Usabilty celebrity Jakob Nielsen has been the go-to authority on everything web-related for some time now. I have seen him in Boston, San Francisco and Amsterdam (I think). I have purchased, and been reimbursed for, several of his books. He’s a funny guy and a lot of laughs at seminars and yet I believe I am done with our friend. I think his principles have all been disbursed. I think, no matter what the future holds for us as web developers, he has said all there is to say on usability. I also can’t take his site anymore.

When I burst onto the web scene many years ago (I made myself laugh right there), Mr. Nielsen was a real help, and I appreciated his simplistic website and even understood his obvious dislike of designers. Websites in ’97 were full of (let’s face it) obvious mistakes, and having a guru to quote helped justify your design choices when dealing with clients. (more…)

I was writing a post about Project’s Agape’s new Facebook application that allows people to raise money for causes directly on Facebook (through the new Facebook Platform). Unfortunately, the application is still really buggy so I was unable to get the data I needed for the post. So while I was messing around in Facebook I decided to write a quick post about what the Barack Obama team is doing with their custom Facebook application.

After you install the application, an Obama video and a few recent headlines appear as part of your Facebook profile. See below.

(more…)

Last night I attended an interesting journalism workshop at the Cleveland Park Library here in Washington, DC (hat tip: FishbowlDC).  Nationally known writer and photographer Bill Adler and former MSNBC chief Washington correspondent turned freelance multimedia journalist Brock Meeks pitched the citizen driven hyper local news site NowPublic to attendees. 

Approximately 35 people attended.  Some were older while others — like me — were younger.  Mothers brought their kids who had iPod ear buds in their ears.  Black, white, etc.

Adler and Meeks were just two normal blokes.  They weren't trying to appear "civilian," but they simply were themselves sans the scripted made for a TV newscast spiel dolled up by foundation powder from a compact.  This tact helped them assert that journalism is not just for the professionals.

Adler who moderates the Cleveland Park listserv with its 5,254 members wants to transfer the reporting about the neighborhood from that forum to a Cleveland Park NowPublic portal since the site enables anyone with access to the site to view the news.  In fact, the Associate Press is now buying NowPublic content — text, pictures, video, and audio — for use on its wire services.  It will pay content producers a fee for the right to use their media; the AP won't buy exclusive rights so that NowPublic contributors can use or pedal their work elsewhere.

Adler and Meeks also provided handouts about how to use NowPublic, how to write a story, where to get information for news stories, some journalism basics, and other anecdotes like, as Meeks says, "Short is sacred" and "No story is insignificant."

With the AP partnered with NowPublic, it is not that unlikely that your work could appear in a major paper or broadcast.  However, NowPublic also makes it available to your most important audience – your neighbors.

UPDATE: Meeks has an audiovisual slide show of the event on his site. 

Just over two years after its launch, The Huffington Post is expanding its offerings.  Arianna Huffington explains in her blog post announcing the update last night that, "But the main reason we've grown to the point where we need to expand is you, the HuffPost community. The blogosphere is a constantly evolving conversation, and we're blessed to have such an active, passionate, and vocal readership." (more…)

Ads of the World

Website that showcases the best and most interesting ad campaigns from around the globe.

User Generated Ads Don’t Pay Off

Frank Shaw from WagEd offers his take on a recent NY Times story that exposed some of the flaws of ad campaigns relying on user generated content.

FatDoor Launches Social Network for Your Neighborhood

Mashable has the scoop on a new social network aimed at building connections on the local level.

Democrats Have an Early Lead … in the Web 2.0 Race

Nice quotes from Rob Bluey, but I’m getting a bit bored with this particular story line.

One of the greatest fears that companies or organizations have about starting an on-line community is the troll — a commenter who seems content to spew garbage and threaten unspeakable action against anyone for anything.  They quickly turn a fecund forum into a locale of bile.  No fair!

There are a many ways one can deal with these unscrupulous people, and I read about a technique – disemvowelling – in a great article about maintaining a healthy community  by Cory Doctorow at Information Week.  This is not new, but it deserves a mention every once in a while.

Basically, disemvowelling is stripping words of their vowels, and that forces people to carefully read to decipher what is written.  As the disemvowelling Wikipedia entry states (as of this posting):

When used by a forum moderator, the net effect is to mark the original text as deprecated, while at the same time not suppressing freedom of speech; after disemvowelling text is still legible, but only through significant cognitive effort, and disemvowelled text has the advantage that it will not cause offence to anyone who does not stop and invest that effort in reconstructing their message.

At first moderators did this by hand, but soon programmers helped by developing applications that do this automatically. 

Give Doctorow's article a read; he has more advice.  Or should I type, "Gv Dctrw's rtcl rd; h hs mr dvc"?

I have a new entry on my list of technologies that will impact the 2008 elections. Facebook Platform.

In a nutshell, Facebook is boldly opening things up, allowing outside developers (like us) to build third party applications right on top of Facebook. Essentially, Facebook is becoming a technology platform, a la Salesforce.

On a mundane level, this will allow developers to do things such as replace the Facebook Photos section with photos from, say, a Flickr account.

On a more substantitive level, Facebook Platform will allow political campaigns and advocacy groups to embed action tools (fundraising, team building, letters to the editor, etc.) and other stuff I can’t even fathom right into Facebook. Check out what Project Agape has done as an example.

Obviously, the devil is in the details. Who has access to this data? How difficult will Facebook’s markup language be to learn? Is it really as open as it sounds? But from where I’m sitting Facebook Platform looks like a game changer. Can’t wait to play.

Update: TechPresident has info on a Facebook application the Obama campaign has already developed.

For me the highlight of the Personal Democracy Forum was seeing Seth Godin speak in person. You can check out the video of his presentation below. If you haven’t heard Godin before, take the 15 minutes and watch it.

Click To Play

You can see other videos from the conference here.

Throughout the Personal Democracy Forum a lot of smart people were making impassioned pleas for candidates to use technology to have an open dialogue with the American people. Be real. Be authentic. Tear down the walls that have been erected between the candidates and voters.

It all sounds great. But it seems to me there is a tension between this idealized goal of how things should be and how the social web is actually being used.

In many ways, the story of the web (particularly video) in politics the last few years has been the story of “gotcha” moments. Bad jokes. Pretty hair. Southern accents. Screaming. Terror taxis. Macaca. No strings. The humiliating videos get a lot more play than the substitutive ones (admittedly nobody has done anything that interesting with video this cycle).

Some of the moments linked to above are unforgivable. But in some cases these “gotcha” moments are examples of candidates being real.

So we’re in a situation where we want candidates to be authentic but are quick to punish them when they are. And the constant presence of voters with cameras ensures that there will be plenty of these gotcha moments.

It seems to me that instead of creating a more open election, we may be creating one where the candidate that is the most on message and the most robotic is rewarded. It can be argued that it wasn’t YouTube that defeated George Allen, but his own lack of discipline on the stump. The candidate that makes the least mistakes wins.

What do you think? Do you think candidates will use the web to raise the dialogue or are we just going to see an endless series of “gotcha” moments? Is the social web going to be used this cycle to build candidates up or simply to tear them down?

Update: John Stodder offers his take on Kos’ “gotcha” strategy for 2008.

Here at The Bivings Group we're fans of Adrian Holovaty; he has developed fascinating on-line database news features for news sites like for The Washington Post.  Today, upon recieving a grant from the Knight Foundation that he'll use to develop an innovative site at EveryBlock that will make local news more useful.  He's leaving the Post to pursue this venture.

Another Knight Foundation receipent is (more…)

Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 has an interesting post about why journalists should blog independently from their employers (hat tip: Mathew Ingram).  He gives seven reasons: (more…)

Earlier today Google launched a new feature called Hot Trends, which shows you the 100 hottest search terms on Google in near real time. You can also go back and browse the hot terms for previous days.

Note that this is not a list of the most popular searches on Google. Instead, Hot Trends “analyzes millions of searches to find those that are deviating the most relative to their past traffic.” Sounds good and useful.

The Google Blog has a post with a full explanation.

In preparation for our newspaper study that will begin in a few weeks, I was poking around the Washington Post and USA Today websites, specifically looking at the blogs offered by the two papers.  I wanted to find a logical way to compare the success of these blog networks.  Having tried using Alexa in some previous newspaper research and being less-than-satisfied with the reliability of the results, I decided to see how these blogs were doing on Technorati.

What I found was pretty interesting.  The Washington Post has a massive networks of blogs.  I found 41 of them today, and I am sure that there are others buried within the site's architecture.  It was hard to track all of the blogs down, as there is no one place where they are all stored on the site.  In contrast, USA Today has a much smaller network of blogs–20.  At first, it might seem logical that because the WaPo has more than twice as many blogs as USA Today, its blog network must be more successful.  However, this is not the case.  Instead, I think this is clearly an example of the mantra "quality, not quantity".

I tracked down all the URLs  for these newspaper blogs and plugged them into Technorati, recording the authority, rank , and date of the most recent post for each blog.  At the end, I averaged these figures and found that the USA Today blogs are doing significantly better than the WaPo blogs.

Of the 41 WaPo blogs, 7 were incredibly out of date with no updates for several months:

Reporting for Duty
Your Post
County Connections
World Opinion Roundup
Richmond Report
World Cup
On the Plane

On USA Today, only two were out of date, and these were dedicated to time-sensitive topics (holiday shopping and March Madness), which aren't really relevant the rest of the year:

Holiday Shopping
Bracket Racket

Further, the WaPo has 4 blogs that have no authority or ranking in Technorati.  None of the USA Today blogs face this problem.

In my comparison, I found that the WaPo blogs have an average rank (1 is best) of 191,669 and an average authority (the higher the better) of 221.76.  USA Today blogs have an average authority of 233 and an average rank of 119,212.4.  As a benchmark, The Bivings Report has a rank of 6,197 and an authority of 513. Between all of the blogs I researched, just 6 have a better ranking than The Bivings Report. In general, most of the newspaper blogs are doing pretty poorly.  But, as indicated by these data, some were much better than others.

In order to expand this research, I tried the same process for the New York Times blogs and Boston.com blogs .  However, it didn't appear that Technorati was tracking any of these blogs.

I really think that while blogs enhance the interactivity and variety of content on newspaper websites, it is absolutely possible for a newspaper to stretch itself too thin.  Perhaps some newspapers should cut down on the number of blogs they offer, substantially improving the quality of the blogs they choose to maintain.  Outdated blogs or blogs that no one reads don't do anything but clutter a website.  My advice would be for newspapers to cut down on the number of "junk" blogs and instead focus on publishing quality content on a smaller number of blogs.  What do you think?  Is it quality or quantity that really matters in this case?

You can check out my excel datasheet here.

It was great meeting many people who share my interests and passions at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City last Friday.  Instead of focusing on summarizing sessions or panel discussions, I'll focus on a chat I had with Utah State Representative Steve Urquhart who participated in a panel discussion about voter generated content since he launched Politicopia — a wiki out in Utah where citizens debated laws from the last legislative session.

Representative Urquhart told me that he wonders how the Internet and the proliferation of information sources will affect the common political experiences we have as a country.  For example, a powerful national moment was when a sickly Richard Nixon debated John F. Kennedy; although we'll never know how much Nixon's appearance during the televised debated influenced his loss, that was a common moment. (more…)

We've wondered why liberal bloggers are more prominent and influential than their conservative counterparts here in the United States before, and I got an interesting insight into the nuanced answer last week.

Last Thursday afternoon, I attended a conservative blogger event hosted by The Washington Times.  The paper wanted to gather conservative bloggers to determine why liberals fare better and how conservatives can react. (more…)