Our post a few weeks back about when to use Drupal and Wordpress generated a pretty good discussion in the comments and on other websites. Below are the best questions/comments and our responses.

(1) Amnon - Drupal Israel: “Did you notice any performance difference between the systems?”

Considering the functionality both of them possess and what both the platforms are trying to accomplish, we have found Wordpress is more resource intensive then Drupal. By default, Wordpress makes a ton of database queries and has no built-in caching. Drupal has caching out of the box. Poorly optimized Wordpress sites have actually become a sort of running joke on Digg, where Wordpress site after site that appears on the Digg homepage goes down within a few minutes due to overwhelmed database servers. However, those with a bit of experience can run Wordpress efficiently by using the WP-Cache plug-in and by optimizing your hosting set up. In addition, the brand new Wordpress 2.3 release supposedly includes some serious speed improvements. We are testing the new release now.

In addition, when implementing both Wordpress and Drupal you should be conservative in the plug-ins you use, as they can cause performance problems. This has been less of an issue for us in Drupal, mostly because Drupal has most of the functionality we need out of the box and we haven’t had to install a ton of plug-ins. (more…)

Google Maps has always been pretty easy to use to embed maps in your website. The tool has featured an open API since the beginning, which made it easy for folks with a fairly advanced understanding of the web to post maps on their site. But it still wasn’t dead simple

This all changed in April when Google launched My Maps, which allows users to create maps from a simple web-based interface that they can then embed into their own website using an iframe. My Maps made using Google Maps as simple as inserting YouTube code in a blog post. It even allows you to draw line between points on the map and insert HTML code in the little address pop up thing. You can view a sample map below that highlights the location of our office here.

I’ve personally been using this tool a lot in my work. For simple maps, this tool can save you a lot of time. Check it out if you haven’t already. (more…)

I started to write about the top 5 sports blogs, however I feel I wouldn’t do that post justice. The fact is, I grew up in San Antonio, TX, which, in terms of pro-sports, has the Spurs as the only game in town. So for this weeks Friday’s Five I bring you the Top 5 Pro Basketball Blogs using the only metric that makes sense, my opinion.

The Best

TrueHoop

Henry Abbott has a background as a journalist and the quality posts on TrueHoop show it. Anybody who loves the NBA and thinks little is happening during the off-season should start reading this blog. The original reason I started reading was very simple, I was tired of getting the same stories about the same things over and over again in the mainstream media. TrueHoop was an island in the storm providing great insight from true basketball fans both in the posts and the reader comments.

When Henry is on vacation or assignment, the backup bloggers, led by Kelly Dwyer , continue the great posts. Recently Dwyer has been doing a series called KD’s DVDs where he goes back into his archive of game film and gives his comments on the games of yesteryear, reminding readers of the epic games that made them become basketball fans in the first place. And all this greatness exists despite the fact that TrueHoop has become part of the ESPN Empire .

The Rest

Basketbawful

This is a basketball blog with an “it’s funny ‘cause it’s true” brand of humor. With posts about the trials and tribulations of what to wear and how to survive pickup basketball, and words of the day like “Circus Shot,” it’s easy for a longtime hoops fan to relate. Add in some old school highlights and commercial clips and you’ve got pure gold.

Basketball Jones

This is a great basketball blog with an even greater basketball podcast. In fact thebasketballjones.net podcast is currently ranked number four in the category of Best Podcast on the Blogger’s Choice Awards.

Agent Zero: The Blog File

More and more players are starting to blog their thoughts about basically everything. Gilbert Arenas blogs about his workouts, his games, players, video games, his home life, shoes, and whatever else pops into his head. Arenas is a funny guy and the NBA, who hosts the site, lets him be himself. Anyone in the public eye wanting to start his or her own blog should take a lesson in transparency from Agent Zero.

SB Nation

Team blogs. It stands to reason that a lot of the basketball blogs out there are fans writing about the team that they love. As a Spurs fan, all of the Spurs fan blogs would tie for a place on this list. But there are a lot of other great team blogs out there and several of them are part of the SB Nation blog network. The “recent posts” section combines all of the member site headlines, and if you want to stray, the network also includes baseball, football, college, and the catchall “other” category.

Get ready for the NBA blogs to explode in the coming weeks. Opening night is Tuesday October 30th 2007 .

This week alone four co-workers/clients/friends have asked me how they can save videos off of YouTube to their local computer.  I’ve tried doing this a million different ways over the years and have settled on a pretty simple solution: I use Keepvid to do it. 

Keepvid allows you to grab a source FLV file from most video sharing sites (YouTube, Blip.tv, etc.) simply by copying the URL of the video you want into the site.  Keepvid then spits back a link to the source file, you right click and save as and you are on your way.  The only complication is that you have to change the extension of the file you save from “.html” to “.flv” after saving.  Works like charm, although I’ve mostly used it for YouTube videos.

My previous method was to use the Video Downloader extension in Firefox.  I found it to be somewhat buggy and annoying to use.  Keepvid is much simpler. 

If you are interested in diving into this topic in more depth, you should check out CNet’s breakdown of the different ways to save videos.

Today we launched a new public demo of our media management platform, ImpactWatch™. To quote our marketing materials, ImpactWatch “is a web-based media management platform used by public relations and corporate communications professionals to continuously observe, track, gather and analyze high-volume media coverage of any brand, product, issue, event, or industry.”

Put more simply, we track mentions of your company/product/issue in newspapers, magazines, blogs, etc. and provide you with tools that help identify trends in coverage.

Our new demo looks at coverage of the real estate market.

If you want to give ImpactWatch a quick test drive, sign up now.

In my article last week on Wordpress vs Drupal, I gave some examples of sites built using those tools. Frankly, most of the examples I gave were sites we’d worked on. I figured I’d loop back and give examples of some exceptional sites I’ve come across (and didn’t work on) using each toolset. The goal is to show just how far you can push things using Drupal and Wordpress.

Drupal

(1) New York Observer

A full on newspaper website built using Drupal. (more…)

UPDATE (January 15, 2008): We now recommend choosing Blu-Ray over HD-DVD.

Please see our updated post here . 

When I began researching this post, I was aiming to write an article laying out the specifics of HD DVD and Blu-Ray, attempting to make sense out of this DVD format war. What are the advantages/disadvantages of each? Which should I buy? I discovered, however, the CNET already has those topics covered, with everything you never wanted to know about HD DVD and Blu-Ray in their Quick Guide. To avoid redundancy, I'm not going to repeat their expertise.  Instead, I'm going to take a different angle–figuring out what movie studios and dvd providers are working in which format, as well as the affordability of HD DVD and Blu-Ray players.  After all, these factors are what will probably influence most consumers' buying choices, rather than the actual technologies themselves.

Studios and Retailers

(more…)

This one is probably better titled, five more great Wordpress plugins, as we’ve covered this ground before. So here are five more great plugins for your blog:

(1) Wp Poll

Add swank, Ajaxy polls to your blog.

(2) Brian’s Nested Comments

Add threaded discussions to your comment area.

(3) WP-Sticky

This plug-in allows you to stick important posts at the top of your blog, breaking chronological order.

(4) Count Comments

This plugin counts the the number of comments each poster has made on your blog.

(5) Official Comments

Presents posts from the authors on the blog in a slightly different format of that of other commenters.

At this point, nearly all of the websites we build at The Bivings Group are either in Wordpress or Drupal. Sure, we build custom applications on occasion and sometimes do Flash work that really doesn’t fit in a Content Management System. But mostly we use Wordpress and Drupal.

Both are fantastic open source blogging platforms/content management systems with robust user communities. Both systems have their strengths and weaknesses. They are great alternatives to closed, paid platforms and much more cost effective than custom builds. As a web development shop, using Drupal and/or Wordpress allows us to focus our energies on design and strategy as opposed to reinventing the content management wheel.

After implementing a variety sites using both Wordpress and Drupal over the years, we’ve sort of developed our own unwritten rules as to when to use each platform.

Single Person / Group Blog (Use Wordpress)

If you are building a straight on single person or group blog, I think Wordpress is the way to go. It has all the base functionality you need built in and a robust set of plug-ins if you need to add on. The admin interface is dead simple - anyone with basic computer knowledge can master it in a few minutes. The install of the software is also simple and the templating system is not difficult to master.

Anything you want to do in Wordpress, you can also do in Drupal. But Drupal is more complicated from a design/install perspective, and has tons of features you’d end up turning off/not using for something simple like this.

A good example of a blog like built using Wordpress is our modest blog, The Bivings Report.

Blog Community (Use Drupal)

At a certain point your simple blog sort of crosses a line and becomes a blog community. Here are the things I look for:

• In some cases you are going to want people to navigate directly to an authors blog instead of the main page of the overall blog.
• Your blog has 10+ authors.
• There is the possibility that your commenters may themselves become contributors.

You can accomplish these goals by extending Wordpress. You can also use Wordpress Mu, which a community-version of Wordpress that we don’t think is quite ready for prime time. However, these kinds of sites are pretty much the reason Drupal exists. All the community-based features you need are available right away upon setup with little tinkering required.

A good example of a blog community is TechPresident, which we had nothing to do with building.

Blog Driven Website (Use Wordpress)

With its pages section and various plugins, Wordpress can be used as a full on Content Management System for blog-based websites. Lots of companies (including us) long ago abandoned the old fashioned press release and use blogs as their primary content delivery mechanism. Assuming your overall templating system on the site is pretty straight forward and you don’t have hundreds of pages, Wordpress works perfectly well for these types of sites.

Once again, Drupal can accomplish the same thing but it is a little more complicated to deal with and the admin interface is a little more complicated. It is sort of like driving a Ferrari in bumper to bumper traffic - you will get from point A to point B but you’d ultimately be better off weaving through traffic on a motorcycle.

The Washington Area Women’s Foundation is a good example of a Wordpress-based site that we built. In addition to having all the content editable through Wordpress, we also built a few databases as custom plug-ins.

Full Featured Website (Use Drupal)

At certain points, a site simply becomes too big for it to be sufficiently managed using Wordpress. If you find yourself bumping against any of the following scenarios, you should probably be using Drupal:

• If you have multiple dynamic content types (press releases, news articles, blog posts, etc.). Drupal is great at allowing you to create this stuff on the fly, with Wordpress you are hacking things together.
• If your site has more than a two template design structure (homepage and second levels).
• If you have numerous content blocks on the homepage or in sidebars that you will be editing frequently. Drupal’s block system is great at this kind of stuff.
• If you are trying to start small and expect your site to add tons of features/content moving forward.

We built a site for Monsanto Spain that uses Drupal as a full on Content Management System. This is a good example of this kind of website.

I attended a blogger lunch at The Heritage Foundation this afternoon.  While the event was about a topic not relevant to The Bivings Report, I did get something out of it for the blog.  At the meeting I overheard two people who have known each other for years on the Internet but met today for the first time in person.

Certainly not everyone who forms relationships (friendships, professional associations, etc.) on the Internet has a chance to interact in the real world, but meeting and interacting off-line cements on-line relationships.  In fact, while I may communicate and track people I knew years ago on the Internet, the strength of the relationship is derived from our interpersonal interaction with each other.  Regardless if a relationship started on-line or off-line, both realms can help cement and strength the relationship.

Thus, while this is pretty obvious, I think it is important to remember every once in a while how helpful meeting on-line friends in the real world and vice versa is.   

Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) recently launched a new campaign website that I find vaguely fascinating.  The site doesn’t look like any campaign site I’ve seen before and relies heavily on video.  Campaign sites have a tendency to all look the same and I applaud Chambliss for not being afraid to try something different. 

However, two things:

(1) On my laptop I actually have to scroll down on the homepage to find a Contribute or Join link and access the main site navigation.  Call me old school, but I think this stuff needs to be more prominent.  Design conventions exist because they help people navigate your website and quickly find what they are looking for.  Usability matters.

(2) Video is great, but you have to back it up with text.  The site features Chambliss talking about a variety of issues via web video, but nowhere on the site is there text expanding on the videos points.  Web developers should always remember that not everyone wants to watch your video and that the web is still primarily about reading good old fashioned text.  There is also this little site called Google that does much better with text than FLV files. 

Regardless, I would like to thank Chambliss for taking the road less traveled with his site.

<Via TechRepublican>

We're starting a new series here at TBG–Friday's Five.  Every Friday we're going to publish a top 5 list.  The topic of the list will always change, but the five items featured in the list will always be related to one another.  For this week's list, we're going to build on our recently published magazine study and run down our five favorite magazine websites.

This list was pretty difficult to build. Many of the magazine websites are extremely similar, so picking the 5 best was a tricky process.  Making matters more complicated, some of the most robust sites are part of larger online networks (such as Money Magazine, which is part of CNN.com or Martha Stewart Living, which shares content with the larger Martha Stewart network).  To be fair, our list only includes websites that are unique to a particular magazine.  Here goes nothing.

1. TV Guide.  Not only does this site have tons of content related to TV and movies, including reviews, previews, video snippets, and listings, but it also has some interesting blog features.  The 40+ celebrity blogs (comments allowed!) are augmented by community blogs maintained by readers. The site has a solid design and navigation, and is all together well-done.

2. Rolling Stone.  Photos, videos, and blogs.  User reviews and ratings of movies and cd's.  Those features alone would be enough to get RollingStone.com on this list.  The site really surprised me with their section for listening to music.  After just a quick download of a mini-Rhapsody player (no registration required!), users can listen to music featured in the print edition of Rolling Stone.  Another cool feature are the celebrity playlists. I mean, who doesn't want to know what Carrie Underwood's favorite songs are? 

3. Better Homes and Gardens.  Pulled in by the shnazy feature box on the homepage, BHG.com has lots of nifty features that you might not notice right of the bat.  The "clip it" feature lets you save tidbits of information ("just like tearing a page out of a magazine") in your myBHG.com account so you can use them later.  This was also the only magazine site I noticed that has a downloadable widget that you can put on your desktop to get updates from the website.  The site also features several interactive home design tools, which are pretty fun to mess around with.  One downside-the features are only available if you register for the site (it's free).

4. Family Circle. From the same network as BHG.com, the Home and Family Network, Family Circle offers similar functionality as BHG.com–reader comments for articles and features, bookmarking articles and features in their site accounts, and a tag cloud linked to message boards appears on the main site.  There also are many up to date blogs and links to blogs on other sites within the Home and Family Network.

5. US News and World Report . Nothing too earth-shattering here.  However, I appreciate the site's design, which is much more organized and "sane" than most other magazine websites on our list.  The content is professional, interesting, and easy to browse.  There are lots of blogs (although you can't comment on them, so let's instead call them 'columns'), and there is a section where they publish letters to the editor, which can be emailed to the site.  I think the key here is that this publication has really made an effort to make some of its highly valued content (primarily in the rankings section of the site) available to a larger audience by publishing this info online.  It also sets itself apart from other magazine websites by keeping things simple–the site isn't overcrowded, loaded with doohickeys, or cluttered with too many headlines.

What do you look for in magazine websites and what are some of your favorites?  Share in the comments. 

This morning I attended a breakfast discussion (thanks, Kara Kelch for inviting me) put on by Potomac ExecutveBiz at the Tower Club in Vienna, VA.  About 20 persons from various organizations, consulting shops, technology firms and start-ups showed up to throw around ideas and experience regarding Web 2.0.

It was well worth the time spent (The food was way better than most places!) and great to hear from others in the field.  Jim Garrettson of ExecutiveBiz led the discussion.  Here are a few comments of my own – my idiosyncratic take-way.  Sorry if I missed any important points (I’m over 50); you can add them in the comments section.

As we all know, the consensus was that there is no firm definition of Web 2.0.  Blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, YouTube and Flickr all got their due.

In a general way, Web 2.0 is about giving more power to the individual to express, explore and collaborate with others on the web for personal, professional and organizational advantage.  Many more voices, connections to friends, associates and strangers, and fleeting, at times, or lasting relationships for many reasons, at others, on a local, regional and global scale. (For a contrarian view, see Mark Cuban’s posting on how boring the web has become.)

• Vishal Gupta talked about how Cisco is harnessing wikis (following the model set out by James Surowelski , to spur innovation through collaboration, and how Jeff Crites at Fellowforce.com has built a start-up around the notion.

• Thomas Wallace from Ecofusion and Chase Warmington from emPivot.com described their new start-up to leverage the power of user-generated video in the sustainable development space.
• David Gorodetski at Sage Communications raised the important distinction between the technology itself and the social aspects, and Brian Reed at Boxtone talked about the strategy of implementing 2.0 tactics.  (This to me is critical: the strategy must dictate the application of the technology.  It matters that we’re clear about what we want to achieve before we select the technologies.)
• Brands are evolving.  As Andrea Morris of Hinge, Inc.  (I think) paraphrased Jeff Bezos, “Brands are what people say when you are not in the room.”  How true.  And companies are finally coming to the realization that they can’t control the message, the word of mouth, or customer interactions.  Phil Zalewski at Pulse Media Group mentioned Nike’s efforts in this arena, and the example of Dell was brought up.
• As Arthur Clarke once said,” The future is here but it’s not evenly distributed.”  There was lots of talk about how everyone is an organization can and should (?) make use of the evolving web.  As Martin Ringlein of nclud noted, not everyone has the temperament, skills or inclination to participate.  Others disagreed, saying that there’s probably a place for everyone on the new web.  (I’m not convinced).  And the same goes for organizations.  Some still try to limit the use of the web, and others are very slow to adopt.  Carie Lewis was surprised to learn that Instant Messaging was not available in her new organization.
• The World Bank’s Irakli Nadareishvili brought up what I thought was an under-appreciated idea.  Making new applications (software, databases, widgets, etc.) available to others for their blog and websites will push the boundaries of Web 2.0.  Facebook is doing this, and so is The Washington Post, as is The World Bank with its blog tracker, very much like our own ImpactWatch (but which isn’t free).

These new things – mixtures of data, visuals, interfaces, etc. – much like Google maps and restaurants on your mobile phone – called "mash-ups" will truly push to the next level.  It’s one thing to have a platform to say something; it’s truly another to offer services that help find people (the current search for Steve Fossett), offer services to the aged, and transform our health care system, alleviate poverty and reduce violence (those elusive goals founders of the Internet keep aiming for.)

We were asked at the end to say who’s the winner of Web 2.0.  The consensus favorite was the individual.  I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure we're all equal winners.  I'd feel differently if I had been a founder of Youtube or MySpace.  

Last week I wrote a post mentioning that I thought coverage of the 2008 Presidential election would lead news organization to push the envelop in terms of innovation in online coverage. Cyberjournalist has the scoop on just such an innovation from the Washington Post and Daylife - Issue Tracker.

Issues Tracker allows you to select Presidential candidates to get an idea of the amount of press coverage they attract around issues such as abortion, immigration and education. Visitors can also select an issue to view how the candidates compare in terms of the volume of press coverage. I find this tool particular interesting since as it is similar to tools we have on our ImpactWatch media monitoring platform.

A couple of things that I think are significant about Issues Tracker:

• The tool aggregates stories from all across the web. Newspapers have traditionally been reluctant to link to competitors, i.e. other news outlets. It is nice to see the Post recognizes that this is an archaic way of thinking.
• The piece functions as a widget that you can insert in your website (see below). Very cool, although they might want to offer a less full featured version - that is a huge chunk of code to include on your site in any sort of permanent way.

Marketing and grassroots activity on social media sites like Facebook is a burgeoning field.  More and more people are recognizing the power and the variety of ways an organization can harness or benefit (or suffer, for that matter) from social media action.

The news today provides an example about why this trend is important.  According to The New York Times, Time Warner is closing its new economy magazine Business 2.0. 

What I find most interesting in the article is that it states: "A report in The New York Times in July that Time Inc. executives were considering closing the magazine mobilized some support among readers, who started a group on the social networking Web site Facebook."

The Huffington Post's media page linked to an Adage article with the headline: "Facebook Group Not Enough To Save 'Business 2.0'."  While this headline is true, it is very imprtant to note that one of the most read newspapers in the country, the Times, mentioned the Facebook group supporting the magazine.

The moral of the story is that the mainstream media organizations pay attention to social media — particularly the larger and better known sites.  Creative efforts, embarked by organizations or their supporters and detractors, may get significant media attention.  Therefore, it is important for organizations to pay attention to this part of the web as well.