Splogs are to blogs as spam is to emails.  It's a scam, a growing problem on the Internet, and splogs are threatening to pollute the blogosphere.  They seriously challenge efforts to monitor real conversations in the blogosphere.

There's a very good article in the September 2006 issue of Wired (in print, not yet online) by Charles Mann about the increasing menace posed by Splogs. Here are a few highlights for your enjoyment or disgust, depending on your perspective:

• Some 56 percent of active English-language blogs are spam, according to research by Tim Finin at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County
• He also found that splogs account for about 3/4(!) of the pings (or links telling the network that a blog has been updated) from English-laugage blogs
• David Sifry of Technorati.com acknowledes that spam is doubling every six months
• In Decemeber 2005, Blogger.com, the blog hosting site, was home to more than 100,000 sploggers (those who splog), according to Mitesh Vasa, a splog researcher
• Vasa also found 10 million of the 12.9 million profiles on Blogger to be inactive, fertile ground for sploggers — and also good evidence of the overbound hype as to the size of the blogosphere
• Examples of splog sites include debts.com, lasvegasvacations.com and photography.com (worth a visit, but watch out, each time you click on a link, you're helping the sploggers to make money)
• 9 out of 10 comments on blogs are spam, according to investigations by the founders of WordPress, the software that powers this blog

Splogs are here to stay.  There's too much money to be made, especially since hyperlinks are now a form of currency.  Everyone, who should be, is alarmed and looking for solutions.  So far the solutions aren't that pretty; they inevitably take away the interactivity and openess of Web 2.0.  Quoting Mann from the artilce's final paragragh:

"Asked what impact he thinks splogging will have on the future of the Web, Some Title (a prominent splog) creator Goggins pauses.  'I'm just making my living,' he says. 'I guess I don't think about that kind of thing very much.'"

Kids everywhere are going to hate me for saying this.  But, with the summer winding down, the smell of school is in the air.  That's right, the back-to-school shopping season is almost upon us.  And for kids heading off for their freshman year of college, back to school shopping is getting more and more complicated every year.

Let's travel back in time a couple of years to 2001 when I started college at Fairfield University in Connecticut.  I made the usual trip to Linens and Things, buying bedding and odds and ends for my dorm room. On top of that, I purchased the Dell desktop computer recommended by the school (it crapped out before the end of the first school year) and about $500 in textbooks and other school supplies.  I brought an old printer with me that my Dad had laying around the house for about 4 years.  No MP3 player. No laptop. No digital camera. No new cell phone. No video games.

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The biggest flaw in the way blogs are structured is the near total emphasis on the newest posts.  The obsession with the new means that posts sitting in your archive just aren't read that often.

Problogger has a great article with tips on how to get more people to look at older posts on your blog.   One of the tips is to include a list of your most popular posts somewhere on your site.  As you'll see from our sidebar, we've already done this.  However, we only started this feature in May and the plugin we are using doesn't include data from before then.  

Given that, here are our 5 most popular, pre-sidebar posts:

1. The Age of the Internet: Ruining Reputations in Record Time
2. Web Design Matters
3. Top 10 Ways Trade Associations Can Employ New Media Techniques
4. Do PR firms blog? Not so much
5. Reweaving the Political Web: E-campaigns and Hard Money

 (1) The print circulation of the top Japanese newspapers is staggering.  The five largest newspapers in the world in terms of circulation are all from Japan.  The largest Japanese paper, Yomiuri Shimbun, has a circulation of 14,067,000.  To put that in perspective, the largest paper in the United States, USA Today, has a circulation of 2,310,000. 

(2) Every single newspaper site we looked at in Japan when conducting our study offered some form of special service designed to serve content on cell phones.  In most cases, this takes the form of a cell phone version of the website that users have to pay and subscribe to separately.  Sixteen of the twenty one Japanese papers we looked at offers this kind of service.  Goes to show how fundamentally different Japanese newspapers and Internet habits are from ours in the U.S.

Mark Glaser from MediaShift has written a great article about the spontaneous sister studies bloggers from around the world put together in response to our look at the use of the Internet by U.S. newspapers.  Below are some snippets.

Story Intro:

On August 1, The Bivings Group released a research report of how the Top 100 U.S. newspaper websites were implementing features such as blogs, podcasts and social bookmarking. (I summarized the findings here.) By August 10, three bloggers located outside the U.S. took it upon themselves to do a similar study of their own country’s top newspaper sites to see how they stacked up to their American counterparts. And one German blogger set up a wiki  to track results for German newspaper sites.

On why it took off:

So why was this such as successful foray into ad hoc open source reporting? I think it was easy for anyone to gauge the features on a newspaper site by just poking around and tallying their offerings. It didn’t require calling up people to survey them or other more time-intensive or expensive research techniques. You just list the results, create a graph, and presto! — you’re an online media research expert.

On the benefits limitations of a collective approach:

Of course you might miss something, and with no centralized controls, mistakes might happen. But with centralized control, mistakes happen, too. Plus, you can count on others — especially online newspaper publishers themselves — to correct the record where possible.

The full story is worth a read.

As a complement to our study on the use of Web 2.0 tactics by the top 100 U.S. newspaper, we took a look at how the twenty largest Japanese newspapers are using the Internet.  Overall, we found that Japanese papers are not taking aggressive Web strategies (except when it comes to cell phones), and are behind their American counterparts in terms of Web offerings.  The study speculates that the lack of adoption of these tools by Japanese newspapers is a result of the structure of the Japanese newspaper industry itself and the unique newspaper culture in Japan.

Here are some of our key findings:

• Only four of Japan’s top 21 papers are using RSS feeds. In comparison, 17 of the top 25 American papers offered this technology. In both the United States and Japan, none of these RSS feeds included advertisements.
• Almost all of the Japanese sites had pages dedicated to cell phone access.  From looking at the results it could be argued that the widespread distribution of content via cell phone has made it less neccessary for Japanese papers to use RSS.
• Just five of Japan’s top 21 papers offer reporter blogs. In contrast, 23 of the top 25 American papers have blogs on their websites.
• The most widely used Web feature on the Japanese websites was video. Eleven of the 21 websites offer this technology.
• Just one Japanese newspaper, the Shizuoka Shimbun, required registration to read online content. In contrast, nine of 21 American papers required registration, with some charging a registration fee. The Shizuoka Shimbun’s registration was free of charge.

Here is a graph showing the results of our study, comparing the top 21 American and Japanese newspapers.

You can download our full study here.

You can find links to sister studies performed in the UK, Italy and New Zealand here.

Our media monitoring product, ImpactWatch, has always been able to accept and display non-English news articles.  But we recently had a client that wanted to take things a step further and create a version of ImpactWatch entirely in Japanese (navigation, drop downs, everything).  We just finished the work (see sample screenshot below) and the infrastructure improvements we made mean that we can now rapidly deploy ImpactWatch in just about any language a client requires.

The other cool thing here is that for global companies we can create versions in a variety of different languages (say Spanish, English and Japanese).  Each individual user within a company has the ability to to choose which language they want ImpactWatch to render in. 

Anyway, good stuff.

John Voelcker, an interactive media strategist, released a review of the top ten technologies that are changing the world. His list is based on technologies developed by social entrepreneurs who thought through the development , usability and financing of their solutions. 

Voelcker's list is as follows, followed by summaries (based on his paper) of what these products actually do:

1. The Enviroloo by Enviro Options (Pty) Ltd of Kya Sands, South Africa.

Sewage treatment poses a problem in the developing world. People are exposed daily to disease carrying insects and contaminated water. In response to this problem, South Africa-based Enviro Options Ltd. introduced a new system, the Enviroloo, which uses heat and ventilation instead of a water-based system.   

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Rolling Stone has a story on their blog about YouTube's role in exposing and spreading the now infamous George Allen Listening Tour video.  Here's a quote from the article:

There’s a paradigm shift under way and politicians like Allen, and to a lesser extent Joe Lieberman and Barbara Boxer, are learning it the hard way. The barriers to video broadcast are now gone. So an opposing campaign no longer has to rely on a local news station or CNN or CSPAN to run video of a gaffe. Any dolt with a handicam now can capture the unscripted reality of a candidate and disseminate it worldwide.

If it generates enough buzz in the blogosphere, the cable networks will even pick it up, as happened almost immediately with Allen’s monkeyboy dig.

All that sounds great and true.  There is only one problem: didn't the Washington Post break the story after the Webb campaign released the video to reporters?  I think this was more a case of the blogosphere picking up on a mainstream press story than vice versa.

Regardless, I think it's pretty much guaranteed that more citizen journalist produced videos will pop up in the next few months and potentially impact the 2006 election. 

Hello dear reader and welcome! Last week we launched the marketing site of Graphhopper - a new and cool offering from The Bivings Group that is based on our ImpactWatch graphing engine.

We are in the pre-launch stages of Graphhopper, but we are continuing to develop and test graphhopper before we release it into the wild.

We hope to offer you a simple way to create great looking Flash-based graphs in a few easy steps. We will host your graphs for you for free, making it easy to post graphs to your website or blog. No more redrawing graphs by hand, battling Excel or paying for expensive graphing programs.

I will try and post regularly and talk about the experience of launching this new product. Feel free to email me with questions and check back ocassionally for updates.  Oh, and make sure you Sign Up for Beta!

So I'm writing this post using the beta version of the blog authoring tool Windows Live Writer, which you can download here.  I really like this piece of software and am going to start using Live Writer to draft all my blog posts.  (Note: don't bother if you use a Mac.)

Windows Live Writer is a downloadable application that allows you to write blog posts using a WYSIWYG editor.  You can update/post directly from Live Writer to your blog, meaning you don't have to do battle with the slow and clunky HTML editors that come prepackaged with blog software packages like Wordpress.  Live Writer has a couple of advantages over other similar tools I've seen:

(1) As mentioned it is a downloadable application.  Being a laptop user that works primarily from one machine, I prefer something that I can run locally.  Web based application are great in theory, but oftentimes they are slow and more prone to crashing than a local application.

(2) It produces pretty clean HTML and actually tries to work with the style sheets you are using on your blog.  A lot of the programs I've tried before produce mangled code and my posts end up requiring massive clean up.  So far so good with Live Writer.  It also downloads your Wordpress categories so you can put the post in the right place on your blog.

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The Washington Post published an interesting article on Sunday about Google's Book Search function.  With the University of California recently adding its massive library to the book-scanning process, this idea of creating a comprehensive digitized library of all the world's books seems like a reachable goal.  This move, which opened the University of California's network of 100 libraries and some 34 million books to Google's scan-and-search framework is a landmark event in Google's quest of digitizing every book ever written.

The Issue

Google Book Search, originally dubbed Google Print,  was the basic idea on which Google creators built their franchise in 1996.  After getting distracted by indexing the entire World Wide Web and earning massive amounts of money, the Googlers returned to their original goal of digitizing books in 2004.

The search function was originally developed as a marketing tool for publishers and authors.  Under this structure, the Google team gained permission from publishers to scan books into a Google database.  Users can now conduct a search online, and their results consist of various books that include the search term within the text of the book.  Citations are provided, along with snippets of text with the search terms highlighted.  Links are provided to publishing companies and bookstores so that users can buy the books online.  In many cases where permission was obtained from publishers, books are shown in their entirety on the Web.  Publishers can track their stats on Google to see how many people are reading their books online, are given the opportunity to "opt out" of the service at any point, and can even make some extra money from Google ads.

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As a current student of Mandarin, I've been looking at the resources the web has to offer to help extend my classroom learning.  The result of my search has been a few sites that are using innovative strategies to help foreigners learn Mandarin and, hopefully, turn a profit in the not too distant future.  The Bivings Group has an extensive network of non-English speakers to cater to our foreign clientele and, as an internet-focused enterprise, are always looking for innovative, global solutions to help in our work and to better our human capital.

The first is an as yet unlaunched site called chinglish.com that has been getting some good reviews (and some bad).  The idea behind chinglish is to provide a combination translation and webmail application (with some other goodies thrown in) that will turn the most mundane and boring ff tasks (reading e-mail) into an opportunity to learn Mandarin.  I think the concept here is simple and powerful.  As someone who can spend hours on email every day, this has the potential to subtly turn a burdensome chore into a continuing learning lesson.  I'll report back when they open their doors.

The other site I'd like to talk about is ChinesePod.com.  I've been using their services for a few months now and am pleased with their direction.  The feature I find most useful is the daily podcasts of audio lessons, which are each either beginner, intermediate or advanced in nature.  Each podcast tackles a different situation, usually a real-world example of a conversation someone might have (asking for discounts at a store, haircuts, getting a date….).  They also offer the occasional video which follows roughly the same line of attack as their audio podcasts.  Perhaps the most intriguing aspect, but one I'm not overly familiar with since I'm still focusing on oral vs. written Mandarin, is their dictionary and flash card sections.  Essentially, any word (character) you're having trouble committing to memory can be tagged and put into a personalized database.  You can then draw on this database to create online flashcards so you can practice.  As far as business models go, chinesepod also has a brick-and-mortar operation in Shanghai so this is an excellent example of how the internet can help draw in "real-world" customers from a free service (the flash-cards require a monthly fee arrangement however).  The site is rounded out with a community feature that features blogs, wikis, forums and a community RSS feed where you can add your blog to the Chinesepod site

So we just launched a redesign of our main website, www.bivings.com, as well as our blog, www.bivingsreport.com. Below is a screenshot of the new www.bivings.com.

We've been contemplating a redesign of the main Bivings site for a couple of years, but the path forward only became clear the last few months.  When thinking about a redesign previously we fell victim to our own ambition.  We had grand plans and wanted to create something that was perfect.  This sort of led to paralysis.  We didn't follow our own advice, which is to focus on usability and design that serves the content.  

We finally started making progress when we shifted the focus to our blog.  We decided to keep www.bivings.com really simple and not to overwhelm folks with lots of brochure content they don't want to read anyway.  We brought our blog content front and center.  Our goal with the new site is to tell the story of our company a little bit every day by writing about the projects we are working on and the things we are passionate about.   We think this will be much more effective than producing some sort of slick, heartless brochure site.

Anyway, we hope you like it.  Let us know what you think it he comments.

Oh, and more on the whole Graphhopper thing to come soon.