We have just finished a new mini-research study in which we examined the availability of mobile features for the top 50 newspaper websites and the top 50 English-language blogs. The results were surprising. Just 24% (twelve) of blogs provided mobile content, while 54% (27) newspapers offered a mobile browsing option.

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Apple did a masterful job of announcing the iPhone at MacWorld Expo. The phone is a hit with Wall Street and consumers (me) are salivating.

One unintended consequence of Apple’s shock and awe announcement style is that the search engines are way behind. If you search for “iPhone” on Google today you get a bunch of dated results that have nothing to do with today’s announcement.

Of the top 10 results:

• 2 have nothing to do with Apple or the iPhone
• 7 are speculative pieces about the iPhone written weeks and years before today’s announcement
• 1 (the top result) is a fan blog about the iPhone that must have been started a while back

Apple’s official site is nowhere to be found in the first few pages of results on Google, although there an Apple ad that appear in the sponsored results.

It’ll be interesting if we get to a place soon where Google’s main search updates in close to real time. In the meantime, I’ll bet some of the webmasters on that first page got a nice and unexpected traffic bump today.

Screenshot of top results after the jump. (more…)

For those who care, Apple announced the iPhone today and has launched a section of its website about the new cell phone. This phone looks incredible and will probably change the way people think about and use cell phones.

For web developers, it is interesting that Apple is trying to give users a full, computer-like web browsing experience instead of the simplified browsing experience most phones go for. Screenshot below:

In the most recent volume of Communique Magazine , TBG’s Gary Bivings authored a featured article. “Watching the Web” is a great piece about how PR and marketing techniques are changing to incorporate the monitoring of various new forms of media, primarily the Web. The article cites several examples of how the Web has affected PR and customer involvement in the pharmaceutical industry, and discusses how content tracking platforms can be an effective addition to any PR firms strategy (this includes our very own ImpactWatch !).

Among other issues, Gary listed the Top Seven Online Media Monitoring Practices in his article:

1. Get involved sooner rather than later
2. Implement a platform that will track online media for you
3. Categorize online activities of target markets/information seekers–blogging, message board posting, etc.
4. Make a list of the top sites to monitor per public/target audience
5. Track site statistics (eg, how often the site is visited)
6. Track bias of various sites with regard to your product
7. Decide how you will respond to the circulation of negative information about your product

You can read the article in its entirety here.

Had some blog ideas piling up so I figured I would just do a link post. So here you go:

Social Networking Websites and Teens: An Overview
“More than half (55%) of all online American youths ages 12-17 use online social networking sites, according to a new national survey of teenagers conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.”

Just Cancel the @#%$* Account!
PC Magazine takes a look at how easy/hard it is to cancel trial membership to some prominent online services such as Netflix, AOL, etc.

Nearly Half of our Lives Spent with TV, Radio, Internet, Newspapers, According to Census Bureau Publication
A recent Census study features a lot of great stats about how people spend their time.

Time Magazine 2006 Top Tens
Time takes a look at the best websites, video games, books, cartoons, etc. of 2006.

Wireless users in the United States aren’t really using the their mobile devices to browse the Internet. At least not yet. A study conducted in April of 2006 found that 18 percent of wireless users had tried mobile Internet browsing and that 6 percent browsed the web from their mobile device regularly.

While the numbers are low, I think the emergence of the mobile Internet is inevitable. As phones get better and download speeds get faster, people will start surfing the Internet on their phones.

As a website developer, that means it is increasingly important to build websites that work on mobile browsers. Fortunately, if you are a WordPress user this isn’t much of a problem. We made a mobile version of The Bivings Report using a great plugin developed by Alex King.

To access our mobile version, simply type www.bivingsreport.com into your mobile browser. That’s pretty much it.

<Rant: All mobile websites should work this way, meaning they should auto-detect whether you are browsing from a mobile phone. Sites that have separate URLs for their mobile versions are missing the boat, in my opinion. Who is going to memorize a separate mobile URL?>

If you are a web developer working on a mobile version, you might try out this mobile phone emulator software from Openwave. It’s free and allows you to see what your site looks like on a mobile phone without having to look on a mobile device.

Democrat John Edwards has gotten a lot of attention in the blogosphere for announcing his candidacy for President on YouTube. A little more quietly, another candidate, Democrat Tom Vilsack, has launched a video blog over on blip.tv (via WP Post IT blog).

Here’s one of his recent posts where he talks about “the power of the Internet to enable conversation between voters and candidates.”

Click To Play

Sounds like he’s been reading Doc Searls, Scoble, etc, huh?

During the 2006 cycle, lots of campaigns had staffers blogging but very few candidates wrote blog entries themselves. I think it is difficult for candidates to find the time to blog. And even if they do find the time, rarely can a candidate pull off the right tone. Blogging well requires a serious time investment. It’s just not a good fit for candidates. Better to have a staffer or consultant do it.

Video blogging, on the other hand, plays to candidate’s strengths. They meet and connect with voters every day. Video blogging is a natural extension of that skill. Bill Clinton would have made a great video blogger.

I’d look for just about every 2008 Presidential hopeful to do some form of video blogging.

While I was aware of the One Laptop Per Child Project - the goal of which is to develop a lost-cost, “$100,” laptop that can be given to children in developing countries for educational purposes - I had not seen much about its progress recently until I read an article on WashingtonPost.com this morning entitled, “Low-Cost Laptop Could Transform Learning .” If you have a few minutes, I would recommend reading it in its entirety – it is not terribly long and I found it to be a worthwhile read.

It serves as a good overview of what the final product will be like, and provides sufficient background about the project itself.  There are two things in the article that I feel warrant my humble commentary.  

The first is related to the operating system developed specifically for the machine, which is nicknamed Sugar.  Sugar is unlike any other operating system that is commonly used today.  Although it is built up on Linux code, it neither resembles most implementations of it, or Windows, or Apple Computer’s OS.  The article describes its runic-oriented, journal-like organization (as opposed to a folder-centric system, such as that used by Windows) in greater detail, which you can read by clicking here.  

I have somewhat of an issue with this “innovative approach.” While I do not necessarily oppose the concept behind the OS, which was developed to be intuitive for children across myriad cultures, I do question the wisdom behind teaching children about technology on a system that is so unique that when they eventually graduate to mainstream computing (which one would assume is one of the goals of the project) a lot of their knowledge will not be directly transferable.

My second area of concern is somewhat similar, and it has to do with a quote by the project’s founder, Nicholas Negroponte.  In the article, he is quoted as saying, “…the children are being trained to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint. I consider that criminal, because children should be making things, communicating, exploring, sharing, not running office automation tools.”  

Granted, a child’s learning should be more creation- and exploration-focused than say, vocational training.  That said, Microsoft Office, like it or not, has evolved into a nearly universal tool in business and (to a somewhat lesser extent) in academia.  Therefore, what is so inherently wrong about children learning how to use these tools and then utilizing them in the creative process (other than the cost)?  To me, this reeks more of anti-Microsoft / anti-corporate dogma than a legitimate area of concern for a project such as this.

Do not get me wrong – I think that One Laptop Per Child is a great program that is innovative and will make inroads towards closing the technology gap.  No project is perfect, and I completely support these efforts.

It’s been a great year for us here at The Bivings Group. Our blog has grown immensely throughout the year, and we’ve gotten some great attention from bigger blogs and organizations. We decided to take a bit of time and highlight our Top 10 Moments from 2006 (in no particular order)

• We are the #1 public affairs blog on Technorati. No joke. Check it out here. We’re also the 17th “public relations” blog on Technorati.
• Getting mentioned on CNN’s “The Situation Room”, Buzzmachine, and Romenesko.
• Todd’s post “9 Ways to Improve Newspaper Sites“, which he entered in a contest run by ProBlogger. Not only did this post generate enormous amounts of traffic from its mention on Holovaty, but also raised interest from LA Times reporter T. Christian Miller and several online publications.
• The Nintendo Wii vs. PS3 post, which now has generated 104 comments and is the most popular post on TBR. By a stroke of luck, this post comes back as the #1 search result on Google using the terms “Nintendo Wii vs. PS3″. Thanks to Google, this post from TBR has been read by a huge amount of people. TBG has followed this up with a series of blog posts, and an Impact Watch demo that tracks media mentions of the two game systems. You can go here to sign up for a free 5-day pass to view the demo.
• Tom and Jei’s redesign of USA Today’s Homepage. While only viewed a handful of times, our designers did a great job integrating the best of Web 2.0 with a realistic newspaper design. Here is Tom’s explanation of the redesign:

“In putting this together, we included every element of the current USA Today site. We wanted to come up with something that could actually be implemented, not something so conceptual that it could never see the light of day. In other words, we didn’t take the easy way out.”

• Todd’s introduction of the TBR Wiki. Used to organize our newspaper research and comments by blog readers, The Bivings Report Wiki is a great example of how bloggers can cooperate more with their readers. The Wiki didn’t get all that much attention, but I think it was a great idea.
• Tom’s “Web Design Matters” post. All around an interesting piece. And, according to Todd, this was one of TBR’s first posts to go viral and get passed around the Web.
• Our media research studies. These studies have not only given us a way to express opinions about mainstream topics such as the print media and politics, they have allowed us to suggest ways these outlets can improve. Some studies have been popular, while others have kind of dwindled with little traffic. All in all, however, conducting this research has been a great way for us to get involved with the media, expand our site’s traffic, and generate interesting content on our blog.
• Todd’s post “Do PR Firms Blog? Not so Much”. Partially the inspiration for TBR’s wiki, this post shows off what TBG does best: online public affairs. Quoting Todd’s post:

“I think its obvious that the ability to implement a successful blogging strategy for yourself is a pretty good indication you can implement one for a client.”

Also check out “PR Firms that Blog: an Update” and “PR Firms that Blog: Who Got there First?”

• TBG wins three awards.
• The Iron Sabre Award: Impact Watch beats out Hill and Knowlton for best product in the Evaluation Category
• Best of Blogs Award: TBG wins the award for Best Corporate Blog
• TBG Recognized as a Socially Responsible Business: During the 2006 Business Philanthropy Summit, The Bivings Group was recognized as an example of a small/medium size business demonstrating outstanding service to the community for its work with Bread for the City.

Overall, it’s been a great year here at TBG, filled with lots of successes. Thanks to everybody on our team that made it possible!