I really enjoy using Facebook as it allows me to connect and remain connected with friends and associates, but there are so many ways that I could use it to better my life and that of others.  Here are five things I would like to do through Facebook in 2008 to better harness its power:

1. Actually catch up with old friends

I have friended heaps of friends on Facebook whom I've done nothing with other than skim their profiles in the last several years.  If they are truly my friends, I should try to get caught up with their lives.  What are they are up to?  Do they still like to (fill in the blank)? Etc.

2. Do something meaningful through a group

Most groups on Facebook aren't very productive.  I just join, and my membership in that group says something about me.  While I have posted a photo or a message on a group page, that's about all I've done.  My membership in a group — not all, but some — should result in productive action.

3. Help someone because I noticed something on their profile

From time to time a friend of mine will say that they're sad, overwhelmed, sick, etc. through their status.  I should take that as a cue to at the very to give them a call to offer support if I know them well enough.

4. Get acquainted with my "Facebook Friends"

Yes, I do have some friends on Facebook that I've never talked to or meet in person or over the phone.  Either they randomly friended me or we were involved in some other project but didn't directly interact.  I should get to know them so that I can feel better about appearing on their friend lists.  Besides they might be really cool.

5. Introduce people to each other

With the wealth of information that people put on their Facebook profiles, I can easily see where friends of mine who don't know each other share common interests.  While other times one friend will mention a job opening at their company when another friend of mine needs a job.  Why not introduce them via Facebook?  I'll have to think about the matchmaker role…

Last week, NewMediaAge.co.uk reported that The Economist magazine intends to launch a social network.  This partly stems from its Project Red Stripe that aimed to produce something innovative with the company's expansive library of quality content but then fizzled with hopes of an altruistic social site.  While the idea is noble, there are many other sites out their now that connect people those who they can help.

For awhile I thought that news sites creating their own social networking site was great since it would help them lure audience members back more often, but now I'm wary of another social networking site.

The concept is not flawed; it is just the idea that I'll have to create another profile, remember more usernames and passwords, and try to woo my associates to do the same that seems so laborious.

Perhaps the magazine could partner with an existing social networking site that many of its readers are either members of or would benefit from joining.  I understand concerns about relying on another company to handle your information and that of your customers as well as branding issues, but if my sentiments are shared by many other people, forget the success of a social networking venture.

Now, who could The Economist partner with?  MySpace and Facebook probably aren't great possible partners since neither are designed for sustained conversations and debates.  The same goes for LinkedIn, but its professional networking emphasis does should jive well with Economist readers.  On the other hand, Gather is centered around conversation, yet, tries to appease a wide variety of folk.

Are there any other sizable social networks that would suit The Economist well?

Every once in a while we like to point out how non-profits and charitable causes can harness the Internet to better achieve their goals, and this post highlights the successful efforts of Goodwill of Greater Washington using a blog — about fashion.

True, Goodwill is about community development projects like job training for lower income folk and sales from used and thrift clothing helps fund such programs, but fashion is not one of the organization's main concerns. 

However, it understands that Napoleon Dynamite and others find cool second-hand threads at thrift shops to don.  These hipsters frequent thrift stores since they know that the fine line between "thrift" and the more haute couture adjective "vintage" is razor thin — price.  Further, many high end boutiques buy some of their stock at places non-profit second-hand stores and jack up the price.  Why can't organizations like Goodwill cash in more on "vintage" as well?

To counteract this trend, Goodwill here in DC hired Em Hall to write the DC Goodwill Fashion Blog in order to attract more customers to the stores.  Through this blog she spotlights (and, dare I say, markets) trendy items found on the racks and even auctions off higher quality and more haute items.  In some cases, these items fetch a far higher price through the on-line auction than a transaction in the store.  Thus, Goodwill gets more money to devote to its community projects.  In fact, Goodwills in other parts of the country have approached Ms. Hall to try similar blogging ventures.

This is a creative way that a non-profit organization has used a blog, and the best part of it is that blogging is cheap and easy.  But it does require some creativity and, in this case, a good sense of fashion.

Hat tip: Rachel Martin and Win Rosenfeld of NPR's The Bryant Park Project.

Baseball player Roger Clemens was accused of using steroids in the Mitchell Report, which was released a few weeks ago.  Since the report came out, Clemens has been silent, letting his lawyer do his talking for him.

In a sign of the times, today Clemens spoke about the allegations for the first time in a video posted to his website and to YouTube.  Interestingly, the YouTube account he posted from was created a few days ago.  Another example of how the web allows folks to talk directly to the people without the filter of the media.

The video statement is embedded below.

Christmas is on Tuesday, and I'm flying across the country to see my family.  This evening I will be busy as millions of my closest friends and I decide to fly somewhere this weekend.  Here are five things I'm doing on-line to help me cope:

1. Check in for my flight

Yes, I checked in for my flight last night on the airline's website.  It was great.  Now, with boarding passes in hand, I don't have to wait in line at the ticket counter and was able to move my seat to an aisle on both of my flights. 

2. Check the weather

There are many sites that provide weather information, and fortunately, the weather at all three airports I'll use tonight looks fine.  That should lower chances of delays.

3. Download podcasts

With several hours on a plane ahead of me, I downloaded several podcasts for my listening pleasure.  Hopefully, they're interesting…

4. Preview in-flight entertainment

Let's go back to the airline website.  If my iPod gets boring, will I get to watch a movie?  No, but the airline I'm flying today offers complimentary satellite radio.

5. Forward my itinerary to the family

There's no need to confuse flight numbers and arrival times when you can simply e-mail your itinerary to whoever will pick you up.  In my case, up until a few days ago both my family and I thought I was flying at a different time.  Good thing we checked my itinerary and can e-mail each other the exact details.

What do you do on-line to better cope with holiday travel? 

On Tuesday of this week (December 18, 2007) NPR's new morning show The Bryant Park Project did a segment on the local perception of Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul, and his large and ardent Internet posse came up.  Like many others Bennett Roth of the Houston Chronicle guesses that Ron Paul supporters "are a little bit younger, a little bit more male, and certainly very disaffected."

Instead of letting the story end there, the show's on-line editor Laura Conaway decided to ask, "Who Are Ron Paul's Supporters?"  Unsurprisingly, Paul activists have flocked to the post to leave comments — 3,189 as of this posting.  However, not all of the supporters claim (hopefully, they're honest) to fit the stereotype that many of us think of this ardent group.

One is a "47 year[s] old, male, married, two children and a computer programmer. Never involved in politics until someone introduced [him] to Rep. Ron Paul's message."

Another is a "Fifty-something single female, employed in the arts."

Another respondent is a "54-year-old divorced woman… [and] very concerned about the decline of the dollar and inflation."

While another person is a "29 year old woman and married" who is works as a "self-employed Independent Sales Trainer, writer and stay-at-home mom."

One commenter states, "I'm an NPR listener and one of the 'secular progressives' so feared by the Fox news crowd."

Granted, many of the respondents are in their 20s or 30s, male, and work in a technical field, but not all.  Hopefully, The Bryant Park Project will interview of some the respondents who don't fit the stereotypical Ron Paul supporter to ask them why they support him.

When I showed this to my friend Kevin Anderson, who is the Blogs Editor for The Guardian in the UK, he was impressed by the response to this simple blog post since he could see how it can add to the greater Ron Paul story.

"I have often said to our journalists that only a fraction of our audience will respond to [a] traditional article, and often those responses won't add much to the story," Kevin e-mailed me today, "However, by guiding the discussion with a simple question or some framing of the debate or issue, I think participation not only increases but it's also broader and more diverse."

His remarks confirmed what I was thinking.  Not only do simple questions help participation on blogs, but they can have significant impact on the journalistic value of blogging.

Update: Due to the "Paul-valanche" of comments, The Bryant Park Project has turned off comments on the post. 

Last night we launched a new marketing site for our media monitoring product, ImpactWatch™. The site features a slick new design and streamlined new copy. We also added the following new features to the site:

(1) Users can sign up for an online demo of ImpactWatch.

(2) The site now features a quick tour of the product. We are going to be adding video demonstrations to the site as well in the coming weeks.

(3) Most importantly, we’ve launched an ImpactWatch-focused blog. Check out the posts “Welcome to the ImpactWatch Blog” and “Tracking Twitter” to get a taste of what we’ll be talking about over there. You can subscribe to the RSS feed here.

Anyway, check out the new site and let us know what you think in the comments.

The Bivings Group recently won an Award of Merit from the Society for New Communications Research for our company blog, The Bivings Report. Here is the write up on our blog that was published in the New Communications Review:

The Challenge
The Bivings Group lacked a medium for showcasing the company’s projects, publishing research and reports, and discussing issues in new media, technology and politics that are relevant to the company’s projects and clients. To resolve this problem and to provide the company with a flexible platform, The Bivings Group developed a corporate blog called The Bivings Report.

The Ingenious Proposal
The Bivings Group decided to create a blog that would serve as a source of news, insight, research and analysis on the web-based communications industry. They tailored their blogging efforts to several key audiences: members of the traditional media industries (newspaper and magazine publishers), representatives from politics interested in online developments, potential clients, and individuals interested in emerging Web 2.0 technology. The goals of The Bivings Group’s corporate blog were to find new business opportunities, garner attention for media research, showcase the company’s abilities and quality work in new technology, and solicit feedback and commentary from audience members.

The Call
The Bivings Group implemented a corporate blog as an extension of its main website called The Bivings Report. Tapping in-house design, programming, and communications professionals, The Bivings Group built the blog in WordPress, an open-source system, and customized the blog with various types of new technology to serve the company’s needs. Specifically, they used video, podcasts, sharing tools, and wikis on their corporate blog to demonstrate the company’s capabilities in Web 2.0. Finally, The Bivings Group used its corporate blog to develop a library of research materials and written reports relevant to new media and politics. By publishing these materials on a blog, they are easily accessible and available to the public.

The Success Story
The Bivings Report has been an extremely productive tool for The Bivings Group. Publishing articles consistently on a near daily basis, The Bivings Report has grown to become one of the top “public affairs” blogs in the USA. They have also received several new business opportunities and numerous press inquiries through the blog. Most recently, The Bivings Report was recognized by the Web Marketing Association for the high quality of technology and content employed on the blog and received a Blog Standard of Excellence award. The Bivings Report has given the Bivings Group an opportunity to expand upon and develop its corporate identity online through discussion, written expression, and graphic design.

Click here to check out the other winners.

Cyberjournalist has the scoop on the BBC launching a beta version of their redesigned homepage. You can view the beta site here and the current version here. Note that this redesign affects only the main BBC homepage and not the BBC News homepage, which is where I spend most of my time.

A quick perusal of the new homepage shows that the BBC is trying to turn its homepage into an Ajax style start page like Netvibes or Pageflakes. I’m not opposed to the idea, but the execution here is pretty poor. The whole thing is clunky, but what really jumps out is how poorly designed the customization options are.

Here is what it looks like out of the box:

I’m not a fan of magenta, so I immediately clicked on the Display Option link at the top to try to make a magenta-free version. After clicking that you are given the options to select from eight preset color schemes or create your own. Sounds great. The problem is that all the preset options look absolutely terrible. (more…)

Through my work on ImpactWatch, I spend a lot of time analyzing data. I’m also a pretty big sports fan. Unless you live under a rock, you probably heard that the Mitchell Report on steroids and baseball was released yesterday. Given that, I thought it would be interesting to use ToCloud.com to create a tag cloud showing the words mentioned most often in the report. Here is a quick screen capture of the cloud showing which keywords were mentioned most often.

Here are links to the full tag clouds I created that look at the 300 top keywords:

• Tag cloud ordered by most mentions
• Tag Cloud in alphabetical order

Upon looking at this initially, the thing that jumped out is that the Players Association and the Commissioner’s Office are mentioned in the report roughly the same number of times. I think this demonstrates how careful Mitchell one in not trying to place too much blame on either party.

Anything jump out at you?

Is it just me or has Facebook just dropped "is" from its standard status update formula? 

Until today a user was forced to mold their status updates to follow the format "Steve is [custom text]."  Of course, some people's updates didn't make sense with the "is" – whether this was intentional or just from the common lack of concern for grammar on the Internet. 

However, now it appears that you can use whatever verb you want.  Well, at least for me right now.  Maybe I'm special…

If so, I'm not the only one.  Tom Phillips of metro.co.uk reports that this change has rolled out for UK users.  In fact, he refers to a Facebook group titled "Campaign to lose the mandatory 'is' from status updates!" with, as of its posting, has 66,678 members.  Apparently, it has achieved its objective; the group's description states: "***WOOHOO! LOOKS LIKE THE BOTHERSOME IS HAS BEEN BANISHED!***"

Perhaps I should update my status to state: "Steve is wonderings if this is a big deal." 

Loren Baker of the Search Engine Journal reports that Google News has tweaked it algorithm (hat tip: MediaPost).  The search engine hopes to its users more relevant results about breaking news stories.

One of the tweaks aims to better identify the news source that was first in reporting information about a story.  Further, the tweak will better highlight fresher reporting as the story develops.

Another tweak that I find really interesting and helpful to local media outlets is that Google aims to place more emphasis on providing users with reports from media outlets whom are local to breaking news.  Thus, if there is flooding in Houston, Google wants to highlight reporting from, say, the Houston Chronicle instead of a wire report picked up by the Los Angles Times.  That is if the local coverage is at least equal in relevance to articles from elsehwere.

I think that this is great news for local news outlets since Google is explicitly trying to promote them.  Of course, this does not negate the need for local sources from working harder than larger organizations that have more resources and enjoy a larger presence on-line, but the search engine's changes could level the playing field.

Mathew Ingram yesterday proclaimed that "free is better" when it comes to news sites, and he offered new evidence to support this assertion.

He pointed to web traffic data of the New York Time's website that TechCrunch analyzed.  According to comScore data, traffic to the paper's site has surged since it ended its Times Select subscription pay wall back in September. 

Between August and October this year, site visitors increased by an impressive 64 percent along with a 52 percent growth for page views.  Clearly dropping the pay wall has boosted the traffic to the site.   

The web analytics geek in me would love to see how the average time on site per user has changed in this time period.  One would think that Times Select subscribers would spend more time on the site since they're paying for it and are probably Times fans.  If that's correct, then perhaps the average time spent on the site has dropped since people who come for free are: 1) not paying for it and 2) aren't proving loyalty already by paying a fee.

What do you think?

It seems like at least a few major news sites have launched redesigns over the last several weeks.  Here are five that I've noticed:

1. Newsweek magazine

I like how the sister sites for Newsweek and MSNBC are now much different from each. 

Check out the nifty multimedia page header that can collapse or expand on each page on Newsweek's site.

2. MSNBC

While I'm glad that this site has deemphasized its horrid navigation bar on the left, it is still there as "Categories." 

3. New York Observer

The Observer Daily is a blog that is now at center attention on the homepage; this weekly newspaper probably wants to focus more on day-to-day reporting to keep site visitors coming back to the site. 

On a sad note — at least for me — the gray background that used to surround the main content area of each page is now gone. 

4. Reader's Digest

I like the concept of the four main homepage boxes — The Daily 5, Daily Laughs, Your Photos, and Featured Story — but does this emphasis on fresh content distract people from the other great content in the site? 

5. Fortune magazine

The new design seems clean and uncluttered — a major plus.  Further, the table of content pages for magazine issues is pretty straightforward.

These are probably the hottest electronic gift items for the 2007 holidays. We've got a little bit of everything in here. Personally I'm waiting for the 3G version of the iPhone so that's not on my list. So instead I asked for an ASUS EEE and got it early! I'd review it but there's so much written about it already I won't bother. Suffice to say that it's tiny and light and fine for basic computer usage.

What? The item you lust after most is not in our poll? Feel free to complain in the comments area!

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