Michael Cosentino over at the International Herald Tribune's Developer Blog shares some of his thoughts about comment sections on news sites – a topic that we cover in our newspaper study.  In his post titled "How are visitors using comments?" he shares some of the issues that he and his team have mulled over as they upgrade the comment section on their site. 

His post focuses on three main points that are crucial to successful comment sections: location, topic selection, and lead-off questions. 

I personally liked his discussion of the editorial side of managing comments.  On one hand his site wants to present topics that many site visitors would have something to contribute, but just because people would talk about the latest exploits of a celebrity, that doesn't make it suitable for every news site.  On the other hand, a site shouldn't select topics that are so esoteric — like seventh century underwater basket weaving — that most of the visitors would have nothing, nor desire, to say.  Editorial decisions must achieve an interesting balance.

Granted, what works for the IHT will not work for other news sites, but this post is valuable since Cosentino shares several factors to consider when designing community features of a site.

Hat Tip: Kevin Anderson at Strange Attractor

Here at The Bivings Group we like news and Internet sites.  A news site interests us even more. 

The Internet and news sites have changed a lot over the last 10 years, and that's why it is fun to wish the site for BBC News — of the most well known – a happy tenth birthday this week. 

The Beeb is celebrating as well.  Check out its news stories about its first 10 years — it even has pictures of how the homepage looked during major news events.

The conservative blog community RedState recently issued a ban on Ron Paul supporters from “shilling” for their candidate on the site. This led to a very entertaining exchange of arguments about the decision. Against the ban, you’ve got Captain Ed and David All. Defending the decision you’ve got Mike Turk, Lance Dutson and Erick Erickson from Redstate. And then David All and Mike Turk weighed in again.

Seriously. Go read this stuff. Very entertaining.

My take on this is that RedState did the right thing. But I have a different perspective on the matter than most that have commented so far. By banning Ron Paul “shills,” RedState was simply preserving what makes it a great site - it’s community.

I’m an old dude in Internet years. I’ve done my time on various message boards, blogs and community websites. And I’ve seen some of my favorite sites ruined by poor moderation by site runners.

I’ve watched sports boards that I loved devoted to the Texas Longhorns and the San Antonio Spurs go to crap due to poor moderation that allows personal attacks and off topic discussions.

I’ve seen the conversation level on fantastic liberal and conservative blogs devolve to the point of horror due to submissive admins.

I’ve watched how crappy the discussion is on newspaper websites like the Washington Post and USA Today due to lack of oversight.

I’ve watched Ron Paul supporters make any real political discussion on Digg impossible. I’ve seen these same folks hijack threads on this very site.

I can only imagine what a site like RedState is dealing with during an election year.

As an admin at one of these sites you have a responsibility to your community to preserve the level of discourse by providing oversight. If you don’t, you run the risk of alienating the core contributors that made your community site great to begin with. RedState did the right thing.

Yesterday The Bivings Group launched our latest client site Living Conversations, a community-based website for breast cancer survivors. The site encourages survivors to submit their stories via video and the written word as a way of providing strength and support to anyone coping with the disease. We’re happy of the way the site turned out, and to be associated with such a cool organization.

Working on the site also gave us the chance to try out a few things we hadn’t attempted before. Given that, I figured I’d give a little look under the hood and explain how the site was constructed.

The site is built using using the open source Content Management System Drupal. As mentioned previously, we pretty much build all our website these days in Drupal or Wordpress. We chose to use Drupal for this site due to the community features that were required and the varied content types on the site. We also wanted to leave the Living Conversations folks with the ability to quickly expand the functionality on the site should they choose to.

Working from Drupal, we added a great deal of additional functionality to the site through a combination of custom coding and the use of Drupal modules and plugins. Here is the breakdown of the ones we used:

(1) Video Uploading. A central aim of Living Conversations is to get breast cancer survivors to tell their stories via video. This required us to develop a way for users to upload videos to the site and then to display dynamically in various spots on Living Conversations. We did this using a combo of the Video module and a plugin that allows for the uploading of videos to a Blip.tv account. So basically users can upload a video on Living Conversations and it will FTP directly into their Blip account and show up on the site. Cool stuff.

Note that the Video module in Drupal is very easy to use. If you want to use the Blip.tv upload plugin, you are going to need to have some developers around as it is a bit tricky.

(2) Content Rating. The site allows registered users to rate content using a five point start system. This was implemented using Voting API as the backend and Voting to control the methodology used for the rating on the frontend. They work together.

(3) User Profiles. Out of the box, Drupal has a powerful Profile module built in. This allows registered users to create profiles on the site. Administrators to add just about any fields they want to capture to this profile field. We supplemented this with Buddy List, which allows users to add other users as contacts and track their activities on the site.

Those are the big ones. We also used Flag Content and Syndication to add some minor functionality to the site.

Anyway, check out www.livingconversations.com if you get a chance. Let us know what you think in the comments.

A few days ago Jeff Jarvis over at BuzzMachine noticed an ad for a Tag Editor (Editor 2.0?) job at Britain's The Guardian.  Jarvis explained this is exciting since metadata increases the accessibility and utility of a news site to its audience.

This made me think of our newspaper study this year.  Of the top 100 American newspaper, as ranked by circulation, only one — The Plain Dealer in Cleveland — uses tags on its website.  I wonder why so many papers have avoided tagging but admire The Guardian for willing to make the venture using folksonomy (collaborative taxonomy) since it presents both great challenges and utility.

As social media guru and Everything is Miscellaneous author David Weinberger explained during NPR's All Things Considered on June 11, 2007 in a commentary piece "The Value of a Man-Made Mess, on the Internet" that tagging allows one to classify web content in a variety of ways.  For instance, tags like "American," "food," "yummy," and "crust" are all applicable for a picture of an apple pie. 

Thus, through the use of tagging, a news site doesn't have to limit itself to a small set of sections like metro, style, and national; by using tags it can create sections like "Southern California Fires 2007" or not fret having to exclusively place a story about horse race betting in the sports or business section.  Why not both?

Of course, such freedom and a lack of consistency can make it hard to find anything or tie related information together.  However, that's why The Guardian is going to hire someone to manage this full-time.

Mike Shields of MediaWeek reports that CondéNet, the Internet arm of magazine publisher CondéNast, has aggressively used Facebook applications.

The article mentions that in June the company acquired the "What Are You Wearing?" application, which CondéNet executives claim that about 1,000 users are joining each day the over 90,000 others who are revealing their wardrobe on Facebook. 

Further, a few weeks ago, the more festive "What Are You Wearing for Halloween?" application was also launched and currently has about 4,000 users.

While CondéNet hasn't branded either application, it started to display ads from Guess in its application.  That's the great thing about widgets and other applications, companies who develop them can also use them for ad space as well.

One of the most interesting tidbits from this article to me was when CondéNet president Sarah Chubb mentioned that the "What Are You Wearing?" application has been the most viral and fastest growing widget or application that the company has developed over the years. 

I guess deploying an application on a site where people already divulge information helps give these two applications gusto.

Techcrunch has the scoop on an episode of CSI: NY that will take place in part in the virtual world Second Life. Here are the details:

The episode will see Mac Taylor (Gary Sinise) entering Second Life to pursue a killer who has killed a Second Life user in a case of virtual stalking gone too far.

CSI:NY fans will be encouraged to join Second Life and investigate the case by following a link on the CBS website. CSI:NY will have three options for CSI-related inworld activities. The first option will allow viewers to walk around virtual New York buildings and visit a CSI lab and play forensic games.

The second option consists of a game called “Murder by Zuiker,” a unique murder plot which can be solved by users finding clues. The 100 people who come closest to solving the murder will win virtual gifts.

The big tie-in gives new users the ability to become CSI investigators, complete with field kit and tools, and are given a chance to interview suspects and to solve the murder featured in the actual CSI:NY episode. The episode itself will apparently end in a cliff-hanger with the solution not revealed until February.

and

Some reports suggest that Second Life could see one million new user signups following the CSI:NY episode going to air, however it will be more interesting to see how many of the new users will stick around.

Reading this I really have to wonder if CSI: NY is getting anything out of this. Cash? This is such a massive promotional opportunity for Second Life that you’d think money has to be changing hands here.

I think this will also be a huge test of whether Second Life is going to become truly part of mainstream America. If massive numbers of people go in and get hooked, this could take the virtual world to the next level. If this promotion doesn’t move the envelop for Second Life very much, it pretty much will confirm what I suspect: Second Life is a niche community that doesn’t have much appeal for the average person.

(1) Will Social Networks Impact the 2008 Election? I think NOT.

Sanford Dickert has a good post about the seeming lack of impact social networks have truly had on the 2008 elections so far. He writes:

When I go to the local mall, county fair, outdoor market - I can often see the ardent supporters of candidates “tabling” in the flow of traffic - holding their campaign literature, sign at the edge of the table, looking for eyes that are ready to learn more about the person running for State Senate, Congress or even President. You and your friends are there, giving each other moral support as the throngs of people walk by - nary paying attention to you, until a person walks up and says, “So….tell me about Senator X.”

Where does this happen on social networks? Can I put up a “table” and engage in a conversation? Where is the flow of people that are milling about that can be “chatted up”? Certainly not on MySpace or many of the other social networks.

And he closes by asking where the “virtual tablers” are:

This is where the campaigns can use their volunteers and give them the power to reach across their own networks and chat up people when they are interested in learning more about the candidate. But, it is not easy to go and “speak” to someone in Facebook since all of the communications are not interrupt-driven (as a face-to-face might be), they are addressed whenever the receiver wants to. How do you get people to accept the interrupts? Usually, that is the sense of presence - of human contact. Once that magic ingredient is “captured” and enabled, then I could see social networks truly engaging people.

Interesting stuff. My thought is that the official campaign presences won’t have much of an impact this cycle - it is the the ad hoc organizations created and managed by supporters that are the potential game changers.

(2) Will Social Features Make Email Sexy Again?

Wall Street Journal story about attempts by email carriers to add social networking features into their products to help compete with Facebook.

(3) Life At

This is a social networking site aimed at allowing people living in apartment buildings to network with each other. What a great idea.

(4) How to Raise $1.8 Million in 3 Days

Ruffini does a deep dive into how Obama recently raised $1.8 million through a single email push. I wonder how much was raised off the initial email from Obama and how much was raised from those peripheral emails sent by supporters to unsuspecting Obama list subscribers.

(5) Is Mint Ready for Your Money?

Lifehacker takes a close look at the white hot money management tool Mint.

Nancy Scola over at TechPresident has the scoop on the latest attempt by a Presidential campaign to personalize mass emails. Basically, “Barack Obama” sent a “personal” email message out to his list yesterday about Hillary’s cash advantage. I am a member of Obama’s list and got the message. Then a few hours later Obama’s message was forwarded to me by some stranger in Leawood, KS with a personal note encouraging me to donate more cash. This same person from Leawood, KS also emailed Nancy, and the “from” address on the email was the same generic info@barackobama.com address that “Barack” emails me from personally. Basically, I think the Obama campaign has built some tools into their site that makes it easy for the most active members of their list to send mass emails to the least active.

This is just the latest iteration of a trend this cycle: impersonal mass emails that have been carefully doctored to look like personal notes. These stripped down emails have some common characteristics:

• They are usually from someone high up in the campaign who would never email you personally.
• They do not include any pictures or graphics and very little formatting (bolding, italics, etc.). So it looks likes something the sender could plausibly put together themselves.
• They include typical email subject lines like “FW” and “RE” that make it look like the sender just spontaneously decided to forward me something from Outlook.
• The text is the same press-office crafted spin you read in every campaign email.

Basically they are made to look like the work/pleasure emails we all get everyday from our friends, clients and co-workers, but are really the same old same old.

Part of me likes this trend. Theoretically, I prefer to receive text emails w/o all the formatting and pretty pictures.   I’m also confident these are working pretty well, based on Obama’s fundraising numbers.

But mostly I think these carefully crafted emails are just cynical and somewhat troubling. I think Nancy summed it up pretty well:

It’s worrying to me that the lesson that we thought we learned from 2004 — that people respond to personalized politics — is being so loosely interpreted to in 2008 in a way that seems to imply that people won’t know the difference between actual connections between real-live people and bulk emails from people who may as well be fake. There’s no difference between this email and one obviously written by the Obama press shop.

What do you think? Am I overreacting or does this tactic strike you are pretty cynical as well?

As someone who works in search marketing a little, I usually completely ignore advertisements on the Internet.  However, while using my Yahoo! e-mail account yesterday, I noticed a rather interesting ad for the new CBS show Viva Laughlin (the network's apparent answer to NBC's Las Vegas…).

Beyond its normal animation that catches the eye, the ad gave me the ability to add the show times of the show's entire first season to my Yahoo! calendar with a button at the very bottom, which means that I can set up reminders of each episode. 

I don't know how long Yahoo! or other sites have offered such options to their users and advertisers, but who wouldn't want such a robust feature?

Appointment viewing — with reminders – is a network executive's dream.

I must admit that at first this adding the show schedule to my calendar gimmick struck me as slightly vexing.  However, I probably would've loved to have this option for one of my favorite TV shows — Alias. 

What are some of the most robust features of Internet ads you have seen?

Update (October 29, 2007): CBS canceled the show after two episodes and four days since its premier.  However, that doesn't mean that these Yahoo! ads aren't interesting.

Newsweek unveiled a redesigned site yesterday.  The new site looks nice; although it still crams a bit too much information on the page than I would like, it does so in a much more organized manner than it did.

One of the new features that really caught my attention is the homepage header that can appear on any page.  It is, of course, on the index page, but is also available on individual story pages.  This is an interesting way to better coax a person who has come to the site through a link to a specific page to other pages.

All one needs to do is to click on a arrow button that lies between the site's main navigation and the headline of the article — in a box with a Top Story, Latest News item, and Video item — on the page.  Once this is done, the homepage header is unfurled in all of its grandeur: a rotating image centric box that scrolls through six items on the left, the latest headlines above a tidbit from the magazine's Conventional Wisdom column in the middle, and access to multimedia items on the right. 

This is a lot of content to present in one feature, but the site lists it in an attractive manner.  If one doesn't want to see this section, they can simply close it by hitting on the same arrow button to close it; there is a corresponding text tab on the lower right of header that one can use to open or close it.

Perhaps the best thing I can report about the homepage header feature is that, at least for me, opening and closing it has not noticeably affected the site's performance. 

Great job, Newsweek.

Back on Oct. 3rd through the 5th Alex and I attended the Institue for Public Relations’ 5th annual Summit on Measurement in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Overall the event was fantastic. I spend all day working on ImpactWatch, the media measurement platform created by The Bivings Group, so it was great to meet with a group of 100+ media measurement, media research, and social network gurus.

The session I was most interested in attending was “How to Measure the Impact of Blogs and Other Consumer-Generated Media.” This was a panel discussion including Shel Israel , Kami Huyse , Todd Parsons, Donald McLagan from Compete Inc, and moderated by KD Paine . Unfortunately I set my expectations too high. Not that the session was bad, it just wasn’t what I expected. I think Shel summed it up best when he said that we haven’t been doing this long enough to have best practices “We’re just at the ‘good ideas’ stage.” As such, it seemed like the discussion took a turn towards the merits of doing social media measurement at all. Todd and Donald (and I) think there is absolutely value in it, that’s why we provide products and services doing exactly that. Some thought that it was a waste of time. It was also suggested that the whole point of social media is the conversations it creates which are hard to measure at all. I agree that it’s ideal to have blogs and social networks facilitate conversations and generate engagement, and it is something that is hard to measure. I don’t think that’s what it’s all about. This was confirmed when the audience was asked to raise their hands if they had a personal or corporate blog. Almost everybody raised their hands. When asked if they comment on other blogs, the hands dropped to about a third of the audience.

Most readers are still going to blogs to learn more about subjects they are interested in. They aren’t necessarily interested in joining the conversation. Therefore, many traditional web metrics still apply.

In conclusion, it was certainly valuable to learn that blog measurement is something everybody is still trying to get a handle on right now. In fact, the direction we’re headed with ImpactWatch looks pretty advanced compared to what other folks are doing.

I came across an interesting interactive feature on USA Today’s website — the Candidate Match Game.

The premise behind this feature is pretty simple. A person selects one of a few defined responses to policy questions ranging from the war in Iraq to global warming to health care. Then at the end, it presents the three presidential candidates, including both Democrats and Republicans, that match a person’s answers the most. Further, users can weight different issues more or less than others, and the feature takes this into account when presenting the three candidates.

While the programming and logic behind this probably are pretty complex, the user experience is relatively easy. The great part about this “game” is that it takes relevant data that the newspaper already gathers and allows its website visitors to interact with it in a way that makes it meaningful to them.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this game to me is that it is possible for a person to find out that their top three candidates come from two different parties. If you had some interesting combinations of candidates presented to them by the Candidate Match Game, please list them in the comments section of this post.

The Bivings Group’s Fred Thompson Disclosure

For me this was definitely one of those weeks where I had more ideas for blog posts than time to write them. So here are the five topics I would have written about if time weren’t such a limiting factor for me right now.

(5) Top 40 Drupal Projects

I have a pretty good grasp on what the best Wordpress plug-ins are but less knowledge about the various Drupal modules. This list and accompanying podcast are a great place to start. Of the ones I haven’t played with before, the Video, Simplenews, e-Commerce and Audio modules look particularly interesting.

(4) Thompson Campaign Live Blogs Debate

Obviously I’m an interested observer here, but I thought it was pretty cool that Jon Henke live blogged the Republican debate for the Thompson campaign. I think a lot of poli-tech pundits spend too much time focusing on the shiny new toys (Facebook applications, Eventful, whatever) and not enough on fundamentals (I think blogging should be a fundamental at this point). The fact is that most campaign blogs are really bad and this is an example of a good use of the medium.

(3) Splash Pages - Do We Really Need Them?

More than you’ll ever want to read about the use of splash pages on websites. I’m firmly on the use them very rarely side of the fence.

(2) Social Networking is a feature, not a destination

Chris Anderson writes about whether the future of social networking lies in large, destination sites (MySpace, Facebook) or in smaller communities distributed on niche websites. His conclusion: “I think focused sites that serve niche communities will extract the best lessons from Facebook and MySpace and offer better social networking tools to the communities they already have. I’m sure huge and generic social networking destinations will continue to do well, but I’m placing my bet on the biggest impact coming when social networking becomes a standard feature on all good sites, bringing community to the granular level where it always works best.”

(1) Facebook Reality Check: It’s not worth $100B, and it won’t crush MySpace or Google (but it does rock)

Buried in this long rebuttal against Facebook hype by Jason Calacanis is the following tidbit regarding reports that Facebook usage is falling: “I’ve heard some inside information on focus groups that were done by a VERY credible source outside of Facebook that found that students coming back found the applications to be annoying–the equivalent of spam.”

While that is a bit more extreme than my current opinion, my enthusiasm for Facebook applications has definitely waned in the last few months (both from a user and developer perspective). As a user, I find most of them banal. As a developer, you have to face reality and realize that most people probably aren’t going to use the ap you build.

Unless there is really compelling case, I think building a Facebook application is a flight of fancy you pursue only after you’ve got all the fundamental parts of your web program nailed down.

Despite its somewhat odd name, The State Department's new blog site, DipNote , is a pretty interesting example of new ways to use blogs.

The site features several State Department officials blogging about their work, their travels, and current issues in international affairs. The content is certainly interesting, but that isn't what really caught my eye about this site.

What I found incredibly surprising was that the blog actually allows comments. And they don't appear to be censored.  After a quick scan of the comments on several blog posts, I realized that both positive comments and comments critical of the State Department or US Government are freely flowing.  Here's an example–a comment that appeared on a post about Burma.

Roy in Oregon writes:
"Thou hypocrite, cast first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull the mote that is in thy brother's eye." Luke 6:42

Let me see — You are a political appointee in the most secretive administration in U.S. history… How is that helping "create a free flow of information crucial to democratic development?"

— You are the member of an administration which quite improperly and illegally harvested telephone information without appropriate judicial warrants…. That doesn't discourage "free flow of information?"

— Your President authorized pressuring Internet Service Providers to release information about legal (but private) citizen use of the internet… Who can trust this administration to protect the principles of "freedom of expression?"

Brother, how about first removing the beam (and the blinders) from your own eye and working to end the murderous cabal which employs you? Posted on Mon Oct 08, 2007

Pretty bold.  And the comments are loaded with others very similar to this one.  It seems like DipNote is actually a legitimate forum for discussion rather than just a false front.  In an era where so many media outlets, organizations, and political campaigns are concerned about "inappropriate citizen content" appearing on their websites, I am finding the openness of DipNote pretty refreshing.  I have to say, I'm even impressed.  Why is it that so many newspapers remain unwilling to open their sites to various types of user commentary, but the US government appears willing to reduce barriers to two-way communication?

DipNote is a great example of a blog that is leveraging user comments to generate traffic and discussion. I would venture to say that if the site lacked freely flowing and less-than-complimentary comments, the site would be much less popular than it is now.  Perhaps this can serve as a model for newspapers still serving up "flogs" (fake blogs) and websites without interactivity.