Wow. Just read a great essay on Edge called “DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism” by computer scientist Jaron Lanier. The essay is a massive broadside against the trend towards collective editing and decision-making that is taking hold online (the Wisdom of Crowds trend). Lanier takes aim at the use of collectivism in venues as diverse as Wikipedia (and all Wikis really), American Idol, Google and news aggregator sites like Digg and PopURLs. It’s a great, thought provoking piece.

Here is my favorite quote from the piece:

“…an individual best achieves optimal stupidity on those rare occasions when one is both given substantial powers and insulated from the results of his or her actions. If the above criteria have any merit, then there is an unfortunate convergence. The setup for the most stupid collective is also the setup for the most stupid individuals.”

And Damien’s favorite:

“The hive mind should be thought of as a tool. Empowering the collective does not empower individuals — just the reverse is true. There can be useful feedback loops set up between individuals and the hive mind, but the hive mind is too chaotic to be fed back into itself.”

Anyway, read it.

On an unrelated note, I found this on a great blog called Rough Type. Worth a read too.

We recently took a closer look at the 2006 Senate candidate’s blogs in an attempt to judge the overall quality of blog quality and blog offerings. Here is what we found:

78 percent of the 18 campaign blogs included RSS feeds.

Only 33 percent of blogs included a blogroll or links to other blogs.

78 percent of blogs accepted comments, but only 61% actually published these comments.  In addition, many blogs appeared to only show positive user comments. Jon Tester’s “Testertime” is an example of this. Tom Kean’s blog was an exception, where arguments over issues actually developed in the comments section. Either most candidates’ blogs are only attracting supporters, or blog managers are filtering user comments and only posting positive input.

In 56 percent of the blogs, the candidates themselves posted blog entries. When candidates posted entries, it really gave the blogs a personal touch, giving the candidates a “down to earth” quality that would be attractive to voters. Claire McCaskill used this technique particularly well.

Many of the candidates’ blogs were well-maintained and sophisticated. However, it was disappointing to find that interactive features of the blogs were limited. With just over half of the blogs publishing user comments, it is questionable whether some candidates blogs can really be considered blogs at all. This is another example of our main findings from our political campaign study: candidates are still underutilizing Web tools, and many are hesitant to open their campaigns to interactive strategies. It seems that most candidates are more comfortable with traditional forms of campaigning; the transition to “cyber-campaigns” will indeed be a gradual one.

Update: For those interested, you can see the Excel sheet with the backing data here (Excel sheet). Note that Pete Ashdown got credit in our study for having every blog element that we looked at. We edited the entry to reflect Ashdown’s policy of posting un-censored blog comments.

According to a recent New York Times article, “Death by a Thousand Blogs“, there are now some four million blogs in China, representing about 4% of some 100 million Chinese Internet users.

This is remarkable, given the high degree of Web censoring that occurs in China today. Although China claims that its web regulation is no more restrictive than that of the US or Great Britain, the reality is much different. According to BBC News, the websites of news providers such as the New York Times or BBC, as well as human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, are inaccessible from computers in China. Major Internet service providers (ISPs) throughout China required by law to monitor their websites and to control and erase “dangerous” or “subversive” content. However, judging from the blocking of a variety of websites that have nothing to do with “dangerous” content, it is clear that a much wider policy of censorship is occurring. According to the New York Times, it seems that blogs may be a way for Chinese citizens to escape such censorship.

Author Nicholas Kristof wrote that the “Internet is beginning to play the watchdog role in China that the press plays in the West. The Internet is also eroding the leadership’s monopoly on information and is complicating the traditional policy of ‘nei jin wai song’ -cracking down at home while pretending to foreigners to be wide open”.

Kristof notes one Chinese journalist in particular that has had success in the blogosphere- Li Xinde, who writes about official wrongdoing on his personal website.

This is not to say that bloggers in China are free from punishment. Prison still remains a major threat to free-speakers in China, forcing bloggers like Li Xinde to flee from authorities in order to avoid serving jail time.

Despite the high risks of punishment, Chinese citizens are aware of the massive size of the Internet, and appear confident that there just are not enough police to control all website content in China.

Perhaps blogs may be the key to breaking down the “Great Firewall of China”.

I recently visited the website of Berkshire Hathaway, which is the holding company controlled by billionaire Warren Buffett that ultimately employs 190,000 people. I was looking for video clips of Berkshire Hathaway’s annual board meeting, which are famous for Buffett’s pronouncements on a variety of economic subjects. It became clear pretty quickly that Berkshire Hathaway doesn’t do multimedia. The site doesn’t even do images. See the homepage below:

The entire website is text based and could be built in under a day by anyone with some basic HTML skills. It is actually sort of refreshing that Berkshire Hathaway doesn’t have some slick website. The site is a reflection of Warren Buffett himself: completely lacking pretension.

A little more than a month ago, Todd devoted a post to Blogswana, a project centered on blogging for AIDS Education. The project centers around a university student blogging on behalf of a person afflicted with HIV or AIDS and telling their stories to the Internet audience. It’s a good and necessary project and one that I think will touch the lives of so many people.

Since then, I’ve been scouting for community service/volunteer projects that allow individuals to use technology as a means of communicating or advocating for others. There are hundreds of projects out there that are not necessarily based on simply raising money (though online donation capabilities are very important to a program or organization whose livelihood depends on outside funding), but also give you a chance to commit to offer your guidance to children and young adults.

One such program is the vMentor program, which allows adults over the age of 25 to become virtual mentors to kids who have aged out of the foster care system. The program is possible through a grant made by the Northrup Grumman Foundation and run by The Orphan Foundation of America (OFA). The OFA was founded in 1981 to provide emotional and financial support to foster children who have aged out of the system. It attempts to make bridging the transition between living in the system to living independently a little bit easier, by offering scholarships and care packages, as well as the opportunity to be in a vMentoring relationship with a caring adult.  (more…)

We recently completed a study that assesses the utilization of the Internet as a tool for 2006 political campaigns. The study, a follow-up of the 2002 version, examined how 2006 senatorial candidates used the Web to publicize information about their campaign platforms, personal backgrounds, and volunteer opportunities. We looked at a number of Web campaign tools and made comparisons based on party affiliations, importance of particular races, and whether candidates were incumbents or challengers.

The results clearly showed that while Web use by political candidates increased dramatically since 2002, politicians are still failing to take advantage of all the Internet has to offer. Ninety six percent of this year’s Senate candidates have active websites, while only 55 percent of candidates had websites in 2002. While most candidates use a set of core Web tools, the majority of candidates are refraining from using newer and more sophisticated Web strategies, such as blogs and podcasts, on their campaign websites. Only 23 percent of Senate candidates are blogging, just 15 percent offer Spanish alternatives to their websites, and an even smaller number of candidates, 5 percent, maintain podcasts. In contrast, between 90 percent and 93 percent of candidates offered biographies, contact information, and online donations on their websites. It is obvious from these results that despite a general increase in the use of the Internet for political campaigns, candidates are still hesitant to pour finite financial resources into new campaign strategies.

Read the study in its entirety (PDF).

View study data sheets (Excel).

Update: In the name of full disclosure, we do some work for the Republican Party and for a few Republican candidates, although it is not our primary focus. We mention this in the study, but I wanted to make this point more explicity. –Todd Zeigler

Update 2: Article in the Washington Post today on the use of database technology by incumbents –Rita Desai

After finishing our study of campaign websites, we took the time to check out the Senate candidates’ blogs.  Here is a review of some of the best and worst campaign blogs for 2006.

Rick Santorum’s (R-PA) blog, “Running with Rick”, was the most complete of the three incumbent blogs we found, as it offered near daily entries.  However, the blog does not list readers’ comments, does not offer archives, and is used primarily to attack his opponent, Bob Casey.

Of the challengers, Tom Kean, Jr.’s (R-NJ) blog shows the most comments out of any of the candidates’ blogs. Comments were both positive and negative, and in some cases arguments between bloggers evolved in the comments. 

Jack Carter’s blog  (D-NV) was also very complete.  Entries in this blog are near daily, and the blog has been around for some time.  Some comments were shown, but probably the most interesting feature of this blog is the “blog roundup”.  Every few days, someone posts a blog entry on the Carter Blog dedicated to providing links to blogs with posts related to the Carter campaign.  These entries are quite extensive and give readers a chance to find out who else is blogging about politics in general, and Jack Carter in particular.

The least complete blog we found was that of Allen McCulloch (R-NM), who only listed one post.  It is possible, however, that this is a new feature on his website; we’ll have to check back in a few weeks to see if the blog progresses at all.

While the quality of campaign blogs varied from candidate to candidate, most blogs were used for similar purposes: to present news, attack opponents, to discuss candidate’s reactions to recent events, and to provide information about candidates’ humanitarian and volunteering interests.

Folks who read papers like the Washington Post online are familar with the Who’s Blogging feature powered by the blog search engine Technorati. Basically, Who’s Blogging allows you to view a list of blog entries linking to the Post story you are reading. You can see an example of this in action on pretty much any Post story.

I saw on Techcrunch that the new blog search engine Sphere has launched a competing tool that is currently getting a trial on Time Magazine’s website. According to Sphere, the Sphere tool is different in that it performs a semantic analysis of web pages to find articles on the same topic. So, in theory, the new Sphere tool will find more related blog entries than the Technorati product since it is searching based on similarities in content between the article and blog entries as opposed to simply whether the blog entry links to the article.

Below is an example of Sphere tool in action.

Frankly, I’m not sure which approach is best. If I’m reading a sports column by Michael Wilbon about the Yankees-Red Sox series, there is a decent chance I only want to read blog entries on that very specific column and not the series in general. However, if I’m reading a straight news story from the Post on immigration, I’m probably interested in seeing all related blog entries. I don’t know.

Either way, Time Magazine’s experimentation with Sphere is another step forward in the melding of traditional newspaper and consumer generated content.

I’m a big fan of Firefox.  At first my infatuation was all about the tabbed browsing and increased security, but at this point the biggest draw for me is the extensions. Internet Explorer users don’t really get the whole extension thing, so I figured I’d list out some of the more useful ones I have installed to show what the fuss is about.

Bugmenot. This allows you to bypass registration procedures on a variety of news sites simply by right clicking and logging in using a community database of user names and passwords maintained by Bugmenot.

Session Saver. This extension saves your Firefox windows exactly as they were when you closed them. It even saves the text you were typing in.

MeasureIt. Allows you to launch a ruler within Firefox that you can use to measure the pixel width of any page element.

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For someone who loves to squirrel away nuggets of information (everything from ornithology to celebrity news), Google Notebooks has provided a great tool to all of us. I have created a number of new notebooks since yesterday (one for each client, plus one solely dedicated to recipes involving easy-to-prepare rice dishes and cake recipes that consist of stacking Hostess Ding Dongs on top of each other). After years of surfing the net, I am still delighted by the things I find on the web and usually just emailed links to myself. 

With Gmail, I could easily search through my mail for links. But with Google Notebook, I no longer need to excavate my email for links to things I vaguely remember, or to bother Todd or Alex for a URL they mentioned six months ago. If I find something interesting that I want to copy and paste, I can simply click on the little notebook icon located in the corner of my browser and a mini-version of the Google notebook I want will show up.

  —>     =TERRIFIC!

This is a truly useful tool for those of us who work online most of the time and must  funnel research and analysis to ourselves, our clients and our team members on a daily basis. I would even argue that it’s necessary for the serious researcher who is constantly wading through websites and electronic articles kept on databases. With a quick cut and paste, one can grab any number of tidbits off the web and organize them easily, by subject and section.

Google has clearly created another winner.  

We’ve been working on a study testing how effectively this year’s Senate candidates are using the Internet for their campaign websites. The study won’t be released for a few days, but so far we have been able to identify some of the best campaign websites out there. These websites stand out because they successfully present seemingly complicated web tools in a clear and user-friendly fashion, allowing every-day voters to get involved, while simultaneously adding personality and down-to-earth qualities to the candidate’s platforms. Here are some of our favorites:

By far the best campaign website was used by Hillary Clinton (D-NY). Her website offers more web tools than any other senatorial campaign websites, and was very easy to navigate. Her website has the most extensive action center of all the candidates, providing tools to create individual fundraising campaigns, track team progress, and to host house parties. She also offers an extensive download gallery, information to buy Hillary gear, and a full Spanish version of her website. While her site lacks some personal touches such as a blog or podcasts, the technical and team-oriented aspects of her website provide a great example for other candidates.

Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) also offered an effective website that used a unique feature: (more…)

I’m fairly obsessed with technology and the web in general. But I really don’t get the MySpace phenomenon. Sure, I get it conceptually. But I don’t get it personally. I’m probably just too old. Through blogging, I’ve established some new and rewarding professional connections and have had some old friends reconnect with me through Google searches. But, ultimately, most of my friends are non-geeks in the 25-35 age bracket. It wouldn’t even occur to them to use the web for social networking like the MySpace generation does.

A recent Pew study shows that the web really is becoming a way of life for American teens. The age gap I feel is real. Here are some key stats:

• Half of American teens (12-17) are online content creators, meaning they’ve created their own blog or web pages or shared content like videos and photos online.
• 22% of teens maintain their own personal web page.
• 19% of online teens maintain a blog (as compared to 7% of online adults)
• 38% of online teens read blogs (as compared to 27% of online adults)

I think the divide in the way teenagers and adults use the Internet is even wider than the study shows. The adults I know who maintain and read blogs typically do so in a perso-professional way. They blog about politics, technology, their jobs, etc. Less so about their personal lives. I would argue that nearly all of the teenagers are blogging/creating content as an extension of their social lives.

As Danah Boyd wrote in her great essay about why MySpace has been so successful:

“…i think we’re seeing a huge shift in social life - negotiating super publics. I kinda suspect that MySpace teens are going to lead the way in figuring this out, just as teens in the 60s and 70s paved the way to figuring out globalized life with TV.”

As a follow up to my last post, the Kinky Friedman for TX Governor website is the kind of candidate website I’d like to see more of. It’s a good example of a campaign site that is both professionally done and a true reflection of the candidate’s personality.

It’s working too: 169,000 Texans have signed a petition to get Kinky on the ballot in November as an Independent and he’s outraising the main Democrat in the race. Not surprisingly, Kinky also has a MySpace page with 14,000 friends.

Of course, it’s easier for Kinky to pull this kind of site off. He’s Kinky Friedman, after all. But I think campaigns could learn a thing or two about how to breath life into their websites by giving Kinky’s site a look.

I came across the trippiest political campaign site I’ve ever seen today. Check out Eric Jon Gunderson for Congress (D-MT). We’ve got a litany of design offenses here: background music, spinning logos and clip art. We’ve also got some features that are just bizarre: an animated illustration of someone playing guitar in front of a tree and a section labeled fun that includes a typing test for reasons beyond me. The site is also missing the most basic of campaign site features. No donation form. No volunteer sign up.

As someone who works in web development, my first instinct was to pass judgment, write a snarky post and move on. But then I started thinking back to a Robert Scoble blog entry I read a few months ago about anti-marketing web design. To paraphrase, the theory is that sites like MySpace succeed in part because their designs are unprofessional - the lack of slickness makes them genuine and a true reflection of the site’s community of users.

Do I think the Gunderson site is successful? Nope. Would I advise a client to build a site like this? Absolutely not. But you know what, almost all campaign sites I’ve seen are devoid of personality, fun and humor. They are professional and cold and say very little about who the candidate actually is as a person. The Gunderson site most definitely has some personality. It is authentic, almost like a MySpace profile. There is a sweet spot between the heartless approach of most campaign sites and the homegrown style of the Gunderson site. That sweet spot is what I think campaigns should aim for.
Screen shot after the jump. (more…)

“Blogger Jeff Jarvis single handedly brought down Dell! He hurt their stock price! He hurt their reputation! Thus, buy our services! Blog monitoring, blogger relations, blog, blog, blog! Do it now or it will happen to you!”

The pitches are probably more refined than that. But in reading PR blogs, it’s clear that the Dell Hell situation has become a go to case study for PR firms pitching blogger relations programs. I’ll bet it works, too. It’s an easy argument to make.

Backing up, in July of 2005 Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine bought a lemon from Dell. He paid a premium for a four year in-home service plan and Dell refused to live up to their pomise. They refused to come to his house and fix his computer, which is what he paid for them to do. Jarvis got angry and started complaining about it. Other bloggers came forward with similar problems and the blogosphere engaged in open warfare against Dell. You can read Jarvis’ R-rated original posts here and a great case study on the situation here.

You know what though, the “blogs brought down Dell” argument rings false to me. The fact is, Jarvis only resorted to blog complaints after being told to buzz off by Dell customer service personnel over the phone. I can guarantee you he wasn’t the first customer this happenned to. I would also guarantee that Dell was well aware that customers weren’t happy about the in home service plan (and problems with their computers) long before Jarvis started his blogging crusade. Customer service folks record phone complaints religiously. Dell knew what they were doing. They knew they were cutting costs at the expense of customer satisfaction.

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