A friend of mine works for Gannett, which owns USA Today and heaps of local newspapers and TV stations throughout the country. Well, most of the local sites are horrible at the very least. However, the company is in the process of rolling out new designs across their network.

The Desert Sun site from Palm Springs, California is one of the first sites to get the facelift:

Compare it to the site of its sister publication The Californian — which will likely get its new design soon — from Salinas, California:

I’m not going to do a site review, but can you tell the difference?

Get productive with the best Facebook Apps

Lifehacker breaks down Facebook Apps that can improve productivity.

A Social-Networking Service With a Velvet Rope

New York Times on Digg/Revision3/Pownce founder Kevin Rose. If anyone wants a Pownce invite, let me know in the comments. I’ve got a few left.

coComment to Launch New Version Tomorrow

A new version of this comment tracking service will go live tomorrow. You can check out the beta below:

http://beta.cocomment.com/
u: betatester
p: cocommentv2

Learning from Dave Winer

Joel on Software post explaining why he and Dave Winer don’t allow comments on their blogs. If I was a big-shot blogger like Winer or Joel, I could see how comments could get in the way. But as a writer for a specialized, modestly read blog, I’m happy to receive comments at all and think they add value to the posts instead of taking value away.

9 Ways to Build Your Own Social Network

Techcrunch breaks down options for building a social networking component into your website.

It seems that Bill Richardson's Presidential Campaign had a great time at the CNN/YouTube Debate on Monday that they added a new feature to their site.  If you go to the "Ask Bill" page, you can fill out a form with your personal information and a link to the a video question that you have for the Governor.

He states on the page, "I wish I could get to every living room and meeting hall in this country to talk to people, shake hands, and answer questions face-to-face.  I can't do that, but I can do the next best thing."

I'm wondering if candidates answering Internet video questions is just a fad, but this is a sign that the presidential campaigns are taking those questions seriously.

Bivings Fred Thompson Disclosure

I am a big fan of buying and selling items online.  I think using sites like Craigslist and eBay provide efficient and easy ways to find cheap and useful items and also for getting rid of unwanted stuff (for a profit!).  My most recent purchase was a 3 person tent in great condition for just $10 on Craigslist.  What a deal.

This begs the question though, which service is better? Craigslist or eBay? This question becomes more and more important as we discuss the future of classified ads in relation to newspapers and media.  How will the progression of these websites compete not only with MSM classifieds, but also with each other?

(more…)

Our recent newspaper study dealt exclusively with the features present on newspaper websites. We didn’t look critically at the design of these sites. The adoption of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) makes it possible for web developers to create rich designs while keeping the file size of pages to a minimum.

In looking at newspaper websites, it becomes clear pretty quickly that their homepages are bloated. They try to stick as much data as possible on the homepage (including ads).

Given that, we decided to look at the file sizes of the homepages of the top 10 newspapers, and how much of that file size is devoted to advertising. Note that file size does not always equate to load times. Other factors such as the number of database calls and the quality of the hosting environment play big roles.

These numbers were grabbed using the Firebug Firefox extension. Sizes were recorded both with Adblock on and off, so we can get an idea of how much space is devoted to advertising. (more…)

As I mentioned on Monday, Google — which owns YouTube — invited me to attend the CNN/YouTube Democratic Debate in Charleston, SC. 

Thank you, Google and CNN for a great time!  I had so much fun.

I was part of a group of about 10 to 15 YouTubbers that were invited.  Some were invited since they are active in political discussions on YouTube while the rest of us were selected since our questions had a great chance of making the debate. 

My question was to find out where candidates get their news and information and why they trust their main sources.  It didn't make the telecast, but just barely.

Personally, one of the most interesting aspects of the the debate was talking with my new friends who are active on YouTube.  For instance, one is starting a new job any day now and mentioned in a recent video that she mentioned her employment news.  Then all of the sudden she posts a video from Charleston explaining she's attending the debate as a guest of YouTube.  She laughed that the timing of the debate and new job aligned poorly.  Someone left a comment on her post giving her the impression that her subscribers might now think that she is a YouTube plant — a lonelygirl15. 

Another new friend got an angry comment from one of her channel subscribers just after she posted her first video from Charleston.  The person asked if she was attending the debate, and she said that she wasn't since we all had to sign non-disclosure agreements to not reveal our trip until the day of the debate.  The commenter called her a liar.  However, what could she do?

Transparency is crucial in social media, and two of my friends were accidentally caught in incidents that affected their reputations.  Hopefully, any disgruntled subscribers understand the circumstances that my friends were placed in.  That's one of the most important things I learned during my whirlwind trip — a once in a lifetime experience that I don't want to happen just once.

Now, in interest of transparency, here's a disclosure.  The Bivings Group has an account with Fred Thompson's campaign.  Having said that, here are the circumstances around my question and invitation.  I recorded my question before we had the Thompson account, and YouTube had no idea of my employer or job before inviting me last Wednesday.  Before the debate I did disclose my connection to Thompson to the Google staffers in charge of my trip.  Further, I also disclosed this fact to journalists that interviewed me about my experiences in Charleston.

Update: Netflix is back up after being down for many hours.  According to TechCrunch and CNET , this happened as a result of a power outage in San Francisco yesterday that caused major sites–including Netflix, Craigslist, Typead, Vox, and LiveJournal–to go down.

Last night as I finished watching Season 3 of Felicity, I sealed up my three Netflix movies and got ready to stick them in the mail this morning. Logically, my next step was to wander over to my laptop to prep my queue for the next round of mail-in movie rentals. Upon heading to Netflix.com, I was greeted by the following message:

"The Netflix web site is temporarily unavailable. It is anticipated that the site will be available again at 11 PM Pacific Time."

Needless to say, I was pretty surprised. I was even more surprised when I received a similar message at 8 AM this morning, saying that the site would be back at 11 AM Pacific time. And, you guessed it, I am still surprised that it is now 2 PM Eastern time, and Netflix is still down, and is likely to be down for the rest of the afternoon.

These technical difficulties are occurring simultaneously with some pretty dramatic changes over at Netflix. According to the Washington Post, the company is reducing its prices for some of its most popular plans by $1 in order to earn back market share from Blockbuster, which gained customers after beginning a policy that allows them to exchange mail-order DVDs with those in the store. From the Post:

Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter believes Blockbuster may have exposed Netflix's Achilles' heel by aggressively promoting the convenience of Blockbuster stores to build its online service. "Netflix has a broken model," Pachter said. "They aren't used to competition and now someone is competing against them very effectively."

Netflix ended June with 6.74 million subscribers, a decrease of 55,000 customers from April. It marked the first time Netflix's total subscribers have declined from one quarter to the next since the service began renting DVDs through its Web site in 1999.

It seems like Netflix is having a rough couple of days. If I had to guess, I would venture to say that these events are probably all intertwined. Does anyone have the details on the Netflix website?

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I submitted a question to the CNN/YouTube Debate, and last week YouTube invited me to come down to Charleston, SC for the debate. I’m one of about 15-20 people who were selected for a virtually all access experience to the debate. In fact, we get to go into the Spin Room after the debate to try to get follow up and reaction responses to the debate questions. More to come in a few days after I get back to DC…Remember, that The Bivings Group is working for Fred Thompson. Also, I don’t represent Google or YouTube.

We have recently completed the 2007 study of America's top 100 newspaper websites, entitled "American Newspapers and the Internet; Threat or Opportunity?". As the newspaper industry continues to suffer declines in readership and circulation, using the Internet to expand a newspaper's reach is becoming more and more important. While many industry experts fear that the Internet will spell the end of newspapers as we know them, our team here at TBG feels that the Internet presents newspapers with a unique opportunity to make up for lost circulation and readership. This study explores these concepts, as well as the difficulties facing newspapers regarding online advertising, shrinking staffs, and reaching out to consumers. Our research examined the websites of the top 100 newspapers in the United States, as determined by circulation (via the Audit Bureau of Circulations). We evaluated all of the websites on the presence of lack of various web features. Here are some of our key findings:

• The use of RSS increased in 2007 by 21 percent since 2006. Now 96 of the papers we researched are using this technology. Within this group, 93 papers offer partial text feeds, while three offer full text RSS feeds. No papers have begun embedding advertisements in their RSS feeds.

• Ninety-two percent of America’s top 100 papers now offer video on their websites. This represents a significant jump from 2006, where just 61 percent offered video. In this group, there is a mixture of local, Associated Press, and original content available on newspaper websites. Thirty-nine papers offer original content, 26 use AP video streams, 13 offer video content from local news outlets, four papers use all three technologies, and 10 papers use a mixture of two different types of video.

• The number and quality of reporter blogs also improved in 2007. Now, 95 percent of papers offer at least one reporter blog. Ninety-three percent (88 papers) of these blogs allow comments. In 2006, 80 percent of the papers offered blogs, with 83 percent (67 papers) allowing comments.

• One-third of newspapers now allow comments on articles. This represents a 14% improvement on 2006 statistics, when only 19 percent of papers allowed comments on articles.

• The number of papers requiring registration increased by six percent from last year’s results. Twenty-nine percent of the nation’s top 100 papers now require users to register before gaining full access to their website. Of this group, three papers required a paid subscription, while 26 papers required free registration.

Overall, use of online features by newspapers improved across nearly all the categories when compared to last year's research, "The Use of the Internet by America's Newspapers."

Read the study in its entirety here and let us know what you think! Our research data is available in Excel format here.

Beyond measuring Dell Hells, it is helpful for those who track blogs to measure relationships between them.

When dealing with a small set of blogs, it is easy to determine if and then how they're related.  However, with millions of blogs no person or organization has the resources to accurately track all of them.  Thus, having a automated system to establish relationship is very helpful.  That's a gap that search engines fill for the Internet in general. 

Relationships could form around a myriad of factors like: topic, geography, style, stance, etc.  For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to focus on topic for this post.

There are many ways that blogs can align themselves with others around a topic. 

Semantic analysis can determine if blog posts have a large set of common specialized words that tie them together.  Data mining isn't perfect though.

How about links?  Bloggers can link to other sites that address the same issues that they do.  However, linking is not standardized throughout the blogosphere.  In many cases links will lead to sites which cover a wide variety of topics.  At times bloggers don't hyperlink to other sites, even if it is helpful.  Many people simply posts a list of links that interest them while others will include links in their text.  Then we have to ask: What's a more meaningful link — one in the blogroll, in-text, or part of a list of several other links to sites discussion different topics?

If a blogger is generous with links, then tracking the sites linked to is useful.  It makes sense to connect two blogs to each other if one links to the other in at least half of its posts.  But as I discussed above, measuring this way is hard since linking habits differ greatly.

Bookmarking and tagging sites like del.icio.us are helpful when establishing blog relationships as web surfers classify blogs and posts by using keywords and writing their own headlines.  As David Weinberger explained in a commentary piece "The Value of a Man-Made Mess, on the Internet" during NPR's All Things Considered on June 11, 2007, people can categorize web content in a variety of ways.  For instance, tags like "Africa," "animal," "pachyderm," and "mammal" are all applicable to a blog post about elephants.  Further, one can tease out blog relationships by looking at how people have tagged or bookmarked a blog and posts.  Granted, such categorization is rarely standardized, but Weinberger argues that's not necessarily bad either.

These are just some ways I can think of measuring and defining relationships between blogs.  What are some other methods?   

Compete has a novel post up that analyzes how the Republican primary would play out based on web traffic in each state. This chart summarizes the results based on traffic the first half of the year:

Completely anecdotal, but interesting nonetheless.

ImpactWatch is one of our main products. It is a PR measurement tool that our clients use for mainstream media coverage, but blogosphere measurement is harder to assess since readership and authority aren’t easily quantifiable.

Companies simply lack the resources to closely monitor all that is said about them, and blogs have expanded their radar screen. I don’t know if the blogosphere has increased the number of people who chit chat about a company with others, but it has created a forum in which many more voices are measurable.

However, not all voices are equal in their importance to a company. Concerning this fact, one of issues I’ve grappled with is how to weigh general influence and influence within a specific topic.

For instance, using Dell as an example, most of the A-list bloggers very rarely discuss the company and its products directly. Granted, top blogs like Engadget and Techcrunch should interest Dell since they focus on technology, but what about other blogs like Boing Boing and The Huffington Post?

I use Dell as an example since the company has had to deal with a top blog that doesn’t focus on its arena. Remember Dell Hell?

Although Jeff Jarvis and his BuzzMachine blog are prominent, they focus on media, not technology. Thus, they typically shouldn’t worry Dell, but when Jarvis blogged about his “Dell Hell,” the rules changed. In fact, sometimes when bloggers (especially an A-lister) complain about a company and its products, word can spread fast. Sometimes even the mainstream media picks up on such rants.

Measurement is tough in situations like Dell Hell. Does Dell need to devote resources to scrupulously follow BuzzMachine? No, since Jarvis mainly blogs about media and not computer hardware and software. However, Jarvis was worth Dell’s attention for a while.

How can a company determine which bloggers who don’t focus on the company and its field require their attention? Then, when should they start and stop monitoring such blogs?

The LA Times had a story last week about companies abandoning their presences on Second Life due to poor return on investment. From the sound of things, many companies that have stayed may not be long for the world:

But the sites of many of the companies remaining in Second Life are empty. During a recent in-world visit, Best Buy Co.’s Geek Squad Island was devoid of visitors and the virtual staff that was supposed to be online.

The schedule of events on Sun Microsystems Inc.’s site was blank, and the green landscape of Dell Island was deserted. Signs posted on the window of the empty American Apparel store said it had closed up shop.

The story gets to the heart of the matter when it says, “most firms were more interested in the publicity they received from their ties with Second Life than in the digital world itself.”

You see this all the time. Companies launch MySpace pages or Twitter accounts or iPhone versions with no rationale beyond getting a short term media hit. After the buzz dies down it becomes pretty clear that the emperor has no clothes.

I’d advise a more measured approach to these things. Companies that take the time to do some research and understand the culture of the communities they participate in will have a lot more success long term than those that dive in head first in search of a few press clips.

I came across an interesting vlog this afternoon — Alive in Baghdad.

Through this site a team of Americans and Iraqis post a weekly video entry about life in Iraq from the perspective of a normal citizen.  In one video a man describes how he was tortured while another presents challenges at a girls school in Baghdad.

The site's staffers hope to use the compelling storytelling of ordinary Iraqis "to counter the sound-bite driven, 'Live From' news model,"  the Internet has enabled this project and many others to provide news, information, and opinions. 

Vlogs like this are either an asset or competitor to mainstream media; hopefully, news organizations will harness such productions by either partnering or acknowledging such work. 

However, the challenge is to sort through all the content on the web to find the most relevant.

The Barack Obama campaign has been rolling out new features on its website at an impressive clip. A campaign timeline. Headquarters pages for each of the early primary states. A mobile program. Good stuff and they are clearly doing a wonderful job online.

But in the process of launching this stuff, they’ve turned their clean, nicely designed homepage into a canvas on which to cram as many banner ads as possible. On launch, they had six distinct content areas on their homepage. Today they have eleven elements stuffed into the same space.

Below are the before and after pics. I cast my vote for before.

Before:

After:

Disclosure.