Gerry McGovern publishes a weekly email about the web, customer service, and how to improve website/intranet performance.  It’s a good read; he really should have a blog.  In his latest installment , “WORDS THAT WORK: SEARCH WORDS VERSUS WEBSITE WORDS,” Gerry highlights a new book by uber-pollster Frank Luntz, who claims that people are changing the words they use describe certain things.  Here are a few examples form Gerry’s list, taken from the book (i believe):

Ok, nothing dramatic here; we’ve heard them all; except maybe for the English “mum.”  However Gerry did a little poking around with Overture (Yahoo Search Marketing), He found out that in December 2006:

Some 730,958 people searched for “used car,” while only 949 searched for “pre-owned vehicle.”

Nearly 73,000 people searched for “housewife” (122,000 searched for “desperate housewife”), while only 43 searched for stay-at-home-mum.

Over 30,000 searched for “gay marriage” while 19,000 searched for ” same-sex marriage”.

While about 17,000 people search for “impotence”, over 100,000 search for “erectile dysfunction.”

This little bit of research is suggestive; and adds another dimension to Luntz’s work.  We all know that word usage changes; some changes are accepted, other not.  For instance, “flight attendant” and “server” have, almost, replaced “stewardess” and “waiter/waitress,” respectively.  But I’m not sure “pre-owned” is ever going to overtake “used”.  It’s no surprise that “erectile dysfunction (ED)” is more common than “impotence” given the barrage of ads on the TV over the past years for Viagra, etc.

Perhaps many such changes are for those words and phrases we use in public, in political discourse, in formal settings — the speech of political correctness, in a sense.  But when we’re alone at our computer using Google or Yahoo, “we revert back to older, more basic words. Words that might be cruder, shorter and simpler,” as Gerry wrote. 

And through Google and Yahoo, we’ll be able to chart such changes in word usage over time.

We've been a bit preoccupied here at TBG with the emergence of a new crop political websites.  Taking a break from politics,  here's a quick roundup of some nifty little Web apps that I found recently. 

Visual Page Rank

• Ever wonder what links get the most traffic on your webpage or blog?  When you type your URL into Visual page rank, this tool shows your the Google PageRank for your site and all the links you provide.

TeleFlip

• This program allows you to send messages from a computer to any cell phone.  You just type in the recipient's cell phone number, followed by @teleflip.com, into any email program, then type a brief message.  The recipient gets your email as a text message.  I tried this out with my own cell phone, and it only took about 7 seconds for the message to reach my phone.

TagMaps

• This service combines Yahoo! Maps with Flickr.  Just type in a location and float your mouse over a spot on the map, and any Flickr pictures tagged with that location show up on the right hand side of the map.  Here's a search for Washington DC.  You can also embed TagMaps in your blog.

3-D Digg

• View and surf Digg stories in 3-D flash.  Honestly, I'm not exactly sure what the point of this is or how it works, but it is pretty cool nonetheless.

Shelfari

• Social networking meets books.  This sort of reminds me of the networking functionality on Netflix, only with books instead of movies.

iJigg

• Digg meets music.  On this site, you can listen to, vote on, and share songs, but don't expect to download them.  You can only listen on the iJigg site.

Goodbye Gutenberg: Sensing the Change

• Harvard fellow Jon Palfreman on how the Internet might help save journalism. Key quote: “Before the Web, storytelling was platform specific. Newspapers and magazines focused on text and photos, radio told stories with audio, and television dealt with moving pictures and sounds. Each platform has its tools and specialized skill sets, advantages and disadvantages. The Web forces these platforms to integrate. Today’s best media Web sites are multimedia productions combining text, stills, audio and video.”

10 Things You should Know About WordPress 2.1

• A breakdown of the key new features in the latest version of the blog platform, Wordpress. Version 2.1 will be released sometime today on Wordpress.org.

Beltway Blogroll: Blog Readership on Capital Hill

• The National Journal breaks down which blogs Capital Hill staffers read the most often.

Five Link Building Strategies That Work

• Article from the great Copyblogger about how to get more links to your blog.

Politico to Launch Tomorrow

• New online-only news outlet covering the whole politics thing will launch on January 23rd (tomorrow).  I’m sure we’ll do some sort of review.

Over the years I’ve signed up for every online political mailing list known to man as part of my job, so it was no surprise that I got an email this morning from the Brownback campaign about his candidacy for President. But I was surprised at how poorly executed the email was.

Here is a rundown of the major issues:

(1) The “from” address of the email is brownbackforPresident@cfourstrategies.com. I have no idea what cfourstrategies.com is and half of me now thinks the email is fake. When sending this sort of official correspondence, it has to come from an email address running off the official campaign URL - brownback.com in this case. Otherwise I’m going to assume it is a scam.

(2) The request for money calls in the email link to this page, which also isn’t on brownback.com. In and of itself, that is ok. Lots of campaigns host their donation pages on third party sites. But when the email doesn’t come from the official campaign URL, alarm bells go off again. The suspicion is made worse by the fact that nowhere in the entire email is there a link to the main campaign website. That is a pretty shocking omission. And the donation form itself only has a link to the Brownback site at the very bottom of the page. At worst, this is making me think this email is fake again. At best, I’m thinking this is a campaign solely focused on getting my money (no conversation here).

(3) When you actually do visit brownback.com, you are redirected to some long URl hosted off the domain t-worx.com. The resulting site looks official, but I half think it is a fake too since it is not running from the main campaign URL - brownback.com.

When you combine all these problems together, you end up with an email/web program that seems more like a Paypal scam than official campaign correspondence.

Hillary Clinton formally announced her entry into the 2008 Presidential race today. And like Tom Vilsack, Senator Clinton appears to have spent some time with the Cluetrain Manifesto (”markets are conversations”).

The tagline “Let the Conversation Begin” is plastered all over her site and she begins her annoucement video with this quote: “I’m not just starting a campaign, I’m beginning a conversation.” I hope Cluetrain authors Chris Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger are getting some royalties here.

The site itself is pretty good. I’m a big fan of the look and feel of the Clinton website, just like I was a big fan of the five or six Senatorial candidates who used pretty much this exact same design in 2006 (most are down or have been edited heavily, but you can see the similarities on Maria Cantwell’s site).

In terms of features, here are the things I found noteworthy:

• As a way of facilitating the “conversation”, Clinton will be participating in live webcasts at 7:00 pm EST January 22-25. Seems like a good idea.
• The site’s blog apparently isn’t ready yet, but Clinton is asking users to write posts on their own blogs sharing “your ideas on how we can work together for change.” I guess the Clinton campaign will pick the best entry and highlight that as their first blog post. This is sort of a clever idea. If it works, Clinton will get a bunch of bloggers writing lover letters to her on their own sites in an effort to win the contest. How viral. Not sure many political bloggers will take the bait though.
• The site includes an online fundraising feature called Hillraisers. Basically, this functionality allows volunteers to run their own online fundraising campaigns. This is a great idea in theory (and great for bloggers/people with websites). But in reality if a friend of family member emailed asking me to give money to a political cause I literally could not delete the email fast enough.
• Clinton’s site also features a party planning feature which allows users to plan their own Clinton-themed event. It is sort of interesting that no one is using Meetup.com anymore for stuff like this. It seems like every campaign I saw that did this last cycle had built their own event planning module.

Others on the announcement:

• Buzz Machine: Clinton & Brownback: A tale of two tapes and Hillary on video, Brownback in the pulpit
  
• Blog PI: A Sign of Things to Come
• Patrick Ruffini: Hillary’s In
• Think Progress: ANALYSIS: A Comparison Of How Presidential Contenders Have Engaged The Netroots
• David Weinberger: Hillary’s conversational site — and why house parties are not MeetUps
• Poynter Online: Running for President? No Press Conference Necessary
• Fred Wilson: A Return to Royalty?

The Pew Internet and American Life Project released a new study this week about trends in obtaining political news online.  The results were pretty interesting, but predictable, given the rise in user-generated Web content.  Here is a summary of some of the study's important points:

• The number of Americans relying on the internet for political news doubled from the 2002 mid-term election and grew fivefold in the past decade:

• Relatively young broadband users say the internet is a more important political news source than newspapers.  35% of those 36 and younger said that the Internet was their most important source of political campaign information, compared to 18% that cited newspapers.
• 23% of campaign internet users became online political activists, meaning that they wrote blogs, forwarded other bloggers' posts to another person, created political audio or video recordings, or forwarded other people's audio or video recordings to another person.
• Republicans and Democrats were equally likely to rely on the Internet for political campaign news.

This study clearly shows that the Internet has become a premier source of political campaign information.  The results beg an important question: how are potential 2008 presidential candidates making use of this growing dependence on the Web for political information?

To answer this question, I decided to take a close look at 12 websites: these site belong to politicians who have officially announced their 2008 candidacy or who have formed presidential exploratory committees.  I conducted the survey much the same way as I did our original campaign study, altering the criteria somewhat and keeping in mind that many of these sites are probably placeholders for future content and are not yet fully populated.

Here is what I found: 

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Today we added a new section to our corporate website called The Lab.  Over the last year we’ve completed a number of studies and written a number of articles about topics we’re interested in.  The Internet’s Role in Political Campaigns.  How newspapers and magazines are using the Internet.  Stuff like that.

We’ve highlighted all these materials on our blog in the past, but we wanted to create a permanent home for this stuff so that people can more easily find it.  So check it out. 

And for those of you who haven’t followed us that long, I’d recommend you take a look at our 2002 studies on the use of the Internet by political candidates.  Some tidbits to whet your appetite:

• Only 29% of House and Senate incumbents running for reelection had campaign websites in 2002. 
• Only 42% of House and Senate incumbents with websites accepted online donations.

Times have changed a little, huh?

When I saw Senator Barack Obama’s annoucement video yesterday, I was impressed by the Flash video player the campaign is using.  I’ve looked into this before, and the Flash player Obama is using has the critical features I look for: (1) subtle design, (2) the ability to email the video, (3) permalink and (3) embeddable HTML code.  I’ve embedded the player below so you can take a look:

It turns out the Obama campaign is using a service called Brightcove for their videos.  I took a look at Brightcove and it seems like a great service. 

Interestingly, one of the features that sets Brightcove apart from its competitors is their emphasis on the management of consumer generated content.  Brightcove has a set of powerful tools that allow you to invite users to submit their own videos to your account.  You can then review the videos and publish the ones you like to Brightcove and/or your own website.  It is cool stuff.

Obviously you can do the same thing in homemade fashion using YouTube.  But Brightcove gives users a bit more control over the process and gives you access to the videos in a variety of formats. 

Speculating wildly, I’d say the choice of Brightcove is a decent clue that the Obama campaign might be experimenting with consumer generated video down the line.

Update: I see on Techmeme that Brightcove announced topday that they have raised an additional $59 million in venture capital money. Here is their press release and here is GigaOm’s story on it.

Update 2: It looks like I’m not the first to take notice of Obama’s use of Brightcove. Beet TV has more information. Here’s the key quote:

"Beet.TV has learned that Brightcove’s arrangement with Obama will be multifaceted.  It will include ongoing publication of campaign videos, the creation of a Obama "channel" on Brightcove and a syndication function which will allow bloggers and Web sites to have campaign clips published directly on their pages."

On the heels of John Edward’s announcement of his Presidential ambitions on YouTube, Senator Barack Obama posted a video announcing his candidacy on his website.

The video is embedded below:

BlogBurst is a service that makes content from a pre-screened group of blogs available to a network of publishers, including the likes of USA Today and Reuters. We signed The Bivings Report up with BlogBurst right when it launched in May in an effort to get more folks to read our content. Since then we’ve had a few stories picked up by Reuters, which has generated a lot of headline views (around 850,000) and a modest number of post views (around 1,500).

From our perspective, there is no real downside to BlogBurst. That is 1,500 post views we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. The more people that read our stuff the better.

Then today I got an email from BlogBurst saying that during the fourth quarter of 2006 we were their 45th most popular blog based on headline views. They also offered us $100 as a reward, with the option to donate the money to charity (Periwinkle Foundation) or keep the cash for ourselves. After reading up on the Periwinkle Foundation, we chose to donate the money.

Obviously, $100 is nothing for a full quarter of blogging. But seeing as we signed up for BlogBurst for exposure and not money, it is a nice bonus.

Here is a list of our posts that have been picked up by Reuters so far, from most to least in terms of headline views.

• MySpace Welcomes Magazines
• AP Names Top 10 YouTube Videos in ‘06 (But Forgets the Video Part)
• Want to be President? Step 1: Buy a Video Camera
• Print Media Websites: Who’s Getting it Right?
• Reporting from the “Trends in Political Blogging” Panel
• The Results are in!
• In-Text Ads – Ensuring Contextual Appropriateness
• Hotsoup is a mess
• What is Daylife?

One of the best blogs around is written by New Yorker reporter and author Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell posts around once a week about his books (Blink and The Tipping Point), his latest New Yorker article or some other topic that strikes his fancy (like the NBA or racism).

The blog is quite successful. It attracts intense discussion and is 1,526th most popular blog on the Internet according to Technorati.

The most interesting thing to me about Gladwell’s blog is the way he uses it to hold discussions about his New Yorker articles. As an example, here is a link to an article Gladwell wrote about the Enron case. He subsequently wrote two (1, 2) follow up blog posts. The blog posts attracted around 200 reader comments combined.

The whole thing is sort of terrific. Gladwell gets feedback on his articles (which every writer wants) and readers have a place to to share their thoughts on what they read.

It’s a great example of how reporters and magazines should be using their websites to complement the articles they publish.

Unfortunately, none of this discussion is happening on the New Yorker website, which doesn’t offer any way for readers to comment on or discuss articles. It’s too bad. More than any other magazine perhaps, the New Yorker could generate some great discussions.

• What the Chinese Want to Know
  Interesting list of the top search terms for 2006 on the Chinese search engine Baidu. Thankfully Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears’ don’t dominate Chinese thoughts they way they do those of Americans.
• Microsoft takes email design back years
  Outlook 2007 will handle HTML emails in a vastly different manner than previous versions of the email program. If you are sending out HTML emails, you should look at this list of what is and isn’t supported and run your emails through Microsoft downloadable email validator. This is a big deal.
• The XYZ of ABC
  Blog PI wonders if and when Republican online fundraising site ABC PAC will catch up with it’s Democrat counterpart, ActBlue. Mike Turk and Patrick Ruffini also weigh in. The biggest problem here for Republicans is that two years passed before someone took the initiative and developed a response to ActBlue.
• Huffington Post to Host Presidential Debates?
  The political blog the Huffington Post is trying convince Democrat and Republican presidential candidates to participate in online debates on the site. I don’t think it will happen. Second Life is a more likely venue.

After the fifth book of the Harry Potter series was published, Francisca Solar decided JK Rowling's version of the story wasn't good enough.  She was so dissatisfied with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix that the then 21 year-old Chilean journalism student decided to write her own "fanfiction" sequel.  Entitled Harry Potter y el Ocaso de los Altos Elfos (Harry Potter and the Decline of the High Elves), Solar published her 756 page novel on FanFiction.net.  According to the BBC, Solar's story was viewed over 80,000 times and received positive reviews from all over the world:

"When I read the fifth book, I was so disappointed - I'm a very critical reader, and I'm a huge fan, so the expectation of this fifth book was great," Solar said. "I took the principal characters and I did a story that is more rich than Rowling's story, because you can have access to the thoughts and feelings of all of the characters…Many people from all around the world have written to me, from the US, from the UK, from Asia," she said. "All these people wrote to me about the fanfic and said they liked it more than the official sixth book (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince)."

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Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney launched the first iteration of his campaign website recently and it is underwhelming.

I am certain that the Romney campaign has big plans for the site. But as someone who develops websites for a living I can tell you that the features you choose to include (and exclude) on launch say a lot about where you are headed. Based on the feature set, the strategy behind this site seems much more appropriate for 2004 than 2008.

Here are my main criticisms of the site:

• The design of the site is sort of generic and soulless. Lots of American flags and such. I actually think the site looks nice and professional. It just doesn’t say anything about who Romney is or what he plans to do for the country.
• The site doesn’t include a blog or any way to have a conversation online with the candidate/campaign. There are tools that encourage users to join the campaign, donate money and sign up friends for campaign updates. In other words, they have features that allow you to participate in the campaign in very focused ways, but not in the messy, Web 2.0 manner of the John Edwards campaign. No Facebook group. No MySpace profile. No link to their YouTube account. It’s as if the last few years never happened.
• The video section is great from a design perspective but the content isn’t compelling to me. The name of the section, Mitt TV, says it all. You’ve got a bunch of slick, professionally produced content that looks like it was originally developed for television. It is most definitely not a video blog. It would be much more interesting if the campaign were to buy a video camera and record stuff behind the scenes that actually shows who the candidate is. Kung Fu Quip has a good post on the problem here.

Based on how they are using YouTube and podcasts for crisis response, it is clear that the Romney campaign has an understanding of how to use the web in this day and age. Unfortunately this understanding isn’t evident from the first version of their campaign website.

A mock up of the Google homepage done in the Yahoo! design style is making the rounds today. Steve Bryant, who put this together, did a great job on it. But let’s just say I’m of the definite opinion that Google has been smart to keep things simple.