.

You can read a full description of the project here.

So online videos are all the rage. The Washington Post has a story about their use in politics. Lots of other media outlets have stories about the trend. The growth is driven by the introduction of inexpensive digital video cameras, the adoption of broadband and the launch of free video hosting services like Youtube and Google Videos. It is a significant development, no doubt.

But if you think about it, online videos have been passed around informally since the launch of the Internet. Videos have always been viral. Technology has just made it easier to do what we’ve always wanted to do: share funny or interesting videos with our friends.

Wikipedia has a great entry on Internet phenomenons, and lists out some of the most prominent memes that have gripped the Internet over the years. The entry has a section on Internet videos, most of which predate Youtube or Google Videos. It’s a good read. Here are some of videos they mention that I remember checking out over the years.

	Office worker destroys his computer in a fit of rage (1997)
	Kid reenacts scenes from Star wars (2002)
	Teenage girl featured in Apple television commercials becomes an Internet star (2002)
	Chinese teenagers sing Backstreet Boys songs (2005)

The following Yahoo stock graph speaks for itself. Over the last two years Apple’s stock has soared, increasing by nearly 400%. Microsoft’s has barely budged. One’s a growth stock, the other a value stock — like a utility, I’m told. With Microsoft’s market capitilization ($286 billion) being about five times that of Apple’s, and its revenue last year ($40 billion) nearly three times the iTune maker’s, I had a strange thought. Why doesn’t Microsoft buy Apple? Certainly has the money to do it. Seems I’m not the only one with this ’strange’ idea. See this article at TechNewsWorld.

This morning on public radio WAMU’s (88.5 FM) Marketplace Morning Report, Andreas Kluth, a commentator from The Economist, argued that ‘old media’ needs to become more like an exchange — much like Yahoo and Google, where content, in whatever form, is bought, sold, and bartered. Gave the impression that ‘old media,’ I’m guessing he meant newspapers, TV and radio, should even get out of the content-creating business. What he wants is for such companies to emulate Google, and become the infrastructure for finding and trading content, in this case news.

I don’t see this working anytime soon. So The Washington Post is going to become a site where I can find wire stories, blogs, video and the like of news about D.C., the federal government, the world at large, local sports scores, etc.? And where I can buy and sell such news content? Great. Can’t wait to buy content from the Department of Such-and-Such, and to have a directory of blogs, individuals doing the work of the newspaper. Already have that, via Memeorandum. But the vast majority of the news there is from the ‘old media.’ That’s because blogs don’t create news (except for a handful); they comment on it.

Don’t hold your breathe. Blogs won’t be doing in-depth stories and investigative pieces anytime soon, like those we find in today’s major newspapers. Because it’s not free — content costs real money and takes real resources and talent.

There’s a much better piece about the future of newpapers over at The New Yorker by James Surowiecki.

I recently had an insight about the interfaces of two extremely popular social networking websites: MySpace and Facebook. These sites allow you to create a page on their network where you can post a photo and profile of yourself, allowing your friends to contact you online. However, these two specific sites take very different approaches.

MySpace is centered around independent bands and grew out of a desire to promote the LA club scene. Personal profiles almost always feature music and often have several music videos playing. You can customize the layout, background, color scheme, and just about anything else on the page (there are actually external websites offering free MySpace layouts). Everyone can be a groupie. The site can be slow at times, but that doesn’t seem to stop millions of users from spending hours there.

College campuses are the unifying factor of Facebook. Your invitation is sent to your school e-mail account. The pages are relatively uniform with very little customization, but they always load quickly. Facebook allows you further define the details of your “friendship” (common clubs, you both lived in the same dorm, you’re brothers, etc…). Mark Zuckerberg created the site as a way of putting faces on the flat listings of the Harvard directory.

Both sites accomplish roughly the same thing and are highly successful, yet take almost opposite approaches. What does this tell us about software development? Know your audience. Grassroot campaigns should give users the ability to personalize the way they’re spreading a message. Corporate consortiums should make it easy for members to quickly find and contribute accurate information. Both are important and need very different user interfaces.

A few weeks ago Sports Illustrated published an expansive feature article (subscription required) about how citizen sportswriters are changing sports journalistm. Obsessive and often posting about events in real time, these sports bloggers are spreading rumors, arguing and just generally feeding their sports addictions 365/24/7. Sometimes they even break stories. By the time a traditional sports columnist publishes their take on a game/issue in the local paper, these guys have changed topics three or four times. The real time nature of sports blogs make traditional sports pages obsolete to truly obsessed sports fans.

So it should come as no surprise that Memeorandum has launched a baseball meme tracker called Ballbug just in time for baseball’s opening day. Ballbug hopes to be the real time newspaper for the most passionate (and computer literate) baseball fans - tracking which stories and blog posts are being talked about the most in the baseball blogosphere.

It should also not come as a surprise that a competing baseball site called striketwo.net beat Memeorandum to market a few weeks ago or that there is a basketball meme tracker called lowpost.net.
There is little doubt in my mind that by the end of the year we will see meme tracking sites devoted to just about every vertical you can imagine - football, finance, health care. It’s just a matter of who enters which vertical first at this point.

I first read about Ballbug on Techcrunch.

Update: I took a closer look at Ballbug and Striketwo.net and Striketwo.net has a big advantage in that it allows you to track entries specifically on the team and players you follow.  Politics and sports are always local.  Here’s a screen capture of the Striketwo.net team tag cloud.