Personal Democracy is running a series this week on the role technology played in the 2006 elections and what role it will play in future elections. They asked a group of “technologists, politicos, bloggers, and journalists” to send in their take on the issue.

The best take I’ve seen so far (including my own) was from David Weinberger, a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and coauthor of the Cluetrain Manifesto.

“The old quip about AI applies: As AI succeeds, it’s no longer counted as AI. In this cycle, what was groundbreaking two years ago now seems normal. Bloggers help shape the discussion. Sites aggregate info about who’s raising money from whom. Candidates have blogs. Campaigns post YouTubes. They use the Internet to organize feet on the street. They raise money through email. And, they avoid talking about the details of their proposals by mumbling the URL of their Web site. The Internet transformation is well under way.”

You can read the first set of submissions here (mine is in this batch) and the second set here.

The Society for New Communications Review hosted their Inaugural Symposium and Gala last Wednesday and Thursday in Boston. I attended and am happy to report that your favorite blog, The Bivings Report, won SNCR's coveted Award of Merit in the Business category ! It is a great feeling to be honored by one's peers, particularly on a team effort like our blog.

SNCR followed their awards and anniversary ceremony with a really interesting symposium on, you guessed it, new communications. Highlights, extremely biased my own by personal and professional interests, are below:

• Paul Gillin gave an interesting summary comparing blogs and social media to traditional media.

New media: Outsource everything, leverage free content, involve the community, go after niche markets, market virally, low overhead, few staff, new web creating a robust set of operating principles, little to no barriers to entry.

Old media: Large infrastructure, supported by very expensive advertising, increasingly relies on blogosphere for niche news content, broader markets, subjective editorial decision-making necessary, significant barriers to entry.

If you want to dive really deep into this sort of thing you might want to check out Paul Gillin's book, The New Influencers when it's published early next year. His study comparing new media to old, was quite compelling, and was the first time I had heard so many things that I've come to take for granted strung together in such a logical way.

• SNCR had a panel of executives from IBM, EDS and Novell discussing blogging a la corporate. Topics included policies and monitoring of employees blogging publicly, internal behind-the-firewall corporate blogging successes and policies, brainstorming via blogs, and public blogging in highly regulated environments. Of particular interest to me was the different ways in which blogs were being leveraged internally in organizations, and the new corporate challenges that blogs are giving corporate communications and PR professionals.
   
• I met with Ted Shelton, CEO of Personal Bee, and one of the sponsors of the event, who was kind enough to give me a personal presentation of his new news aggregator. It's got some great ideas — if you can imagine a categorized feed aggregator, where the categories are created and added to socially, with the results presented in a combination of tag clouds and meme-type groupings then you get the idea. The interface is really slick, and is one of the coolest news products I've seen lately. Anyone interested in RSS feeds or news aggregators should definitely check it out. We might have a review on that one for you soon so stay posted…
   
• A panel of university communications executives explained how they had all tried to leverage student blogging as a recruitment tool with varying degrees of success. While corporate communicators can hammer blogging policies home, this panel reported having a hard time dealing with the transparent nature of blogs and trying to keep the image of their university intact.

• There was a discussion on selling the idea of blogging to corporations and the challenges involved there.

• Finally, there was a discussion on the use of copyrighted music in podcasts and the legal implications of doing so. It seems that the jury is still out on this one, but if you podcast, I would strongly advise against using copyrighted work as part of your podcast without consent.

SNCR will be posting the individual panelist findings and the case studies of the other award winners if you're interested in reading more about them. I can't seem to find them online yet, but will post a brief entry when they're up. I had a great time and would strongly encourage other web communicators to check out their next symposium.

Newsassignment.net has a great list of nine ways citizen journalists can cover the election. The piece points to two sites that let users predict the results of the elections, “Midterm Madness” at The Washington Post and Predict06.

Interestingly, Predict06 goes so far as to aggregate the picks of all user to see if the crowd can pick races better than the pundits. We’ll see.

We've just published the second in a series of reports on media favorability in the Connecticut Senate race. The race isn't nearly as close as it was a couple of months ago, but come election day surprises are always plentiful! Even so, as a niche case study in media favorability on a major Senate race, we think it's probably one of only a handful out there. We used our ImpactWatch(TM) web platform to generate this report — those interested can obtain access to a demo showing the nuts and bolts of the system here.

Key findings in our second Connecticut Senate race report covering the period from October 1, 2006 to November 5, 2006:

• Campaign Tactics, a category we created for articles about overall strategies employed by the candidates, particularly advertising strategies, was the most written about subject with 18% of all articles.
• The subject most written about in the last reporting period, the war in Iraq, was written about in 16% of the articles in this reporting period.
• Overall, coverage for both Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman was predominantly negative at 47 and 48% respectively.
• Local Connecticut publications favored Ned Lamont in the Campaign Tactics and Iraq War subject categories much moreso than national publications which tended to slightly favor Joe Lieberman.
• Poll results seem to directly affect the overall positive or negative media coverage of a particular candidate in a very significant manner.

To view the full report click here. We blogged about our previous report here.

The following graphs illustrate some of the trends in coverage available within the full report.

Lieberman Favorability Breakdown: 

Lamont Favorability Breakdown:

Lamont vs. Liberman Average Favorability: 

Crowdsourcing has been all the rage in the tech community the last few months. The term was coined in a June 2006 Wired Magazine article and describes a circumstance where “volunteers and/or low-paid amateurs use their spare time to create content, solve problems or even do corporate R&D.”

Following are some notable examples companies using crowdsourcing:

• Google Image Labeler allows users to help Google improve their image search results by labeling pictures with appropriate tags.
• Amazon’s Mechanical Turk “enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do.”
• Gannett recently launched an initiative that will use citizen journalists to help the organization gather news on a daily basis.
• The Texas Border Patrol recently launched a website that allows any citizen to watch the TX/Mexico border online and report suspicious activity.

I find these projects fascinating. Interestingly though, political campaigns have been using crowdsourcing for years to help influence swing voters and get out the vote. Now we just have something to call it. (more…)

Idealog reports that three or our top 10 political videos are no longer active on YouTube. Our modest top 10 list is a sad casualty of the inevitble legal chess match brought on by Google's purchase of YouTube. All of us at The Bivings Group will observe a moment of silence on Monday on respectful memory of Jon Stewart's Series of Tubes segment.

After revisiting some of our data from the political campaign study we conducted earlier this summer, I realized that many candidates have added blogs to their websites since our original research. Here is a list of all of the Senate candidate blogs (the italicized blogs did not appear in our original research).

• George Allen (R, VA)
• Pete Ashdown (D, UT)
• Sherrod Brown (D, OH)
• Maria Cantwell (D, WA)
• Jack Carter (D, NV)
• Bob Casey (D, PA)
• John Ensign (R, NV)
• Orrin Hatch (R, UT)
• Jean Hay Bright (D, ME)
• Mark Kennedy (R, MN)
• Ted Kennedy (D, MA)
• Ned Lamont (D, CT)
• Joe Lieberman (I, CT)
• Claire McCaskill (D, MO)
• Allen McCulloch (R, NM)
• Mike McGavick (R, WA)
• Bob Menendez (D, NJ)
• Barbara Ann Radnofsky (D, TX)
• Rick Santorum (R, PA)
• John Spencer (R, NY)
• Debbie Stabenow (D, MI)
• Michael Steele (R, MD)
• Rich Tarrant (R, VT)
• John Tester (D, MT)
• Jim Webb (D, VA)
• Sheldon Whitehouse (D, RI)

(more…)

So this is kind of weird.

There has been a big flap over at Techcrunch regarding how they select the hot start up companies they cover. Basically, Techcrunch wrote an article about a company called Maya’s Mom and did not cover one of its competitors, Mother’s Click. The folks at Mother’s Milk got angry and accused Techcrunch of writing about Maya’s Mom due solely to a personal relationship Techcrunch’s Mike Arrington has with the founder of the company.

You can read the original article from Techcrunch’s Mike Arrington about the situation here and a follow up post here.

But what’s really interesting is that Mother’s Milk’s PR firm, SHIFT Communications, has posted a thinly veiled entry absolving themselves of responsibility for the situation. They explain that the client is to blame for the situation.

It sounds like they are right and that the client is to blame here. But still.
As a consultant myself, I can say with absolute certainty that I wouldn’t have made the post that SHIFT Communications made. I just don’t think the post serves any purpose beyond making the client look bad and the PR firm look good.

Am I a dinosaur? Is this sort of openness by consultants the future? I tend to think there is still a place for discretion. What do you think?

After 200 of Enron's internal emails were placed in the public domain by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioned (FERC) back in 2003, innovative software company Trampoline Systems created the Enron Explorer based on their own SONAR platform. In the Enron case, SONAR was able to illustrate existing social networks and information by analyzing email content from the entire organization during the 1999-2003 time period. Though the 200 emails that became part of the investigation are not representative of every part of the company, the sample does give insight into internal communications at the highest levels at Enron before, during and after its collapse.

(more…)

Paid Content has a tiny bit of scoop on Daylife , a news startup that will "soft launch" this coming Monday. What Daylife is exactly is clear as mud. Here's the generic description Paid Content offers up:

"The mission is to gather and organize news in ways that are most relevant to the user. That could be by event, topic, author, geography or other factors. Source pages that show what a journalist writes about or who is quoted are part of the mix."

If forced, I'd guess it is a more journalism-centric version of social news sites like Digg, Techmeme and Newsvine. And no, I don't know what that means really. Regardless, get ready for the hype. The list of investors and advisors is filled with big names in the tech and journalism communities. They include Jeff Jarvis (Buzz Machine), Craig Newmark (Craig's List), Mike Arrington (Techcrunch), Dave Winer (Scripting News) and a little organization called the New York Times Company. I'm looking forward to giving it a test drive.

A recent study from Nielson//Netratings found that there are more Republicans than Democrats online. Of U.S. adults surveyed, 36.6 percent identified themselves as Republicans, 30.8 percent as Democrats and 17.3 percent as Independents.

This makes perfect sense given that other studies have shown that Republicans tend to earn more money than Democrats. The more money you make the more likely you are to have Internet access.

Here are some other tidbits from the study:

• The websites that attracted the highest percentage of Republicans were RushLimbaugh.com (84.8%), NewsMax.com (65.4%), BillOReilly.com (65.4%) and the Drudge Report (59%).
• The websites that attracted the most Democrats were BlackAmericaWeb.com (79.8%), AOL Black Voices (64.8%), BET.com (58.6%) and Salon (55.3%).
• The Wall Street Journal was the most Republican newspaper in terms of demographic breakdown (40.2% Republican and 25.8% Democrat) while the New York Times skewed the most toward Democrats (52.3% Democrat and 18.3% Republican).

Based on the sites named, it’s clear the survey only looked at mainstream media sites and didn’t dive into the blogosphere. Be interesting to see the breakdown for the most popular political blogs.