Steve Rubel over at Micro Persuasion has the news that ESPN.com is now allowing readers to comment on every single story posted on their website, including wire stories.  Here is a controversial story about Tim Hardaway that has attracted over a 1,000 comments thusfar.  ESPN also has added a nice feature where they list out the most commented on stories (see right).

A couple of points about the implementation for anyone thinking of doing something similar on their own site:

( 1) A feature that allows users to report inappropriate comments has been included.  For sites the size of ESPN it is vital that you let your users help police the comments. 

(2) The site allows you to block the comments of users you don't like.  This is important.  Moderators at community sites (particularly sports ones)  spend a disproportionate amount of their time moderating personal feuds between users and dealing with complaints about a small percentage of really obnoxious and abusive users.  This feature allows users to block the loud mouths.  Problem solved.

Overall ESPN has done a real nice job and I'm a big fan of these types of features.  However I think there is one opportunity missed here.  Currently, there is no way for users to establish a profile where they can put in their real name, email address, website URL and other information.  Adding the comments themselves is great, but I think the real value comes when you provide ways for people to connect with each other.

With the rising popularity of user-controlled news sites, everyday citizens are no longer dependent on mainstream media to decide what in the news is important.  By now, everyone knows this, and most people understand the power of a site like Digg as a traffic generator for blogs and news sites and also as a means to a highly desirable end for anyone using the Internet…viral status.

With this in mind, we decided to take a look at the homepage of Digg to determine the popularity of discussion and coverage of the 2008 presidential candidates.  What we found was interesting…aside from news about Barack Obama, no one seems to care.

We conducted Digg site searches for articles about several potential and declared 2008 candidates to see how many times candidate coverage appeared on Digg's homepage over the past month (Jan. 13-Feb. 13).  Six of the 11 candidates failed to make the cut and were not mentioned even once on Digg's homepage. 

Even Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, often-discussed democrats, only made the site on five and two occasions, respectively.  Chris Dodd (D-CT)and John McCain (R-AZ) each had just one mention.

Here is a chart breaking down the results:

As you can see, Barack Obama has been dominating Digg coverage of 2008 candidates with 23 articles appearing on the homepage.  Also interesting is that 2 of these were direct links to sections of Obama's website.  Obama was the only candidate to have pages from his own campaign site make it to the Digg homepage.

Other interesting points:

• Coverage of Hillary was mostly negative, talking about an alleged smear campaign on Obama and voters' apprehension of having "another Clinton" in office.
• Coverage of Obama ranged from mentions of his candidacy announcement to recent TV interviews.  Another widely covered topic regarding Obama was the bogus news story reported on Fox that the Senator attended a radical Muslim school, maddrassa, in Indonesia as a child. 

I am wondering if Obama coverage on Digg will die down as things get more settled or if coverage about him will continue to balloon.  His candidacy this far has been controversial, with his unique background and general lack of experience in foreign affairs.  Will people get used to Obama's uniqueness?  Or will his unorthodox background continue to drive interest online?

 Another question I have is, what's going on with John Edwards supporters?  This group of voters is usually super-active online, so it would make sense if there was lots of coverage about him on Digg.  However, this obviously was not the case.  Are Edwards fans losing interest and motivation?  Or are people simply more intrigued by other candidates?

And finally, why aren't other candidates attempting to popularize coverage about them on Digg?  I found it surprising that more candidates couldn't get their announcement messages to appear on the social news site.  I think that this is a major marketing avenue for candidates that has yet to be approached.

Since the launch of YouTube, Flash has become the dominate video format.   The reasons are pretty simple:

(1) A higher percentage of people have Flash installed on their computers than competing formats like Windows Media Player or Real.  As of December 2006, 94.2% of folks in the US had at least Flash 8 installed on their computers. 

(2) Flash makes it easy to embed videos on your website.  Hence YouTube and the whole viral video craze. 

At this point I think it is safe to say that Flash is the industry standard for online video.  As a web development firm, we've started serving our videos in Flash almost exclusively.

I was interviewed for a story in Shoot Online a few weeks back on how Presidential candidates are using web video for their announcements (it is behind a pay wall now).  My contribution to the piece was pretty forgettable but an executive at Brightcove nicely defined the three ways you can do web (Flash) videos online these days:

(1) You can just post your video on YouTube for free and embed it into your site.

(2) You can build your own branded (or not) Flash player and host the videos on your own servers.

(3) You can host your videos using more feature rich hosting services like  Brightcove, Permission TV, Revver and Blip.tv.  Some of these services charge you, some don't. 

For me, #1 is out.  YouTube is great, but it is not appropriate for all videos.  The quality is kind of bad, their terms of service are a bit scary (see Ze Frank on this) and you don't have much control over the presentation of your video.  For me, YouTube is more of a distribution channel than a video hosting/player solution.  It can be used to complement options #2 and #3.

We've done option #2 plenty and even developed ways to include embed code in client-branded players.  We'll probably still do this for certain folks but it is sort of a pain.  I also feel like by doing this we are fighting a losing battle - our own branded players aren't able to keep up with all the cool features others are using. 

So basically we've settled on option #3 and are playing around with a variety of players.  Read/Write Web has a good breakdown of all the options.  The choices are sort of overwhelming and new features are coming out pretty much every day.  Channels available right in the video.  Embed codes within the video.  The ability to put your own ad or call to action at the end of the video itself. 

My current favorite is blip.tv.  It is easy to use, it has all the features I want, the player is unobtrusive and it will have the ability to embed my own ad at the end of the video in a few weeks. 

The buzz about Yahoo! Pipes is through the roof – as of writing number 6 on Technorati’s top searches list. This confirms what a lot of us here have been saying all along: people want to look at web content in a completely customized way and on the platform of their choice be it Netvibes (we're big fans), Windows Live, Newsgator or whatever. Yahoo! Pipes provides an assortment of interesting tools that allow people to manipulate of web content feeds to their liking, something I think is an increasingly clear a sign of things to come.

I’ve played around with Yahoo! Pipes a little over the last few days. One of the easy things you can do with it is to create a single RSS feed made up of multiple RSS feeds and filter the results based on keywords.

For those interested in receiving a single RSS feed with, say, news about a specific political candidate from multiple websites, Yahoo! Pipes makes this fairly easy to do. The alternative would be having to scour several RSS feeds looking for the nuggets you are interested in. I talked about an alternative method of doing this a few months ago, but Yahoo! Pipes makes this process a lot easier to manage.

Yahoo! Pipes has a lot of work to do in making the tool more user friendly and less buggy, but it’s a great start. In its current form it’s going to turn most users off of using it as you need to be pretty comfortable with basic programming logic to get started. It also lacks any sort of tutorial that makes things harder still, although it does provide a few usage examples.

Here’s an example of a feed I created using Yahoo! Pipes that pulls in news containing the keywords "Obama", "McCain", "Clinton", and "Giuliani" from Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Houston Chronicle, Reuters and Associated Press.

You can explore the actual Pipe I created to make that feed. If you've got some other interesting ideas on content filtering/customization or applications of how to use Yahoo! Pipes to customize web content feeds let us know in a comment!

According to Wikipedia, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a tool that “enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do.” It enables companies and individuals to posts tasks and set an amount they are willing to pay for the tasks completion. Qualified users can then scan these tasks and complete them at their leisure to stave off boredom or to make a little money.

The tasks can be manually posted by individual. Say if you want to pay someone to write a blog post or translate a document for you on a one off basis. Or you can tap into Mechanical Turk’s API and automatically have your computer program interact with MTurk. This allows companies to efficiently send requests to Mechanical Turk and fetch the data back. Companies are using MTurk in this way for tasks like the creation of transcripts of speeches and podcasts. You can see some success story here.

Ajit and I have been playing with Mechanical Turk a bit the last few days as we are thinking of tapping into it for one of our projects using the MTurk API. I think there is a lot of potential here.

In reviewing the interface I noticed a lot of people asking folks to write blog posts. Out of curiosity, I decided to use the service to pay three people $1 each to write a review of the Washington Post’s recent foray into video journalism, On Being.

Below are the three reviews so you can judge the quality yourself.

(more…)

• A Blog's Blast Damage

  Washington Post column on their most recent blog controversy and the differences in process between online and print content.

• 83 Beautiful Wordpress Themes You (Probably) Haven’t Seen

  Good list of some cool themes for Wordpress junkies.  Some inspiration for blog designers as well.

• The transformation of IDG

  Colin Crawford of IDG provides some great stats on how the magazine industry giant is increasing it's web revenue.

• Stuffy Economist Magazine Experiments With Social Media

  The Economist launches a blog where they are publishing most letters-to-the-editor unedited as they come in.  A great idea.  Of course I'm biased, as we'd mentioned this a few months back. 

• Magazines start studios to join online video craze

  Time Inc and TV Guide have video studios in an effort to produce more video content for their websites. 

• TechPresident Launches

  The good folks at Personal Democracy have launched a new site that will provide info on technology and the 2008 Presidential race.

MyBlogLog is a tool that allows for social networking around blogs.  Basically, bloggers and blog readers sign up for a MyBlogLog account and upload a picture, claim their blog and create a profile. 

If you run a blog, you can insert the MyBlogLog widget (see right) on your site and you can see a list of your recent visitors.  MyBlogLog allows users to form relationship with other readers and also to join a blog's community.

It is sort of hard to explain but I think the basic concept is pretty compelling. 

We just added this to our site.  You can join our embryonic community here and you can connect with me personally here. 

On the positive side, I think the idea of social networking around the blogs you visit is compelling.  I read a good number of blogs, so being able to connect with people who read the blogs I love makes a lot of sense to me.

On the negative side, the widget has been criticized for slowing down sites.  Also, the concept is slightly creepy.  I personally enjoy being able to browse anonymously sometimes and don't always want my face popping up on the blog I'm visiting.  There are ways for users to control when their pictures shows up, but the whole thing gives me a bit of pause.

Anyway, we'll see how it goes.

Want to know why some campaign websites are so restrictive, often taking days to approve user generated content?  Check out this post on Techcrunch about a very disturbing hiccup Arrington found on the new Obama website.  Yikes.

I've seen lots of hiccups like this in my time.  I remember doing some political work a few years back and a volunteer complained about an auto-generated password we sent him.  The password was similar to a certain racial slur in its combination of numbers and letters.  I was told by the client to figure out a way to make sure our auto generated passwords didn't contain any offensive letter  and number combinations.  Good times.

Campaigns live in fear of this stuff.  With social networking features, I think you've just got to accept that you are going to take some lumps on occasion.  The returns are worth the risk.

Update: Joe Rospars from the Obama campaign shares his take in the comments of Techcrunch. 

The past few years have taught most people that it’s a non-story when people post crazy/critical/racist/whatever things in the comments on a politician or organization’s site, and that’s what makes it possible for people in jobs like mine to keep these tools open for all. It’s going to take all of us, no matter what candidate you support, to avoid pretending these kind of things are stories to continue to make progress.

In general I would hope that folks concerned about questionable content on the site will turn to the system of flags or some other means of contacting the campaign directly rather than playing “gotcha”. If we want to play that game, there plenty of content in the comments on the blogs of both the Republican and Democratic Party’s web sites to keep us all distracted from the real task of building better technology, engaging more people, and opening up the process.

Update 2: Cybersoc has a good piece on the controversy. 

Barack Obama will announce his candidacy for President later today and in advance of that he launched a full version of his campaign website very early this morning. 

Here are my initial thoughts:

(1) This site is all about social networking.  I mean all about it. 

"This Campaign is About You."

The Obama campaign wants you to create a profile and then start connecting with other supporters, writing blog entries, attending events and raising money (see right).

I wrote a few days back about how no campaign had yet achieved the right balance in their use of peer-to-peer campaign features.  At first blush, the Obama campaign has.  The tool gives volunteers the ability to express themselves uncensored while also providing pretty clear direction as to what they would like you to do (raise money and spread the word).  It achieves the right balance between McCain's "raise money for me or go away" approach and the chaos of Edward's blog network. 

A nice job.

(2) The video section is disappointing so far. All the videos are talking head types of things.  I'm really looking forward to a campaign opening things up and letting us peek behind the curtain a bit with their video use of video. Or try to use video to build community a la Ze Frank.   The section is called Barack TV.  That is exactly what it is so far.  Just TV on the Internet.

(3) The design looks nice.  I like his campaign logo.  All the Democrats are essentially going with the same layout on their website.  Navigation bar along the top with drop down menus.  Big picture/lead story on the left.  Key action items and/or some video on the right.  The only thing really different here is that Obama is using a three column layout instead of a two column one like Clinton, Biden and Edwards.

(4) Not much happening on the blog yet.   However I'd expect Obama opponents to have a full dossier on Obama blogger Joe Rospars by noon EST given the recent Edward's blogger drama.

I'll play with the site more in the coming days, but my initial reaction is that this is a well down site.  The emphasis on social networking is a natural for Obama given that he is already a rock star on Facebook. More than any other candidate, I can see a real social network being built around the Obama campaign.  This kind of approach won't work for every candidate.  But I think it will for Obama.

Update: Here are some other reviews of the Obama site:

Barack Obama launches social network (ZDNet)
Obama Launches Website, Then Launches Candidacy (Campaign08 Blog)
That's Not How You Do It Obama - A VC 
Barack Obama - Bigger Web 2.0 Evangelist than Michael Arrington - Deep Jive Interests
Nice Try Barack - Mathew Ingram

More on Techmeme. 

Update 2:  Donna Bogatin from ZDNet chimes in with an interesting perspective.  She thinks Obama has taken the social networking thing too far and that his site might turn over non-geek voters.  Here is the key quote:

If the campaign is really all about “you,” you would be extended a friendly invitation to be part of it in a more usable and natural way. Moreover, “you” are not as welcome, if you don’t “have an account” and proceed to make “friends,” join “groups,” “blog”…

If every vote counts, than every prospective voter should count as well, social networker or not!

I actually disagree with this point.  While the social networking part is clearly the focus, the site provides users with l other ways to get involved (donations, email updates, volunteer opportunities, etc.).  But hers is a very valid point.  When you are running an online campaign it is easy sometimes to fall in love with the latest toys and forget that the goal of the site is to reach and engage as many people as possible.

We've got two positions available here at The Bivings Group that anyone whose is interested should apply for through Craigslist.  Below are the details: 

(1) Associate in our Client Services Division

This is a position on my team.  We're looking for someone to help develop and maintain web programs for clients and provide client support for our ImpactWatch media/blog monitoring platform.  You'd also get to contribute to this blog you are reading now.

Apply here

(2) Web Developer

Our programming department is looking for an experienced PHP developer to help out with a variety of projects.  For this position we are open to people who might want to telecommute or work part time.

Apply here

After our presentation for the Magazine Publishers of America in NYC on Tuesday, we received some requests for additional research.  I spent this morning trying to find some statistical explanations for the performance of the magazine websites by running some regressions, checking for correlation between the presence of Web features and traffic (as measured by Alexa).  However, much like our regression analysis of newspapers , this did not result in any significant results.

I wanted to find out which websites were performing the best in relation to print versions of magazines, so I created an online-print differential.  This figure represents the difference between the ordinal online ranking of a magazine website and the magazine's ordinal print ranking.  Large negative numbers indicate a website that outperforms the print magazine, where positive numbers indicate print versions that are outperforming their online counterparts.  Here is a table that shows our results.

As you can see, it's difficult to infer any patterns from this data.  I did see a few interesting things, however.

• The Popular Science website has the highest online-print differential of all the magazines we researched.  This makes perfect sense, considering that the demographic to which this magazine appeals is most likely tech-minded, therefore more likely to use the Web to access PopSci materials. Also, the Popular Science website is relatively full-featured and robust.
• Women's magazines made up the majority of the magazines at the bottom of the differential list, meaning that the print versions of these magazines drastically outperform the websites.  I guess I'm not really sure what to make of this, but I would be interested to see if there is any pattern here if we compared this stat to general usage rates for women vs. men.
• I was surprised that TV Guide had the differential it did.  TV Guide has a great website, so I found it odd that its website didn't fare better in this analysis.  I guess this can be attributed to the fact that TV Guide has a massive print audience.
• Endless Vacation is another surprising case.  This website is primarily a brochure site with no online functionality.  Yet, the print version of this magazine only slightly outperformed the website.  What exactly are people looking at on this website?  I can't figure that one out.

Overall, this analysis did not present any clear conclusions.  I think that a problem with this type of research is that obtaining data for magazine Web traffic is difficult.  I used Alexa to determine the traffic rates for magazine websites, but I am not confident in the true accuracy of these figures.  Since Alexa only tracks websites visited by people who have installed the Alexa toolbar, the results are probably skewed toward tech-minded audiences and are not an impartial measurement. 

Another problem with this sort of analysis is caused by what we dubbed "integrated sites"–magazine sites that are part of a bigger network of sites.  Redbook , Country Living , Money , ESPN , and Sports Illustrated are examples of this type of site (Redbook and Country living are part of the iVillage network; Money and SI are part of CNN , and ESPN the magazine is combined with ESPN the network).  Alexa could not read these magazine sites independently, and only presented data for the umbrella network.  For example, when you type the Redbook URL into the Alexa search function, it gives back data for the entire iVillage network rather than traffic just for Redbook.  As a result, we left these "integrated sites" out of the analysis, which probably left holes in the data.

While the analysis itself may not reveal any earth-shattering conclusions, it does draw attention to the lack of transparency in the industry.  In order to conduct a real analysis, we would need access to accurate traffic and page view data, which would probably have to be acquired from the magazines themselves.

Check out our magazine study here and our newspaper study here . 

I trashed the political social networking site Hotsoup pretty good back in October and immediately forgot about it and moved on with my life.

Then today I came across a post over at Fishbowl DC comparing Alexa traffic of Hotsoup to that of sites like DailyKos and Instapundit.  Hotsoup did not fair well. 

So I lowered the stakes and compared Hotsoup traffic to that of our modest blog, The Bivings Report, over the last three months.

That, my friends, is what you call a BAD SIGN.  Sure, Alexa data is unreliable, but after all that hype you'd think they'd be doing a lot better than our stupid company blog. 

Mashable summed up the problem pretty well in their launch review: "too many politicians, not enough programmers."

Part one of my review of the top presidential campaign sites starts with Hillary Clinton's (exploratory committee) site .

As I've mentioned in a past post, this site impresses me with its lack of fluff and solid design. The red, white and blue palette is toned down for a less giddy experience. The user's eye doesn't bounce around. It goes where it was intended to go: the logo to the video to the action center. It's also only as Web 2.0 as it has to be. The background and internal use of the gradient when applied judiciously is one of the appealing aspects of the 2.0 design mantra and works just fine here. No reflecting pool logos (author guilty as charged) are to be seen. The text contrast has been subdued for maximum readability. No high contrast or color/font choices to vibrate through. The Contribute button, although in stop-sign red, is placed between the Action Center and Featured Clips, halfway down the page. Not exactly screaming at users, which is a nice change of pace. You don't see it repeated in the milder universal navigation until you're already working through the site. The overall initial experience is refreshingly pleasant here and I am into the content quickly without having to click through any registrations or toil through a video or splash page. High marks.

Click on the screenshot below and then roll over the numbers on the various page elements to see comments.

• Waiting To Hear From Edwards from MyDD

  Super influential liberal blogger Chris Bowers draws a line in the sand with the Edward's campaign over the potential firing of campaign bloggers Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan. At this point the Edward's campaign has pretty much pissed off the entire blogosphere over this (liberal and conservative).  What a mess. 

• NY Times publisher: Our goal is to manage the transition from print to internet

  Two key excerpts:

  "I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care either," he says.

  Will it be free?  No, Sulzberger says. If you want to read the New York Times online, you will have to pay.

• Blogging vs journalism, yet again

  UK journalist Martin Sable on the relationship of blogging to the mainstream media.  Via the excellent Cybersoc by Robin Hamman. 

Yesterday David All live blogged a conference call John McCain's campaign staff had with conservative bloggers.  Captain Ed from the conservative blog, Captain's Quarters, posted his insights as well. 

I think there are a couple of key points about campaigns and blogs in general that can be drawn from reading these posts, and based on my own experience with these things:

(1) Captain Ed picks up on the point that too often campaigns (and those trying to influence campaigns) use blogs and bloggers as a distribution mechanism for attacks on opponents.  Here is the key paragraph on this:

That said, we have to make sure that the blogosphere understands its role. Already we have seen a blizzard of gotcha moments zipping into our e-mail boxes. Position points and contrasts are always welcome, but other tips seem more intended towards a darker, more negative tilt, and not simply from the campaigns themselves. If the blogosphere wants to maintain a position of credibility, then we cannot be seen as the mud factory of the elections, especially in the primary. Campaigns (for President or anything else) that want to use blogger credibility as a channel to reach the voters need to be careful of using bloggers to bubble attack memes up to the surface.

Amen.  I think too often campaigns use blogs and other new media as a new mechanism for the distribution of old ideas.  It's more than that.  Just knowing how to post a video to YouTube doesn't mean you understand the spirit behind it.

(2) When looking at online campaigns, one should always consider the importance of behind the scenes activities like blog outreach, list building and management, email pitching, etc.  We tend to judge online campaigns based on their outward manifestation - the campaign website. 

Just because a campaign has a relatively simple website that doesn't make a lot of noise doesn't mean they don't get "it".  And just because a campaign site has a blog or whatever doesn't mean they do.