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There has been a lot of controversy today regarding last nights Republican CNN/YouTube debate, during which CNN asked Republican Presidential candidates 40 or so questions carefully selected from thousands submitted via YouTube by ordinary citizens. The gist of the controversy is that people are questioning the editorial process CNN used to select the questions and CNN’s vetting of the people asking the questions (it is coming out today that a lot of Democrats got questions in).

I personally have never been a big fan of the CNN/YouTube debate format and found some of the editorial choices made by CNN in both debates to be a bit baffling. I understand the symbolic value of having people submit questions through YouTube. I really do. However, to me having CNN editors pick and choose which questions to ask pretty much defeats the whole point of a “people-powered” debate. I think the CNN/YouTube process actually gives CNN more control over the things than a traditional debate format would. By putting the producers in a position where they can cherry pick from a vault of thousands of varied videos, you give them the power to choose inflammatory/off topic/goofy subjects that would be completely out of bounds otherwise. Kid, meet candy story.

The power of the social web is that it provides real people with access to unfiltered information, or even better information that has been filtered by people they know and trust. I don’t see anything revolutionary about a debate where CNN serves as our filter, just like they do every single day in choosing what they put on TV and their website. To me, this was a traditional, mainstream media driven debate masquerading as people-powered discourse. A wolf in sheep’s clothing.

I think something like 10 Questions, where questions are voted on by real people instead of handpicked by CNN, is a better model.  Ultimately the power is in the hands of the people who determine what questions are asked.

That’s my two cents.

What do you think?

It appears that there is exciting social media action happening out in Ohio.  Public broadcaster WOSU and COSI, an area science museum, in Columbus are now hosting the Columbus Social Media Cafe group in their WOSU@COSI center.

According to the Columbus Social Media Cafe blog, the mission of this group centers around the following question that WOSU and COSI asked themselves:

What if we — your local public broadcaster and science museum — and those of you who are the local blogging experts got together and learned how to use Social Media to bring back that great American tradition of the community taking charge of its own problems?

The group has already met a couple of times this month with great attendance and participation. 

What I find interesting about this group is how much they're using social media.  They have a blog, a mini social network (ning based), and use Twitter.  However, they rely use these tools to complement interaction in the real world.  We'll see if this collaboration between a traditional news organization, museum, and area residents will indeed usher in a better community through the help of social media.

Since the Internet spans the globe, administering the law is a rather fuzzy process when it comes to the web.  It is also rather easy for more than one country to get involved in a dispute over copyright laws. 

For instance, a person who resides in the United States could post an item to their blog hosted on a server in Russia that violates the copyright of a company in Brazil.  Which country's laws are used in this case?

Sarah Bird, SEOmoz's General Counsel, posted an interesting blog post last week about the Internet and international copyright law in which she discusses the various ways the example above. 

While it is very important to note that she doesn't provide legal advice in her post, she illuminates the myriad of minutiae that can complicate legal proceedings.  It is worth a read to better understand how law is applied to the Wild Wild Web.

I know it isn't Friday. But since I wasn't around this past Friday, I decided to catch up today (Monday).

This time of year, so many people are searching for the best gifts for their techie family members and friends.  I got to thinking…why not combine the love for gadgets with a philanthropic spirit?  Here are some great technology-inspired gifts that have the added benefit of helping others.

One Laptop Per Child.  Through December 31, 2007, you can participate in OLPC's "give one, get one" program.  For $399, you get one of OLPC's laptops for yourself, and an additional unit gets donated to a needy child in a developing country.  

Oxfam America Unwrapped. On Oxfam America's website, you can purchase items in the name of your friends or family members that people in any of Oxfam's 26 operation countries need. For example, you can donate the purchase price of a camel. Your friend gets a personalized card with a picture of a camel on it, and an impoverished village will receive the camel or other needed items.

Kiva Gift Certificates. We've mentioned Kiva on TBR before. It's a great website that helps individuals "connect with and loan money to individuals and small businesses in the developing world."  Now, you can buy your friends Kiva gift cards. These allow you to donate money to Kiva, while the recipient of the card determines how it is spent and what project on the site will get the loan. (You can find a similar program at GlobalGiving.com)

Send an eTree. Have a friend who's into virtual reality? Send them an eTree at Mokugift.com.  Here, you send someone an "eTree" (sort of like an e-card) for $1. Your friend gets an email with some info about the tree and access to their eIsland, where all their eTrees grow online.  At the same time, Mokugift plants an actual tree in the real world, helping the environment.

And since this post is about giving, I'll give you a bonus link:

NonProfit Shopping Mall. This isn't actually a gift…but it's a place where you can find gifts for others. This site aggregates products from online stores where you already shop, like Amazon.com, iTunes, and Target.  These stores then donate a percentage of the purchase price to a charity of your choosing.

Good luck with your holiday shopping. Maybe this year you can combine your love for technology with helping others. 

On Monday Duncan Riley reported on TechCrunch that 17 more newspapers have joined in on Yahoo!'s partnership with local news sites; these papers include 16 regional papers owned by The New Times Company but not the NYT itself. 

A main part of this partnership is that local newspapers can buy job listings from Yahoo!'s HotJobs site.  In return the local sites upload job listings to Yahoo!'s HotJobs, and they can charge a higher price for these listings.

The idea behind this partnership seems logical.  Yahoo! gets access to more job listings that are provided by its partners while the local newspapers can offer those who purchase job listings a greater forum in which their positions are advertised on.

So far, this logic has worked out for Cox Newspapers, which owns the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.  According to the Associated Press on Monday Cox has enjoyed increased revenues.  For instance, Cox owned Austin American-Statesman enjoys a "market share for online recruitment ads is now 40 percent, up 19 percentage points from a year ago."  

The fact that more papers have signed in on this partnership is an indication that it is working.  However, Yahoo! is not alone in offering such services.  For instance, Gannett and Tribune — the top two newspaper publishers (as measured by circulation) — haven't joined Yahoo! yet.  Perhaps they are too interested in their own jobs site, CareerBuilder, that they run with McClatchy — a fellow newspaper publisher.  Further, there are other jobs sites out there like Monster.  That leaves plenty of options for papers like The Washington Post, which hasn't joined in the Yahoo! partnership, to consider; that's what the paper told the AP that it's doing. 

Thus, as newspapers and advertisers alike realize that on-line ad space is growing in importance, more publishers are considering banding together to deal with advertisers.  Looking forward, if partnerships like Yahoo!'s are profitable, a key question is: Who else wants to get in the game of selling and culling on-line ad space on local news sites?

With Thanksgiving tomorrow, tis the season for sweets and treats.  A newspaper article about cookies sounds like a great idea.

Stuart Elliott of the New York Times has just an article today, but not one about recipes.  It is about Pepperidge Farm, the cookie company, which is employing social networking in a new advertising campaign.  While other companies establish a presence on an existing social network site by setting up a group, profile, or buying ads, Pepperidge Farm has launched artofthecookie.com.

The Art of the Cookie site is aimed at woman and helping them make connections through cookies. Sally Horchow, co-author of The Art of Friendship: 70 Simple Rules for Making Meaningful Connections, is a key spokesperson for the campaign.  On the site she posted a diary of a cross country trip she made this summer during which she spoke with women about friendships.  The site offers other tips about friendships.

Companies have taken a more serious look at social networking as many are either creating niche social network sites or participate on existing networks.  Clearly the notion of connecting customers with each other is gaining traction with the common practice of a company speaking to its customers.  

Pepperidge Farm didn't haphazardly decide to pursue a social networking centric campaign.  After conducting research in the homes of its customers, vice president and general manager Michael Simon explained to the NYT that "this notion of connection came up again and again…hectic lifestyles, life in general, has gotten in the way" of fostering friendships.  He expects positive results from portraying the sharing of cookies with others as a great way to make and strengthen relationships. 

It'll be interesting to see how this new campaign works out.  I wonder if a poultry company will launch a campaign about forging business deals over steak… 

We’ve written about the One Laptop Per Child project before on The Bivings Report. Now they have launched the Give One Get One promotion running through November 26^th. The way it works is for a $399 donation one laptop is donated to a child in a developing nation and one is sent to another child of your choice.

So why is this a big deal? It’s the only way that the public (read you – the "child") is able to get one of these laptops. At first I questioned the motivation for wanting one. Isn’t personal ownership of one of these cool, inexpensive and innovative laptops against the spirit of the OLPC project? These are supposed to be for the kids, right? I especially thought this when I saw this post the other day on Engadget.

But I think when all is said and done this is a good thing. Gadget crazy hackers get a new toy to play with and will probably make it 100 times as awesome as it already is, and a child in a developing nation gets a fantastic learning and communication tool. Plus as part of the promotion you get a free year of T-Mobile HotSpot Access worth $359.98 and a tax write off of $200 for the laptop you gave. It’s a win-win-win-win. Now all they have to do is keep up with production.

Last week the New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt announced that the Times had begun allowing user comments on select editorials and news stories appearing on the website (via CyberJournalist). The Times has long allowed commenting on its blogs, but this marks the first time it will allow visitors to comment on stories that actually make it into the print version of the newspaper. All comments will be moderated by Times’ staffers. Hoyt writes about that decision: “The paper is creating a comment desk, starting with the hiring of four part-time staffers, to screen all reader submissions before posting them, an investment unheard of in today’s depressed newspaper business environment.” You can view an example of how comments on the Times site will work here.

In reading Hoyt, it is clear that this is a decision the Times came to very reluctantly. On the one hand, the Times acknowledges the contribution that commenters can make to a site:

“We have two great assets,” said Jonathan Landman, the deputy managing editor who is in charge of the newsroom’s online efforts. “One is the quality of the material we produce; the other is the quality of our readers, some of the most curious, intelligent and sophisticated people on earth.” Putting the knowledge of readers together with the journalism of The Times, he said, could result in “news and information of greater power, reach and quality than even a great newsroom can produce on its own.”

On the other hand, Hoyt provides multiple examples of commenters on the Times’ website run amok and closes with this:

Many major newspapers, like The Washington Post and USA Today, do not have an editor screen comments before posting them. Those two papers allow other readers to object to a comment as abusive, and then an editor will check it.

But Landman said The Times never considered unmoderated comments.

Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president for digital operations of The New York Times Company, said: “A pure free-for-all doesn’t, in my opinion, equal good. It can equal bad.”

I believe that’s especially true if you’re The New York Times and you are trying to maintain a rare tradition of civility. A site with many Rays in Mexican Colony of LA might carry the name of The New York Times, but it would no longer be The New York Times.

I think the solution of allowing comments on select articles is a good one. I also think the decision to allow only pre-screened isn’t going to work for the 99% of newspapers that simply don’t have the resources to devote four full time people to screening comments, as the Times does. The solution simply isn’t scaleable.

If I were running a newspaper website, I would not pre-screen comments. But I would take the following steps to help ensure the conversation maintains a minimum level of quality:

1. Only allow users who have registered with a site to post comments.
2. Screen the first comment a user makes. If the first comment is acceptable then let the user post without screening. If it is objectionable or off topic, then don’t allow the user to comment. This will help prevent the trolls seeking to sidetrack conversations from getting through.
3. Automatically delete all comments that contain profanity.
4. Create a mechanism that allows users to report comments that are objectionable. If a comment is flagged by enough users, it would then be sent into a moderation queue for review by an editor.
5. Give users the ability to hide the comments of users they find objectionable.
6. Provide active oversight of the community. Have editors leave comments themselves. Ban users who are out of line. Delete objectionable comments. You’ll find communities tend to be more civil when administrators maintain an active presence on their site instead of being distant figures.

What do you think is the best way for high volume sites to handle comments?

Update: Thought of one more: (7) Close comments on articles after one week of discussion.  This will free you from having to manage comments on old stories and focus on the new stuff.

On Saturday, MSNBC launched a redesigned version of its website (via Cyberjournalist). You can view some reader reaction here and take a tour of the new site here.

I’ve never been a fan of the MSNBC website. While I think the new design is an improvement from a design perspective, the site has a long way to go before I’ll be converted into a regular visitors. Here are my specific criticisms of the new design and the overall site strategy.

(1) The navigation on the new site isn’t very user friendly. For me, the banner at the top of the page is useless from a navigation perspective. Instead of just providing me with a nice breakdown of the content of the site in the header, MSNBC uses the entire thing to advertise the sites of the Today Show and Dateline. The actual site navigation has been de-emphasized and placed at the bottom left area of the page, meaning many, many users will be scrolling to find the Health and Weather sections on the homepage. (more…)

I was doing some work on Google and did a quick search for Barack Obama. I wanted to go to his main campaign site, so I clicked on the ad that shows up as the first result. I often find just typing search phrases in Google quicker than trying to type in a URL or sort through where I have the site bookmarked.

Not surprisingly, I got taken to a page designed specifically for Google Adwords that encourages me to join the Obama mail list. Below is a screenshot of the landing page.

This is pretty typical. The only thing interesting here is that the page doesn’t include any obvious way to opt out of the sign up process. Most of the time when you do these sorts of pages you get the little “Skip to go to Website” option. Want to to go to the website? Can’t get there from here. It seems to be designed in a way that conveys that the only option is to sign up. (more…)

One thing I’m noticing more and more is media websites running advertisements as background images on their websites. Above is an example from Gamespot. If you click on the image above you’ll see the page in all its widescreen glory. It is a pretty spectacular ad. I’ve seen similar ads on entertainment sites like TV Guide and the Superficial and think we’ll see more like this the future. They work for a number of reasons:

• Most people have widescreen LCD monitors nowadays but most websites don’t use the space. These ads fill that void.
• The ads are visually engaging and catch the eye much more than banners or Flash piece. People have gotten pretty good at figuring out where ads are normally located on a page and ignoring them.
• Ultimately, the ad is still in the background of the page taking up space that otherwise wouldn’t be used, so I think this makes these kinds of ads less disruptive than formats you have to mute or that cover over text you are trying to read.

I think these background ads should be deployed judiciously by sites. You want to break it out only on special occasions and make sure the advertiser is a perfect match for your brand. Overuse will lead to the loss of the wow effect the Gamespot ad achieves.

What do you think? Cool or just another way to steal your attention?

I went to the New New Internet conference in Reston, VA last week. It was an enjoyable conference that I feel like I got something out of.

But, having been to a couple of tech conferences this year, I think there are some topics and parlor tricks that simply need to be retired They have entered the realm of cliche. So here’s my list of things that made me groan a bit and that I think panelists should avoid doing in the future.

Unless you are Jeff Jarvis, don’t mention Dell Hell. This example was mentioned during three consecutive panels at the New New Internet. Shockingly, I’d heard about it a few times before. Can we please find a new example? Please? I’d also avoid using Robert Scoble as an example of exceptional corporate blogging. His Microsoft work was mentioned on two panels despite the fact that he left there over a year ago. Can’t we find some new stories to tell?

Personally, I think panelists are most interesting when they bring their own experiences to bear instead of retelling anecdotes they’ve accrued from reading lots of blogs. That is why the Wine Library TV guy was one of the more entertaining panelists at the conference - he told his own story.

Please don’t poll the audience about anything. In four of the panels I attended, someone asked the audience a question and asked for a show of hands. Raise your hand if you have a blog. Raise your hand if you have a Facebook account. Raise your hand if you’ve heard of Twitter. Maybe I’m alone here, but I really, really don’t want to raise my hand anymore. Generally, the response you get isn’t going to change what you have to say anyway so why bother? As Chuck told me after, why make your audience answer clearly rhetorical questions?

Please don’t Twitter from the stage (or at the very least don’t talk about it if you are). Look at me. I’m crazy. I’m using Twitter on my cell phone while sitting on a panel.  I saw this in two panels, plus in another someone did the trick where he had someone call him during the panel with “news.”  Twitter has been around for a while now. People at these conferences know what it is. Most of the audience would rather have you focus on what you are saying than pounding away on your cell phone.

Frankly, I think I sort of deserved to listen to some of this stuff as I spent the first part of the conference sitting in the main hall listening to panels on topics with which I am already pretty familiar. I had a much better experience later in the day when I sought out panelists and speakers I hadn’t heard before talking about topics that were new to me. Chalk it up to lessons learned.

CNET  had an interesting blurb a couple of days ago about newspaper websites–more people are using them!

"The number of people visiting U.S. newspaper Web sites rose 3.7 percent year over year during the third quarter, even as their print editions reported lower advertising sales.

More than 59 million people, or 37.1 percent of all active Internet users, visited the papers' Web sites during the quarter, up from 56.9 million a year ago, the Newspaper Association said, citing data supplied by Nielsen/NetRatings."

Check out CNET for a longer blurb and more stats . 

Startup Weekend is a project founded by Andrew Hyde, who came up with the idea to connect a "highly motivated group of small business entrepreneurs to build a community and company in a weekend."  Basically, Startup Weekend groups together web developers, designers, marketers, and entrepreneurs for a weekend to see what kind of Internet company they can come up with.  Groups have a weekend to complete their project from start to finish, which includes deciding on a concept and launching the actual project. 

From the various Startup Weekends that have been held throughout the country recently, it seems that the answer to my initial question, "Can an Internet Company be Built in a Weekend?", the answer is yes.  Most Some of the Startup Weekends have resulted in the launching of a website.  The more important question might be, "Can a viable business be built in a weekend?", to which the answer, judging from the sites launched by Startup Weekend, is probably no.

Here's a list of some of Startup Weekend's results:

VoSnap -Boulder team
Favoreats -NYC team
TipDish -Houston team
ScrollTalk -West Lafayette team
DeskHappy -Boston Team
Hola Neighbor -DC team
WorkPerch -Chapel Hill team 

These websites range from confusing without a clear purpose (TipDish and ScrollTalk) to founded on good ideas, but lacking in capabilities (HolaNeighbor), to just plain bizarre (DeskHappy).   

(more…)

I'm at the New New Web conference in Reston and just listened to Tim Ferriss of 4 Hour Work Week fame speak during our chicken lunch.  His whole pitch is worth listening to but I was particularly interested in an anecdote he gave about how he came up with the name of his book.

4 Hour Work Week was originally titled "Dealing Drugs for Fun and Profit."  For a variety of reasons this wasn't going to fly with publishers or retailers.

Ferriss and his team came up with twelve alternative names and were pretty much deadlocked. 

Ferriss decided on the name by running a Google Adwords campaign.  He bought ads for relevant keywords for all twelve potential book titles and tracked which titles performed the best.  The clickthrough rate for 4 Hour Work Week was by far the highest, so that is what his book is called.

I think this is a smart and novel approach to naming.  Google Adwords as a cheap and real time focus group.