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.

In the comments to our post on blogging at the world's largest PR firms, Frank Shaw from WagEd jokingly wondered which blog went up first. Erin did some quick research and figured it out. Below is a list of PR firm blogs along with the date of the first post.  Frank wins.

There has been some good discussion around our post about how newspapers can improve their web presence. Below is a breakdown of additions to the list suggested (or inspired by) readers. Comments are mine unless otherwise indicated. I’ll update this post with new ideas I come across.

Original List

1. Start using tags.
2. Provide full text RSS feeds.
3. Work with external “social” websites.
4. Link to relevant blog entries.
5. Get rid of all registration.
6. Partner with local bloggers.
7. Offer alternative views of your content.
8. Modernize your site’s graphic design.
9. Learn from Craigslist.
10. Make your content work on cell phones and PDAs.

Additions

11. Allow Readers to Comment on Every Story [Via Micropersuasion]. I think this is a great idea although for some papers it may be unrealistic. It would take a lot of time to manage all the discussion that is generated. But if the paper can pull it off they should. It will help them build a Digg style community of users. This ties in to some good advice from Thomas Power: Become a social network.

Note: In our study we found that 13 of the top 100 U.S. papers were already doing this.

12. Improve Search Features [Henry Miller]. The search functionality on most newspaper sites is terrible. I actually resort to using Google News as an alternative if I’m looking for a particular story.

13. Use Better HTML [Joe Clark and Old Grouch]. From the looks of things, lots of papers haven’t jumped on the CSS bandwagon. Implementing cleaner HTML would improve load times for users and ultimately save money by reducing server load. A related issue noted by Angelos is the abuse of cookies by newspaper site. Why use five when one will do?

14. Focus on Local and Regional News [Mike Driehorst]. “Unless it’s of significant, historical or national importance, don’t put national/international news on your front page.” Most papers value is in their local coverage - focus on that.

15. Open Up Your Archives [Old Grouch]. Many papers only keep 10 days of content up on their sites and/or charge for older content. Making more of this content available for free would be a great service to researchers and also help serve up more page views.

16. Provide Multilingual Versions [Gabrielle Tonelli]. A few papers we looked at in California were doing this. It’s a good idea if it is economic feasible. The audience for every website is ultimately global.

17. Offer Supplemental Content [Bruce Bartlett]. Reporters do loads of research when writing stories. Why note post some of the extra stuff on your website? Bruce writes that it “would both make the web site more valuable and improve the credibility of newspapers. It’s really insane to just reprint the same material that is in the print edition.”

18. Open Up the Letter to the Editor Process [Building on #17]. Why not just post every letter you receive instead of just the 2/3 that make the cut for the print edition? Associate them with the relevant article and let us know which articles are getting the most comments. This would have the effect of turning your site into a townhall of sorts. Only problem with this is that many letters come in still via regular mail instead of electronically.

Thanks for all the comments/ideas. Please post additional ideas below and I’ll update this entry periodically.

> There is an interesting piece on BusinessWeek.com (via Slashdot ) that talks about the Dell Battery Recall program and how the blogosphere “kept the heat on the manufacturers to do something about it and helped the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) conduct an investigation into the burning batteries.”

As mentioned in the BusinessWeek.com article, the blogosphere’s ability to continue to provide examples and data raised the profile of this issue into something that Dell needed to accept and address openly. Kudos to them for dealing with it as they have - maybe they should take a page out of Apple’s playbook (and Rita’s post )  in regards to positioning and ease of use.

Last night in a fit of insomnia I was scanning Slashdot for the latest and greatest - and I stumbled on a link to this article from the Washington Post. Michael De Kort, a (now ex-) Lockheed Martin engineer working on a project for the U.S. Coast Guard identified “several critical safety and security problems” within the project and tried to bring attention to them by going through the traditional processes for dealing with such issues. According to the article, he went through proper channels to voice his complaint - including “Lockheed Martin ethics investigations, engineering management reviews, quality reviews, propram management reviews” and also working through “the chain to Lockheed Martin corporate legal, to the CEO Bob Stevens, and to the Board of Directors”. He also contacted  the Inspector General’s Office of the Department of Homeland Security which is currently conducting a review and reached out to Representative Peter King (R- NY), Chairman of the Homeland Security Oversight Committee. I highlight the steps he took because it seems that he did what any good employee would do in this situation; use appropriate channels to voice concerns about a project.

What he did next is interesting to me - especially in light of the BusinessWeek article I mentioned at the top of this post. He made a video of his complaint and posted it on YouTube. The original video is below

If you cannot watch the video or would rather read a transcript of his video, Slashdot user Pushnell
has helpfully created one.

At 1:09pm this afternoon, his YouTube video has received approximately 41579 views. At 5:15 pm his video had received 47186 views. As of last night the Washington Post was reporting over 8,000 views. As of this afternoon there are over 25 stories about him and his story, and they are on Time.com / CNet.com / CBS news and a host of others. Direct link to my Google News search is here. 

It seems that his story has legs and e has created a profile on Slashdot to respond to comments about his video.

I wonder what appreciable results his posting on YouTube will bring about. Will it raise the profile of this issue to the point that both Lockheed Martin and the Coast Guard need to publicly address this issue? Will the blogosphere embrace this despite having one central source for this story (his YouTube video) as opposed to the many others found on the Dell Laptop Battery incident (YouTube videos, blog postings from many different users, etc)?

Finally, what does this mean for other whistleblowers in the future? Has he set a precedent for them? Instead of a whistleblower pitching his or her story to the traditional media, will YouTube and the blogosphere be the go to outlets? Mr. De Kort lends a human face to the problem that might otherwise be buried in a lawsuit somewhere and thanks to wonders of the archiveal nature of the Internet (and the series of tubes that make it up) his story will always be found in video or text format regardless of the merit of his story. Currently, he is unemployed, and according to the Washington Post,  Lockheed Martin
said that “the video did not influence the decision to lay off De Kort and that he had had been notified earlier this year that he would be out of a job.” Who knows what the details are surrounding his dismissal, but I wonder if his actions can also get him a new job.

Finally, a hypothetical scenario to ponder that could affect us directly in our day-to-day lives. Are we far off from the days when some anonymous ‘hacker’ will decide to not only highlight the security flaw in an operating system but also provide a screencast showing your average user how to exploit this flaw?

I’m watching this story with interest - leave me your thoughts in the comments below.

Our recent report evaluating the use of the Internet by the top 20 Japanese newspapers has been translated into Japanese.

To quickly summarize, the report looks at the differences between the American and Japanese newspaper industries, and how the structure of the two markets have affected the way newspapers utilize the Internet. It was clear from our research that Japan's unique newspaper culture places a much greater emphasis on print news rather than online news.

You can view the Japanese version of the report here and the English version of the report here.

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日本の新聞におけるインターネットの利用状況についての調査レポートを日本語に翻訳しました。

We took a long look at the features U.S. newspapers include on their websites a few weeks back. In doing the research, we spent more time than is healthy looking at these things. So we figured we’d use this new found expertise for good and offer the newspaper industry some unsolicited advice on how to improve their websites.

(1) Start Using Tags. The structure of just about every site we looked at more or less followed that of the paper’s print edition. This is great if you are looking to read the print version of the paper but not great if you are looking to see everything the paper has written on, say, Joe Lieberman. Newspapers aren’t taking advantage of the opportunity the Internet offers to remix/categorize content.

The social news site Newsvine uses tags, and all I have to do is put in newsvine.com/lieberman and voila, I see all the Lieberman stories. Using tags to complement traditional navigation is a great way to offer alternative views of content and better relate stories to each other.

The taxonomy of newspaper sites is broken and using tags is a pretty good way to start fixing the problem.

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If you have a thing for cool graphs and trivial information, you might want to check out IVillage's Baby Name Voyager.  This Java-enhanced graph displays alphabetically the 1,000 most popular names for Americans since the 1880s.  Any name that ever made into the top 1,000 is on this list, and you can see in what year the name was most popular, as well as each name's highest rank.  

Take a look at this screenshot.

Each "stripe" on the graph represents one name.  The thickness of the stripe indicates the name's popularity, and the color of the stripe indicates not only whether the name is for boys or girls, but also the name's popularity in 2005. As you scroll over each stripe on the graph, all the corresponding name is highlighted with a text box showing the name's popularity in a certain decade. (more…)

When I first read that Apple was recalling batteries on certain laptops, I didn't think for a minute that the iBook G4 I own had anything to do with it. Sure, the battery did get extremely hot at times, but if anything, it was comforting, not unlike a sleeping cat. I certainly didn't (want to) think that my innocent little iBook would ever explode. But remembering the burnt out cab of the pick-up truck pictured on the front-page of The New York Times compelled me to scratch in "Check On Apple Recall" on my To-Do list.

Check on Apple Recall I did. I googled "Apple Recall" (I no longer bother with extensive webpage searches) and came across the link that directed me to the page on Apple's Battery Exchange program. (Having an overactive imagination, I thought that the idea of a Battery Exchange was far more exotic than a Battery Recall. I conjured up visions of sending my Apple battery off to study theatre in London or study the culture of the Maasai in Africa, only to return a more cultured, worldly and sophisticated battery than when it had first arrived. Also, the word "recall" to me seemed to imply that I'd bought a cheap product, one where manufacturers give very little thought to quality. After all, I never hear about Maybachs getting recalled.) (more…)

In the swarm of new social networking/personal database websites popping up everywhere, here's a new application that I'm surprised didn't pop up earlier.  MyNoteIT is an online app specifically designed for students.  And, unlike Facebook, it is geared toward academics, not toward social networking.

The functionality of the application is well developed.  MyNoteIT allows students to input a wide variety of information into their account, including class schedules, grades, due dates, contact information for classmates and teachers, as well as typed notes.

Through this database, students can search their own notes and the notes of others by keywords and by course so that they can easily find specific information they are looking for.  In addition, by having "friends" listed on their accounts, students can read and comment on other people's notes.  You can also email notes to others directly from the database.  And, in case your computer is prone to crashing, there is an autosave feature that saves your work every 10 seconds, so it's basically impossible to lose work. (more…)

I didn't like Lost in Translation.  I was supposed to.  Other people I know did and it got great reviews and had fantastic buzz.  I wanted to like it.  But when I finally got around to seeing it I was just sort of bored. I just didn't get it.  So, inspired by Lost in Translation, here's a list of eight pieces of technology that I'm supposed to love but just don't:

(1) Second Life.  The whole alternative online world concept is brilliant in theory.  But I've tried to get into Second Life three times now and just can't. I don't have the patience required to learn my way around the place and ultimately am not that interested in living an alternative version of my life online.

(2) Memeorandum and Techmeme.  The technology here is cool, but whenever I visit the site(s) I'm underwhelmed by the content. To me Memeorandum and Techmeme feel dominated by old school publications (New York Times) and A-list bloggers (Techcrunch).  It is filled with content I've already seen elsewhere or am purposefully avoiding.  Also, Memeorandum would be much more interesting if they added some discussion/community features. I prefer Digg.

(3) Boing Boing.  This "Directory of Wonderful Things" is currently the third most popular blog in the world according to Technorati.  I've tried to like it, but only around 1/5 of the stories interest me so I packed it in.

(4) Yahoo Answers.  This service is wildly successful, having answered 40 million questions and gotten a lot of buzz from its Ask the Planet campaign featuring celebrities like Bono.  For whatever reason I don't know a single person who uses it regularly.  I'm also bitter because none of the questions I've tried asking as a test got a response.

(5) Rocketboom.  The world's most hyped video blog.  Watching Amanda Congdon was fingernails on a chalkboard for me.  Maybe I'll loop back now that they have a new host, although Ze Frank has my video blogging needs taken care of at this point.

(6) 37Signals Family of Products.  These time/project management tools are really slick and I know a lot of people that swear by them.  I've tried pretty much all their products and they just didn't click for me.  I'm probably a dinosaur, but I prefer to do this kind of stuff in Outlook for personal management and have other tools I use to collaborate with others. 

(7) Online Office Replacements.  I've tried Writely, Google Spreadsheets, Zoho, etc.  They are all very good web services whose concept I love.  The problem is that I can't make myself actually start using them.  After that initial burst of activity I always go back to using more full featured software running locally on my machine.  Same story for Meebo and web-based IM solutions.

(8) Google Analytics.  I've got this installed on a few of the sites we run and pretty much never look at it.  It's got great features, but I find the user interface really frustrating. I'm perpetually confused when I use Google Analytics and that is not a good place to be.

Please feel free to set me straight in the comments.  Or add to the list.

We recently completed a "mini-study" that examined the websites of Canada's top 20 newspapers.  We discovered that Canada is yet another country where newspapers are lagging in their adoption of Web 2.0.  Here are the newspapers we looked at, followed by their weekly circulation figures, as of March 2005, courtesy of the Canadian Newspaper Association:

Toronto Star: 3,236,655
The Globe and Mail: 1,970,216
Le Journal de Montréal: 1,909,510
La Presse, Montréal: 1,504,772
*National Post: 1,447,475
The Toronto Sun: 1,355,969
*The Vancouver Sun: 1,095,975
*The Gazette, Montreal: 1,004,983
*Ottawa Citizen: 973,347
*The Province, Vancouver: 923,135
*The Edmonton Journal: 913,026
Winnipeg Free Press: 879,502
*Calgary Herald: 873,574
The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax: 731,031
Le Journal de Québec: 716,676
The Spectator, Hamilton: 643,275
The London Free Press: 617,508
Le Soleil, Québec: 599,095
The Edmonton Sun: 511,404
*Times Colonist, Victoria: 509,887

What's interesting about this list is that the newspapers with asteriks before their name are all part of a network of papers that are tied to Canada.com, and all share the same website layout and features.  Also, the Globe and Mail offers a mobile version that is accessible from cell phones and other hand-held devices.  Here is a graph summarizing the results of our research:

As you can see, the Canadian newspapers are seriously lacking in functionality, and appear to be tools for recycling print content. Very few of the papers have content unique to the Web or online functionality.

Here is a graph comparing the Canadian results with the American results:

Canadian papers were closest to their American counterparts in terms of registration and offering forums/message boards.  However, it must be noted that while many American newspapers require their readers to register online, this registration is free. For Canada, however, most content is locked and is available only to people with paid online or print subscriptions.  In addition, the Canadian reporter blogs were usually sub-par, resembling online reprints of reporter columns.

Finally, here is a graph that summarizes and compares the results for the US, Canada, Japan, and Italy.  Due to the varying nature of this research, each country study was conducted over a different number of papers.  Japan's figures are out of 21 papers, Italy's are out of 25, the US and Canada are out of 20.  Also, I left the UK out of this graph because it only considered 10 papers.

You can view coverage of our other newspaper studies here.

We’re looking for programmers to help with the development of ImpactWatch, Graphhopper and our other internal products.  Job description is below.  If you are interested send an email with your resume to jobs@bivings.com. 

Don’t usually post jobs to our blog, but we figured why not.

————————————

PHP Programmer

Washington, DC-based Internet communications firm seeking experienced and skilled PHP/MySQL programmers for development of company’s suite of web-based products.

Minimum 3 years of PHP web development experience. Strong knowledge of relational databases and database design required. Knowledge of PERL, JavaScript, AJAX, and/or SQL a plus. Undergraduate degree required, preferably in computer science.

No overseas inquiries. Compensation commensurate with skills and experience.

www.bivings.com

I'm a little late to this party, but last week Pronet Advertising put together a list of 10 Things You Should be Monitoring.  Jeremiah Owyang added numbers 11-17 and Joseph Jaffe added numbers 18-23.  Shel Holtz even set up a page of the New PR Wiki where people could collaboratively add to the list.  I figured I'd add to the list based on my experience monitoring through our ImpactWatch platform.  Note that my contributions are mostly specifics building on some of the concepts others discussed.

(24) Search Term Volume.  Track how many people are searching for keywords that impact your company and watch how it changes over time.  This can be done using tools like Google Trends or through Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing accounts.

(25) Search Term Rank.  See how high your company appears for key search phrases.  Obviously related to #24.

(26) Relevant Wikipedia Entries.  See how relevant Wikipedia entries are evolving over time.  You can subscribe to the RSS feed for entries so that the changes come to you.  If you decide to edit or complain, be transparent about it.

(27) Third Party Influencers.  For some, it is important to know everything certain individuals/institutions say about your industry as a whole.  For publicly traded companies, that might be financial analysts covering your industry.  For technology companies, this might be Walt Mossberg or Michael Arrington.  For others, this might include thinks tanks or trade associations.  Figure out who they are and read what they are saying.

(28) Key Stakeholders.  Employees were mentioned in the original list.  For some companies it might also be useful to track coverage of partners, suppliers, and other stakeholders.

(29) Press Release and/or Blog Post Pickups.  Many large companies seemingly produce a press release a day.  The effectiveness of these releases at actually generating press should be tracked so you can see if they are worth the time/effort.  Same applies for blog posts, if your company has a blog.

Note that I don't think every company should track every item I've listed above (or every item on the full list).  Some of the items I've added are only really relevant for specific industries.  But I think the cumulative list that has been developed could serve as a great starter kit for those implementing a monitoring program.

According to a Reuters article, the 1,753 residents of the farming village of Hansdehar have chosen to connect to the world via the Internet, in hopes that the Indian government might take notice of the poor condition of their infrastructure. From a link on smartvillages.com,  Internet users can see pictures of the village, read profiles of the residents,  learn about the specifics of the infrastructure problems of Hansdehar.

The website was the brainchild of Kanwal Singh, a former web developer for the Chandigarh government. His mother's house will be the set up for the first Internet station in the village. Once the connection has been established, the Internet will enable residents to seek out opportunities they would not have otherwise known existed.

 A number of residents already know what they would like to do on the Internet. Here's a sample:

• Get better prices for their crops by trading on the National Commodity & Derivatives Exchange
• Publish an academic paper on mathematical theory and philosophy
• Find a marriage partner
• Apply to college
• Unite with other rural villages that have been ignored by the government.

We've heard from a few bloggers that are conducting research into the features of newspaper websites in their own countries in response to our look at U.S. papers.  We should have a few new reports to highlight in the coming weeks.  Two of the bloggers are taking a collaborative approach to the research and have set up Wikis to facilitate things.  If you have the time and language skills, give them a hand.

(1) Philippe Borremans from the Conversationblog has set up a Wiki to perform the research in Belgium.

(2) A blog called Wortfeld has set up a Wiki for the research in Germany (this is all in German).

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.

Around six months ago I wrote two posts (1, 2) about whether the world's largest PR firms had official, company sanctioned blogs.  I decided to loop back on this research to see if any companies had started blogging in the interim.  This time I also looked at the Technorati rank of each the blogs.   For the uninitiated, Technorati calculates the popularity of a blog by analyzing the number of incoming links a blog attracts. Although not perfect, this is a pretty good way to access the popularity of a blog.  Lower ranks are better.

In doing the research this time I was looking specifically for blogs that were linked to from the main website of the PR firm.  I know that individuals within all these companies are blogging.  The point was to find blogs that are supported and sanctioned by the PR firms.

Enough throat clearing, here is a chart showing the results, sorted by Technorati rank. If the company has a blog that I could find I have linked to it.

*Edelman links to a variety of blogs from their site. The rank listed here is for Richard Edelman's blog, which is listed first and the most represenative.  Obviously I know Micropersuasion is a Top 100 blog.

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