I got the following email from Frank Chi, a college senior and the communications director for a new organization called Students for Barack Obama.

“Hi Todd, my name is Frank Chi and I am a college senior and communications director for a newly formed national grassroots campaign, Students for Barack Obama, a political organization born out of Facebook.com….With over 24,000 members online, we just launched our website and held a rally outside the New Hampshire hotel where Sen. Obama was last Sunday. When we first started this Facebook group it was intended for a bunch of students at Bowdoin College in Maine, nothing big, and 3 months later 24,000 Facebook members are part of it and it is growing by the hundreds everyday. After organizing for weeks, we’ve translated online activism and support from a social network like Facebook into a real, political structure urging Sen. Obama to run for president.”

Politicians are sticking their toes in the shallow end of the pool and setting up their own Facebook profiles. But I tend to think organic efforts like this will have more of an impact than any candidate-driven initiative.

I saw this morning on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that the New York Times, one of the world's leading newspapers, added a new feature to its website. As of this morning, people reading New York Times articles can share their favorite articles on the popular social media sites Newsvine , Digg , and Facebook.

The Seattle PI notes that this is the first time the New York Times has used any kind of sharing or discussion tools on its articles. However, sharing NYT articles is still made difficult by the fact that the paper requires free registration to access most articles on the site.  I have a feeling that most people that use Newsvine and Digg are not going to want to bother with this registration in order to share NYT articles.  In order for external bookmarking to be truly effective on the NYT site, the paper is going to have to get rid of registration.

This partnership has advantages for both the Times and the social media sites. For the Times, adding this bookmarking feature will help create online discussion around the paper's articles, bringing these articles to the forefront of online news. For the Digg and Newsvine, including New York Times articles will add credibility to their news and potentially increase traffic on the sites. This is especially important for Newsvine, because it is the smallest of the three sites included in the New York Times partnership.

Despite offering these sharing tools, the New York Times is not completely opening its site. The external bookmarking options will not be available on the TimesSelect articles, reporter blogs, or wire articles. Regardless, it is still a major step forward for the Times, and shows that the paper is open to creating a more Web 2.0-friendly online environment. It will be interesting to see how these bookmarking tools affect the way New York Times readers get their news. Will they ignore these bookmarking tools? Or will these tools attract new readers? It's hard to tell, but if this effort is successful, I'm sure we will see more papers adopting the social media bookmarking strategy.

For more info on newspaper websites and online strategies of newspapers, check out our study, The Use of the Internet by America's Newspapers . 

If you're like me and like to cook and eat good food but can never decide what to make, there are two websites that you should definitely check out.  All Recipes.com and Yahoo! Food are two online communities that bring together Web 2.0 -minded cooks and food lovers.

All Recipes.com is loaded with great features.  Where Yahoo! Food is very search and tag - oriented, All Recipes.com has a heavy focus on connecting people and enabling them to share recipes and ideas.  Among other things, this website allows you to:

• Search recipes by meal type, cuisine type, occasions, and specialty  categories (vegetarian, kid-friendly, etc.);
• Conduct a search based on the ingredients you have in your kitchen (up to four ingredients) while excluding certain ingredients you don't want in your meal;
• Create a free account where you can save and store your recipes;
• Review and rate recipes; read the ratings other members have given recipes;
• Print out recipes in 3×5, 4×6 or regular format to best fit your own personal recipe box;
• Share ideas, tips, recipes, and advice with other members.

Overall, this site does a fantastic job of integrating Web 2.0 with a theme of cooking and cuisine.  It's easy to use and has some very tasty recipes listed. 

Yahoo! Food is built on the same basic premise as All Recipes.com, but is slightly more developed.  This site includes a ton of videos and also includes discussions and articles from well-known celebrity chefs, including Rachel Ray, Mario Battali, and others.

While Yahoo! Food is less focused on social networking than All Recipes, its tag-based and popularity-based organization makes it a great tool for finding recipes and food ideas.

This site also goes beyond the discussion of food to including tips for throwing dinner parties or holiday events.  It's also organized around the most popular items: on several of the site's pages, the focus is on the most popular searches, videos, or recipes.  For example, the toolbar labeled "buzz" appears on all the site's pages and presents a tag cloud for popular search terms. 

The site's other search functions are very intuitive and useful.  For example,  the "quick recipe" search function works really well -  you can type in ingredients or the names of recipes. Either way, the search results are spot-on.  The "recipes" page is organized into several categories, and each category has its own tag cloud (pictured at right).  Finally, at the end of each recipes, you have the option to email the recipe, rate the recipe, write a review, or view similar recipes.

One interesting note- it appears that the two sites work in some kind of partnership.  On the Yahoo! Food site you might notice the citation "Technology in partnershp with AllRecipes.com".  AllRecipes.com was the precursor of Yahoo! Food, which was just launched recently.  I am wondering if both sites will continue to exist or if Yahoo! Food will attempt to replace its sister site AllRecipes.com.  It seems like Yahoo! Food also works with "Every Day with Rachel Ray", Martha Stewart, and EatingWell.com for recipe content. 

These sites are two fantastic examples of how social networking and Web 2.0 can be used for purposes other than just personal relationships.  If more organizations and companies (ahem….newspapers and magazines) would take cues from sites like Yahoo! Food and All Recipes.com, I think the quality of online media would improve immensely.

Now if only these sites offered free food samples……

The 2006 cycle is in the rearview mirror and the 2008 Presidential campaign is already ramping up. Given that, I figured I’d take a quick look at the contenders and speculate as to how aggressively they will use the Internet in their campaigns. We’ll start with the Democrats (I’m working from this list).

Evan Bayh

Bayh has a pretty good site for his Political Action Committee - All American PAC. The site’s blog is updated daily and features a blogroll and allows registered users to comment. Bayh has a YouTube account and an extremely active Facebook profile (there are 16 Bayh related Facebook groups). Bayh has also posted discussion topics on Gather.

Bottom Line: The Bayh campaign has shown an interest and aptitude for new media (blogs, social video, etc.). I think Bayh will run a pretty compelling online campaign in 2008.

Joe Biden

All we really have to go on here is Biden’s PAC site - Unite Our States. It is pretty standard stuff. He’s got a nice mini-site about his plan for Iraq and the PAC site does include a blog. But the blog is written anonymously, doesn’t allow comments and doesn’t link to other blogs. There are eight Biden related groups on Facebook but he doesn’t have his own profile.

Bottom Line: Judging from the PAC site, I don’t think the Biden campaign will be breaking any new ground.

Hillary Clinton

Clinton had what I think was the best Senate campaign website of the 2006 cycle. It is still up and running - I suspect they are in the process of retooling it for the Presidential run. It basically had every feature you could think of - a store, fundraising campaigns, team building, event planning, etc. The only thing it didn’t have was a blog. Clinton took a hands off approach to the liberal blogosphere last cycle, although she had a blog consultant that probably did a great deal of work behind the scenes. Interestingly, the 2006 Clinton website almost seemed like the kind of site the Bush campaign would put together - it was top down in nature and focused more on giving out marching orders than on collabaration and discussion.

Clinton has a profile on Facebook and there are 356 Clinton themed Facebook groups. Note there are just as many people organizing against her as in support of her though.

Bottom Line: Clinton is going to have a great, full featured website in 2008. However, I’d expect her to run a cautious campaign online. Online, she’ll run like a favorite and try to avoid being dragged to the left by liberal bloggers.

Chris Dodd

Dodd has a personal website up and running that looks like the beginnings of a Presidential site. It looks nice, but is pretty much the definition of a brochure site. No blog. Nothing to do really except give them money or join their listerv. There are seven Dodd related groups on Facebook but he doesn’t have his own profile. I don’t really know anything about Dodd’s previous web efforts.

Bottom Line: Not really much to judge from. But I’d guess the Dodd web presence will be competent, but uninspiring.

Barack Obama

Neither Obama’s personal website or his Senate site are particularly compelling at this point. They are both professionally done but there just isn’t much to them. And I honestly don’t remember much about Obama’s 2004 Senate site. But interestingly, Obama is a successful podcaster. Obama has the 16th most popular News & Politics podcast on iTunes and is the most successful podcasting politicians by a ways. What’s particularly impressive here is that it is an actual podcast created specifically for the web and not just a collection of speeches rebranded as a podcast. Obama has a Facebook profile and there are 255 groups devoted to him.

Bottom Line: Not much to go on really, but if forced I’d guess Obama will use the web as his own personal media outlet. He’ll create a lot of web-specific content with the intention of speaking directly to voters without the filter of the media.

Bill Richardson

Richardson’s campaign site for his 2006 run for Governor in New Mexico is still up and it is sort of fascinating. From the New Mexico inspired graphics to the pictures of Richardson dressed up as a cowboy, it is clear that Richardson isn’t afraid to show a little personality. Besides the design, the most prominent feature of the site is it’s blog, The Plaza. It features a DailyKos style Diaries section where users can maintain their own blogs on the site. So he’s trying to build a community of users here and in the process is giving up some control. Richardson does not have a Facebook profile.

Bottom Line: I’d look for more quirkiness from Richardson and for him to continue to emphasize community building.

I’ll do a preview of the web programs of Wesley Clark, John Edwards, John Kerry of Massachusetts and Tom Vilsack next week.

The New York Times reports today on a new study from the University of Chicago on the political bias of newspapers. The study found that newspapers are indeed politically biased, but that the slant reflects the feelings of the paper’s subscriber base. Here’s the key quote from the Times’ piece:

The authors calculated the ideal partisan slant for each paper, if all it cared about was getting readers, and they found that it looked almost precisely like the one for the actual newspaper. As Dr. Shapiro put it in an interview, “The data suggest that newspapers are targeting their political slant to their customers’ demand and choosing the amount of slant that will maximize their sales.”

Give the people what they want I guess.

[Via Buzz Machine]

Back in August, the Washington Post announced a Blogroll Program. Basically, the Post is encouraging bloggers to submit their sites to the new Blogroll Program. The Post will weed through all the submitted blogs and choose the best of the best.

The blogs that are chosen will then be included on a rotating basis on the Post homepage and in their blog directory. In addition, the Post advertising team will help sell advertising on the blogs they list in their directory.

Apparently, the program is gearing up as they have launched their own blog abut the program and sent out an email saying they are starting the process of sifting through the 1,200 blogs that have been submitted so far. Note they might want to give that blog a look in Firefox 2.0 - it ain’t pretty.

Today Steve Rubel unveils Edelman’s take on the social news release, Storycrafter (note lots and lots of others are doing similar work). I like it. I’d rather get something like this than an old fashioned press release. But two quick thoughts:

(1) Regardless of the format, the key with press releases IMO is to produce very few of them. If you are putting out pointless press release every day reporters are going to tune you out no matter how cool or evolved your format. It’s about interesting content more than format.

(2) Why not just release your news on your blog? That’s what we do for ourselves. When you get down to it that is basically what Edelman is doing. They have cleverly deconstructed the content of the press release and added a bunch of features common on blogs. And that’s it basically.

Update: Here is a link to a competing service, PRX Builder, and to Phil Gomes’ post about the Edelman product.  SHIFT Communications developed a template for the social news release previously.

There is a new site called Fake Your Space that allows users to pay 99 cents to have “hot” men and women post comments to their profiles on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook (see “Sly” to the right). You can even tell them what to write!

I guess the idea is that if you have fake hot friends, real hot friends are sure to follow.

I hope this is a joke and turns out to be fake. Otherwise it is a pretty clear sign of the apocalypse.

<Via Monkey Bites>

CNBC relaunched its website a few days ago after being offline for six months due the expiration of its deal with Microsoft. Here is a quick look at the Good, the Bad and the Ugly on the redesigned site.

The Good

(1) According to Techcrunch, the site will have between three and eight hours of fresh video content available each day. A web show called “Market in a Minute” will summarize market happenings twice per hour. Sounds good.

(2) Most CNBC anchors appear to have their own blogs on the site that are being updated nearly every day (see Phil LeBeau’s blog here). You can search for tags, sectors and companies across blogs. This makes it easy to access all blog entries that mention, say, Microsoft.

(3) CNBC Plus will allow users to watch live CNBC TV content from their computers for $9.99 a month. That is not that interesting to me, but for business users this might be a good option.

(4) You can easily save/submit CNBC content to Digg and del.icio.us (see right). I’m not sure the content here lends itself to those sites, but it is worth a try.

The Bad

(1) The design of the site feels heavy and, well, old. The whole thing has that Microsoft/MSNBC.com feel to it. The site is also very slow.

(2) Given the video focus, it is disappointing that the only option is to play Windows Media Player versions of the videos. If you are only going to offer one video option, it seems like it should be Flash given the success of YouTube and others with that format.

(3) There is no way to comment on staff blog entries (or any other site content), although they do have a weird feature where they invite you to sent them comments via regular email. As far as I can tell there isn’t any really any user generated content on the site.

(4) I don’t see anything in the company profile area (Microsoft example) that would cause people to switch from sites like Yahoo Finance (example) and Google Finance (example).

The Ugly

(1) The search is completely broken. You can see the results for a sitewide search for “Autozone” on the right (which is that there are nor results). This despite the fact that there is clearly an Autozone story on the site homepage. Searches for Microsoft also produced no results.

(2) The Video section has a promising Most Viewed feature that presumably allows you to access the most popular videos. Unfortunately, when you click on this link it says there are no results. So I guess that is broken as well.

We've been somewhat critical of newspaper and magazine websites in the past few weeks.  Two of our studies, "The Use of the Internet by America's Newspapers" and "The Presence of Magazines on the Internet", concluded that newspapers and magazines aren't maximizing their presence on the Web.  By using a larger number and variety of Web tools, we fell that magazine and newspaper websites can be significantly improved.

This doesn't mean that all newspaper/magazine websites are terrible.  In fact, I've listed here some sites that do some things on the Web quite well.

• Best Use of RSS Feeds:  The Houston Chronicle does a great job of  making its RSS feeds clearly available from its home page.  While this may seem obvious to some, a large majority of newspaper sites make users go through several clicks to access the site's RSS feeds.   The fact that the Chronicle makes them accessible directly from its homepage is somewhat unique.
• Best Blog Network:  The Boston Globe has an enormous network of journalist and citizen blogs that cover a wide variety of topics.  Definitely worth checking out, especially if you live in the Boston area.
• Best Use of Bookmarking:  For newspapers, the Washington Post  is a great example of a site that gives users a variety of options for external bookmarking.  For magazines, Sports Illustrated is the only publication that allows both internal and external bookmarking options (users can save articles on their si.com account or their facebook account). 
• Best Commenting Features:  There are a few newspapers that have fantastic mechanisms for user comments on articles.  For example,   on the Philadelphia Inquirer website, users cannot comment on every article.  But the site does enable comments on popular articles about local news or special interest items.  On the main section pages, articles with commenting functions are highlighted by a special icon.  The Morning Call and the Virginian-Pilot take a different approach, allowing comments on just about every article on the site.  Also noteworthy is the commenting functions for The Guardian (UK).  This publication has a separate site dedicated to user comments, called Comment is Free.
• Best Use of Tags:  We found three magazine websites that used tags:  US Weekly, Popular Science, and Parenting.  All three sites have tag clouds on their homepage, which makes searching for article pretty easy.

The great use of these features is encouraging in that it shows that not all publications are clueless when it comes to the Web.  Some magazine and newspaper websites are, in fact, starting to get it right.

Know of any other interesting uses of Web 2.0?  Let us know!

By now, we've all heard the unfortunate tales of injury and destruction that have come as a result of playing the Nintendo Wii. If you haven't, I suggest visiting Wii Have a Problem, a blog dedicated to reporting wacky Wii-related stories. The site has video footage of broken screens, ranging from laptop monitors to 40 inch LCDs; pictures of broken Wii remotes from overzealous bowlers, golfers, and batters; and yes, even reports of tennis elbow!

While most of us may find these stories amusing (if not hilarious), Nintendo seems to be taking them pretty seriously. The company had the foresight to include with the Wii a detailed safety manual, indicating that Nintendo predicted even the most bizarre of Wii-related injuries. Lucky for them, because if they hadn't, I assume they would be facing some pretty serious lawsuits. The safety manual warns against a variety of Wii-related dangers, including, among other things:

• Seizures
• Eye Strain
• Motion Sickness
• Console/TV Screen Damage

My personal favorite, though, is the warning that "The Wii console is a Class I laser product." Hold on, let me call Dr. Evil…I'm sure he'll want to hear about this.

These Wii-injuries are no joke. The Wall Street Journal published an article on November 25, "A Wii Workout: When Videogames Hurt", that discussed some inuries suffered by Wii fanatics, and even interviewed a doctor to get some advice on what to do about Wii-related aches and pains. According to the article, doctors advise Wii-users to "stretch out and be sure to take care of any injuries afterwards." Some Wii-players have even resorted to wearing athletic braces while playing Wii Sports. The WSJ article further reports that:

Nintendo itself warns players about this risk just before some of the games begin. A message flashes up on the screen saying: "Make sure there are no people or objects around you that you might bump into while playing." Some Wii games also have pop-up reminders every 15 minutes advising gamers to take a break.

Anyway, endless reports of injuries and TV damage are not stopping consumers from their Wii buying sprees. Since its launch on November 19, NexGenWars reports that Nintendo has already sold more than a million units in the US, although the site notes that this figure is only an estimate. In addition, the game system made its Japanese debut this weekend and was a major hit. Thousands of people were lined up at major electronics stores through the middle of the night in order to purchase the Wii. Many customers were very enthusiastic. One Japanese man even wore a home-made Wii remote control costume. When asked about his outfit, he replied, "I made this (costume) by myself yesterday. This is an homage to Nintendo."

According to BBC News, the Wii will go on sale in Europe December 8; Nintendo hopes to release 4 million units by the end of the year.

UPDATE (12/15/06):  I read on the BBC this morning that Nintendo has officially responded to the Wii remote flimsy strap issues.  According to BBC, Nintendo will replace all broken wrist straps for the Wii remote with a sturdier version free of charge.  In addition, all new Wii consoles will come with a much stronger wrist strap for the Wii remote in order to prevent future problems.  You can order a replacement strap for your Wii remote here on Nintendo's website .