We launched a couple of new features yesterday sort of on the sly.

(1) We put up a Wiki (what's a Wiki?) that will serve as a companion to The Bivings Report.  At it's most basic level, the Wiki will provide a place where readers can collaborate and expand on some of the ideas we discuss on The Bivings Report.  Down the road, we'll be attempting to conduct some collaborative research on our Wiki. 

Currently, you can contribute to our listing of PR Firms that Blog or add your ideas to our piece on Ways to Improve Newspaper Websites. 

Stay tuned.

(2) We added a link on our sidebar that you can use to email us ideas for posts or products/services you think we should look at.  Or if you just want to talk.  Either way. 

Both ot these features appear in the Collaborate area of our sidebar.

The future is bleak for Sony's Playstation 3.

The BBC reported last week that the European release of the Sony Playstation 3 will be delayed until March 2007.  This not only means that Sony will miss the highly profitable holiday season, but it will most definitely lose out in profits to the Nintendo Wii and XBox 360, which was released last year.

According to Ken Kutaragi, head of Sony's global computer and entertainment division,

"Mr Kutaragi blamed the European delay on problems in mass producing elements of the high-definition Blu-ray disc drives in the machines."

Sony still plans to release the new game console on November 11 in Japan and November 17 in the US, but due to the delayed European release, its sales forecast for the year has been cut in half: Sony only expects to sell 2 million units by the end of the year, down from its original estimate of 4 million.  The production problems have caused Sony officials to anticipate fewer units available for the American and Japanese release of the system, with just 100,000 units being made available for the Japanese launch and 400,000 available for the American launch.  This is the second time the release of PS3 has been significantly delayed: original plans scheduled the release of the console in the spring of this year, but other problems with Blu-ray technology prevented this early release. (more…)

Four years ago, MIT made a committment to sharing the educational materials from all of their undergraduate and graduate courses online, making it free and accessible to people around the world. More than 1400 courses from their OpenCourseWare site , ranging from Aeronautics to Nuclear Sciences to Writing and Humanistic Studies is available through written syllabi to video lectures. There are also interactive web demonstrations and complete MIT authored textbooks available for study. 

One of the best outcomes of this initiative is that it has inspired a number of other universities around the world to offer some of their own materials online to the general public.

Some examples of available courseware online:

• The University of Washington, Course in Practical Cryptology. This course has made all the videos, presentations, quizzes and homework assignments online.
• Stanford University, iTunes LecturesIn collaboration with Apple, Stanford introduced a number of lectures on a Stanford version of iTunes . (more…)
  

Way back when, I wrote a post about the undoing of James Frey and his memoir, "A Million Little Pieces."

We all know the memoir was a lie, a total fabrication.  I wondered at the time what might happen, whether the publisher would fess up and give readers a refund.  Well they are going to it seems, but of course, only after being sued.  In fact, it's basically a total recall — for a defective and falsely advertised product.

You can find more details of the refund at this blog here .

Our recent post, 9 Ways to Improve Newspaper websites, has received a great deal of blogger response in the past few weeks.  TBR's most popular post of all time, "9 Ways" was linked to by over 120 blogs, according to Technorati.  Below is a roundup of some of the most insightful responses to our suggestions for newspaper website improvements.

Adrian Holovaty:

“So much of what local journalists collect day-to-day is structured information: the type of information that can be sliced-and-diced, in an automated fashion, by computers. Yet the information gets distilled into a big blob of text — a newspaper story — that has no chance of being repurposed.”

(more…)

We've posted frequently about the impact video sharing sites like YouTube are having on politics. Sometimes it's better to show than to tell. So here are ten political themed videos that have made the rounds on YouTube. They demonstrate the power YouTube can have in catching politicians in “oops” moments and spreading funny/weird videos that appear on CSPAN and Comedy Central.

(10) Senate Robert Byrd sleeping through a Harry Reid speech….

(more…)

We have some really exciting news: we have reached an agreement with Moreover Technologies to begin to use their online news content in ImpactWatch, our flagship media monitoring service. For those not in the know, ImpactWatch is a web-based media management platform used by a large number of public relations and corporate communications professionals. We are proud to announce that Moreover now joins other high-volume media content providers such as Factiva and VMS in helping to provide our ImpactWatch clients with a truly global combination of news sources, tools and information that give our clients a simple way to visually track, gather and analyze global news content.

After an exhaustive study of all the major online content aggregators out there, we settled on Moreover as we felt they provided the highest quality and most versatile service available to provide our clients with the kind of flexible, quality media monitoring solution they require.

Moreover has in fact been around for about as long as ImpactWatch, which is another reason we felt compelled to team up with them – it was important to us to choose a product that we felt had really proven itself in the marketplace. In the realm of media monitoring and reputation management, new products seem to come out every week – with the release of the fifth complete work-over of the ImpactWatch software just around the corner the software has gotten to the point where it is really user-friendly, scalable and extremely stable.

Anyone interested can see it themselves by entering their name and email on the the ImpactWatch demo form to sign up for a demo.

If you needed information about your city, it makes sense to head over to the metropolitan website to begin figuring out what's what. A research study by Cleveland State's Leo Jeffres and UConn's Carolyn Lin appears in Indiana University's Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. The study examines how the websites of the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the US represented their cities and how well their websites communicated with the public, both residents and visitors, through their sites. The researchers found that while some websites offer quite a lot of useful information, they still have a ways to go to be perfectly useful, especially since the Internet is recognized as a superior platform for democraticizing society and fostering community. 

Jeffres and Lin are, in their investigation, asking a larger question, of whether or not the internet can (and has so  far) help(ed) build and support community and engagement in civic life for a variety of stakeholders, not limited to current and prospective residents, business owners and tourists. In this study, they directly ask whether or not the sample of 50 major metropolitan websites offer the kind of diverse information/content one would consider of great importance to the abovementioned stakeholders. (more…)

I’m not sure how I missed this, but the Washington Post recently launched a political ad campaign database called Mixed Messages. It looks like the Post will be trying to catalogue all the political ads produced by the various candidates/national committees this cycle.

They’ve done a really nice job with this. The database allows you to view ads based on all sorts of criteria such as state, tone, issue, candidate, etc. (see below). Only thing I would like to see is a little code that would allow web developers/bloggers to imbed the videos on their own site. And maybe a better interface for actually playing the videos. Of course, I also don’t have to pay the Post’s bandwidth bill.

Via holavaty.com.

“Yes, America, the Buffalo Bills are back, like the neighbors who won't leave, like the horror movie villains who die but keep returning to terrorize Metropolis…” - Rocky Mountain News, January 26, 1994.

It was almost 13 years ago, and I was only 15 years old back then, but the memories of those four Superbowl losses still pain me.  I usually keep those depressing images tucked deep down in my long-term memory, suppressed so that I do not have to live with the anguish on a daily basis.  Unfortunately, a colleague of mine drew my attention to the Google News Archive recently, and the urge to review the past of my beloved team was too strong to ignore.  

I ask you - what did this urge for a nostalgic stroll through the past get me?  A reopened wound, with salt thrown on it for good measure.  A missed last minute field goal.  An embarrassing blowout loss.  A national call for my team to stop mucking up the Superbowl for everyone else in the country.  Alas, a tear emerged from the corner of my eye, and a little bit of my soul rolled down my cheek.

In all seriousness, the Google News Archive is an incredible window on the past that provides a broad view of events as they unfolded, from different regions and varying perspectives.  I think that it will be a tremendous tool for students doing research for school papers, people trying to gain a better perspective on the events and reporting styles and biases of the past, and saps like me that want a trip down memory lane.  It is unfortunate (but understandable) that most of the content I found on the site required payment to view the whole article (a couple of bucks in most cases). The titles and brief summaries still paint a pretty good picture at least.  

Regardless, it is definitely worth checking out.  Just be careful what searches you conduct.  You may find yourself reliving something from the past that you may or may not want to re-experience.  

With a young, inconsistent quarterback like Losman at the helm, it may be quite some time before I get to watch my Bills lose another Superbowl.  Or even a playoff game.

In a pretty gutsy move, Joe Lieberman’s campaign launched a blog with open comments right at two months before the election.

And in the least suprising development pretty much ever, open warfare has broken out in the comments area of the blog between Lieberman supporters/haters.

I think this would have worked a lot better had it launched before the online discussion around this race had gotten so poisonous.

Yesterday the Democratic National Committee launched Party Builder, a social networking tool attached to their main website, www.democrats.org. This comes on the heels of a similar effort the Republican National Committee launched a while ago called MyGOP.

Party Builder is a nice, full featured tool. The folks behind this did a good job. It just raises two questions for me:

(1) Do people really want to do full on social networking on a website hosted by a political party? I’m not convinced they do.

(2) Is it really a good idea to build a proprietary social networking tool like this when there are so many other options? Inevitably, the DNC effort is going to be clunky when compared to tools like Friendster, Facebook and MySpace. They don’t have the resources to compete with commercial ventures in this space. Maybe a better path would be to partner with existing social networking sites and/or to build add ons (widgets) people can attach to their profiles. Go to where the people already are instead of trying to bring them to you two months before the election.

A screenshot of the dashboard after the jump. (more…)

Our recent discussions about the national and international newspaper industry got me thinking: I wonder how network news sites measure up? Are the sites of some of the United States’ most popular news networks better or worse than those of their print competitors?

(more…)

The Los Angeles Times recently launched a branded RSS reader called Newspoint. The idea here is to introduce RSS to the masses by providing users with a simple tool they can install on their machines and start using RSS even if they don’t really know what it is. Conveniently, once installed the reader automatically subscribes you to seemingly all of LA Times’ various feeds.

This is not a bad idea. Its potentially a really great idea if executed well. The problem I have is that the Newspoint RSS reader is sort of terrible. Here is a breakdown of the major issues I had with it:

(1) Newspoint only shows you article headlines. So partial and full text RSS feeds are turned into headline only feeds by Newspoint. The goal here is clearly to drive clicks to the LA Times website so they can serve more ads. It doesn’t make for a good feed reading experience, as your constantly going back and forth between Newspoint and your browser when trying to read stories. It’s clunky. (more…)

There has been some buzz on the blogs about former VA Governor (and future Democratic Presidential candidate) Mark’s Warner’s appearance in the virtual world Second Life. A transcript of the apearance can be read here.

The last year has seen more and more marketers and PR folks experimenting with Second LIfe. The hype is pretty breathless. So it was only a matter of time before some big name politicians jumped on the trend. Given the mostly positive coverage, I figured I’d take a look at this from a more critical perspective. Here are my thoughts:

(1) It was a great idea for Warner to give this a try. He is the first big name to dive in and the blog pickups he has gotten alone make it worth the effort. Congrats to his team.

(2) Second Life doesnt’ yet have the critical mass of users needed for these virtual townhalls to be effective beyond the PR stunt value. Second Life currently has 610,000 subscribers. Most Americans haven’t heard of it and would have no idea how to participate. The fact is in person appearances, telephone-based townhall meetings and even online chats are more effective ways to actually have discussions with voters. Those formats are actually accessible and don’t require you to register with and master Second Life.

The first few politicians that dive in will get press and brand themselves as people who “get it” in terms of what is happenning on the web. That is probably all they are really looking for anyway. But after the dust clears I’m skeptical of the real value of these superficial, drop in appearances by politicians.

(3) The content of the appearance wasn’t compelling. Warner was asked some softballs and answered them the way you would expect, saying very little. I think “getting it” online has less to do with using the latest toys than it does talking to people in a real way. Have a conversation and act like a real live human being. It will be interesting to see how things go in the next appearance when Warner promises to take questions from actual people (this first appearance was simply an interview with a moderator).

As John Edwards said at his appearance at Gnomedex:

I’m trying to retrain and recondition myself when I get asked a question to actually answer it — to not say what I’ve been trained to say, to not say what’s careful and cautious.

Giving your stump speech on Second Life isn’t going to do you much good. Just like publishing your stump speech as a blog entry isn’t going to do much good. With all this “new media” stuff, to be effective you’ve got to embrace the spirit of it in addition to mastering the technical details. Just showing up isn’t going to be enough in the long run.

Update: Here is a link to a video clip of the appearance. Like I said, not super compelling.