There are two social networking sites for dogs: Dogster and Pawspot. And one for cats: Catster. Below is a pic of Yuki, a boxer who is the second most popular dog on Dogster with over 3,000 friends.

Gary's article on how communicators can adapt traditional PR strategies to the online environment has been published in Communique , a magazine devoted to healthcare marketing. You can find the article here.

Ajit and Erin’s recent posts about creative uses of text messaging got me thinking about Mozes, a cool texting product I played around with a few months back. In brief, Mozes allows you to create a free account and then register the keywords of your choice. People who send a text message to 66937 (MOZES) with your keyword as the message will get back a custom message of your choosing. In addition, you can use Mozes to encourage users to subscribe to your keyword and you can then send out broadcast messages to all your subscribers whenever you want.

So, I set up an account and registered the keyword “ajitmusic” as an experiment. Ajit is a friend and colleague here at Bivings and, more importantly, a talented musician who plays gigs around DC. Check out his website. Plug. Plug. Plug. Text the message “ajitmusic” to 66937 and you’ll get back a custom message and also an invitation to subscribe to broadcast messages from Ajit (or me I guess - :)). Give it a whirl. (more…)

Over the past few years, microfinancing has grown in popularity with a number of internationally focused entrepreneurs and international development workers. The concept of microfinance was introduced by Dr. Muhammad Yunas, who began an experiment in Bangladesh in the mid 1970’s. The professor gave a group of 42 women only $27 to start a bamboo chairmaking operation.  He found that that $27 allowed the women to take care of themselves and their families, sell their chairs and repay their loans. In the early 1980s, Dr. Yunas began the Grameen Bank, which extended small loans (typically less than $300) to the poorest of the poor to help them onto the road of self-sustainability.  The loan repayment rate is around 98% and the bank is now hugely successful, it’s worth having been estimated at nearly $2.5 billion. Grameen’s operations have been modeled by a number of similar microfinancing institutions in a number of other countries, including Nepal, India, Norway and even in the US.

Twenty-eight years after Dr. Yunas first loaned the $27 to the bamboo chair operation, a staff member of the Village Enterprise Fund, Jessica Flannery, along with her filmmaker husband, Matthew, learned that they could use Paypal to essentially wire loans to rural communities through a field operation volunteer who was with the Village Enterprise Fund. The couple worked tirelessly to figure out how they could get involved in microfinancing. They came up with this: an Internet driven microfinancing operation they named Kiva. (more…)

I listened to an interesting broadcast on NPR this morning about how text messaging is affecting the dating culture in Kabul, Afghanistan.  According to the piece, college students in Afghanistan are using text messaging to secretly initiate relationships.  Dating and marriage remain taboo topics in Afghanistan, as strict rules prevent young men and women from having any interaction with one another before they are married.  NPR’s Rachel Martin reports, “Afghan culture and Islamic tradition dictate that young men and women can’t even look at each other directly, let alone have a private conversation.”

For privileged young adults in Afghanistan, Kabul University resembles somewhat of a haven from the country’s otherwise restrictive social doctrine.  Some students at this university use text messaging to secretly contact members of the opposite sex, and sometimes even use this technology to arrange secret meetings.

For young Afghans, meeting each other for the first time is extremely difficult.  Cell phones are helping some college students there to bend the rules and contact one another directly instead of through third parties.  “Now, instead of passing notes through emissaries or trying to befriend a familiy member of a love interest, young Afghan men can send a text message on a cell phone to introduce themselves to a girl, flirt, or even arrange a secret rendezvous,” states Martin.

When talking about her secret relationship with her boyfriend, a young Afghan girl says “I love him very much.” But their relationship must remain a secret or else “my brother will kill me.”

This trend is a more extreme version of text-message-dating here in the States or in Europe, where cell phone relationships are much more casual, revolving around cute abbreviations and informal communication. Perhaps the most controversial aspect of texting in regards to relationships in the west is whether or not it is acceptable to break up with someone via text message.  In a 2004 survey in Great Britain, 20 percent of Britons aged 15 to 24 admit to breaking up with someone via text message. 

Xeni Jardin, a tech correspondent for NPR, described text messages as “digital post-it notes”, but commented that “while text messaging is a great way to test the romantic waters, it is not a substitute for face-to-face exchange”.

But while text messaging may seem impersonal to Americans or Europeans, it may in fact be the best option for young Afghan lovebirds. 

However, with only 600,000 cell phones for a population of almost 32 million people (just one cell phone for every 52 people), and a per capita income of just $800/year, it’s pretty clear that the cell phone revolution has not yet taken over in Afghanistan.  This leaves only the most privileged young Afghans with the opportunity to use their cell phones in order to take control of their social networks.

Today on WashingtonPost.com I caught an article about YouTube’s emergence on the political scene entitled, “In YouTube Clips, a Political Edge” by Howard Kurtz. While it is no secret that YouTube has evolved into a hotbed for political commentary by the masses, it appears that “official” content is being repurposed as well.

I had already seen a lot of the homemade political rants and spoofs, as well as the ubiquitous clips of John Stewart and the cable news networks on YouTube, but the article inspired me to hunt down some content from “official” sources. Of course, the first one I found was from Hillary Clinton. The clip, entitled “No Public Schedule,” was taken from the New York Legislative Correspondents Association Show.

This clip shows exactly why homegrown videos are generally much more viral. “No Public Schedule” is clearly scripted, the clip is fairly long, the dialogue is boring, and although it is an attempt at humor, it is not particularly funny. The best aspect of the whole piece is the cameo appearances by a few NYC celebrities, including Donald Trump. If campaigns plan on utilizing YouTube (and other similar services) in their efforts, they need to do a lot better than this.

Update: As of 11/28/06, the BBC reports that Wii has sold more than 600,000 units in the US and Canada, compared to 400,000 for PS3. Nintendo plans to ship a total of 4 million units to North America by the end of the year, while Sony has set a target of 1 million PS3s.

Even though I am a far cry from a video game expert (or even an avid video game player), I’ve been noticing a lot of articles lately about the upcoming release of Nintendo Wii and Sony Playstation 3. Expected to come out this fall, both systems are receiving a lot of hype, but couldn’t be more different. Playstation 3 is designed to be a more typical “next generation console”, complete with better graphics, blue tooth controllers, cd/dvd player, and, as shown on the chart on the right, a whole slew of other options. All of these extras don’t come without a price, though. According to CNN, Playstation will sell 2 versions of this new console for $499 and $599. In contrast, Nintendo’s Wii will sell for half that, in the $199-$249 range. Nintendo President Satoru Iwata is determined to keep the prices of the console and its new games lower than competitors. This, and the remote-control style controller serve as the Wii’s two major selling points. The controller is pretty revolutionary, and seems like it will be great for playing sports-based video games.

Nintendo Wii will bring back some old-school favorites, like Zelda and Mario Brothers, while Playstation 3 promises backward compatibility. Now, I will admit, I have not actually bought a video game console since Super Nintendo came out about 100 years ago. So I’m a bit old-fashioned when it comes to this stuff. But, I will say this. I can beat just about anybody in a MarkioKart racing match (Super Nintendo OR Game Cube, thank you). When my old game broke, I went on EBay immediately and bought another one. And I have been known to hit a few holes-in-one on Tiger Woods Golf. If only Nintendo Wii would bring back MarioKart (aka the best video game ever), I would definitely buy it. That remote controller looks cool.

I exchanged a few emails with Mark Glaser from Mediashift a while back when he put together a story on our campaign study. One of the questions he asked is how I advise candidates and campaigns who are thinking about blogging. It’s a question I’m asked pretty often and something I address in the pitches I put together. So here is my somewhat convoluted answer.

First off, I’m a big believer in political blogging. Frankly, most campaign websites are dreadfully boring and don’t give supporters a reason to visit more than once. They consist of brochure content and press releases and volunteer forms and bios and contribution pages. And that’s really it. They cover the basics and don’t really establish a real relationship between the candidate and his/her supporters. In my opinion that is the entire point of a campaign website. Blogs are a great way to forge this kind of relationship. I believe that if you truly engage supporters in your campaign, they will be more likely to give you money, perform actions on your behalf and volunteer for your campaign offline. Telling a supporter to give you money or write a letter without context doesn’t cut it - you’ve got to give them a compelling reason to do so. Blogs have a role to play here.

I also believe that most campaign blogs are horrible. They consist of recycled press releases and op eds that read like they’ve been reviewed by an army of lawyers. For a blog to really be successful, it needs some personality. It has to read like it’s been written by real, live, living, breathing human beings. This is harder to do than it sounds. It is against everything candidates and campaigns have been taught about staying on message. It is counter to the lessons they’ve been taught by direct mail and TV and radio advertising.

Ultimately, it’s better to have no blog than a really bad one. People see through this stuff.

So, after all that throat clearing, here are the questions I think campaigns should contemplate when they think about whether they should blog.

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Apparently in Texas, you need a high-tech microscope in order to see patriotism at work. CNN News reported yesterday that electrical engineering graduate students Jang-Bae Jeon and Carlo Foresca at the University of Texas at Dallas succeeded in building a mini-American flag. This flag isn’t just any mini-flag, however, it’s a nanoflag.

The flag built at UT Dallas is so small that it would take 10 of them to span the width of one human hair, reports CNN.
This was an experiment in what scientists call nanotechnology—the study of very little things. Despite the flag’s microscopic size (7 microns, to be exact), it has not been recognized by the Guiness Book of World Records, which claims they have no method of actually seeing the flag.
To put things in perspective, check out the National Nanotechnology Initiative’s “The Scale of Things”. As you can see from this chart, the flag built at the University of Texas is smaller than the head of a pin, a dust mite, and a human hair. It measures somewhere in the range of a red blood cell.
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Business 2.0 ran an interesting article entitled, “Redefining the RSS feed” regarding FeedBurner. The article is based largely on an interview with the company’s CEO, Dick Costolo, and it explores the company’s business model, and discusses how it integrates advertisements into publishers’ feeds and reports back on the size and scope of their audience. It also touches upon how the revenue generated by the ads is split between FeedBurner and the publisher.

One of the more salient questions that emerge within this article is whether or not FeedBurner will be able to compete with behemoths like Google as they enter into this market. Apparently, Costolo thinks that the network externalities that FeedBurner has built due to its early lead will be enough to withstand new entries by larger, better-recognized and better-funded, competitors. Personally, I do not see any significant switching costs for publishers, and the network effects, in my humble opinion, are minimal in this context.