In the past we have praised those like Adrian Holovaty who use databases for news reporting.  Holovaty left his job at The Washington Post several months ago to work on a hyperlocal site called EveryBlock. 

It launched several days ago with database driven hyperlocal news and information reporting for Chicago, New York City, and San Francisco.  To report information about specific neighborhoods it culls data from other sources and presents it in a logical manner. 

For instance, it pulls pictures from flickr with geographical tagging and groups them by neighborhood.  Check out photos from Tribeca in New York.  In addition to photos it pulls data from sites like Yelp for restaurant reviews and local government sites for restaurant violation information.  Other information includes: crime reports, graffiti, lost and found listings, and news articles. 

You can see a screen shot below of a business review from Yelp on a map in New York.

Also, for those who use craigslist to find those missed connections (someone whom you saw on the train and are attracted to but didn't have a chance to even talk to), EveryBlock even collects this data and presents it in list or map form. 

The genius of the site is not that it collects this data, but it organizes it in a way that people should find useful.  People can search for multiple items by neighborhood for all this information in one place instead of having to visit multiple sites.  This is much more exciting and user friendly than your typical database.

The Bivings Group was featured on an NPR segment that discussed Presidential candidates use of the Internet this cycle. Following is the teaser for the piece:

Through ring tones, viral videos and social networking sites, presidential candidates are relying more on the Internet than any of their predecessors. We explore the highlights and examine whether cyber-connectivity translates into votes.

In the interview, I talk about Barack Obama’s web program and Ron Paul’s fundraising ticker.

You can listen to the interview here.

My favorite SEO blogger, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz in Seattle, has an excellent post titled “Choosing the Right CMS Platform for Your Website (from an SEO perspective).” It is about various aspects of SEO to consider when choosing a content management system (CMS) to build a site. 

Instead of doing a comparison and contrast between different systems like Drupal and Wordpress; Rand provides 12 issues to consider. These issues revolve around the ability of a site owner to control various design elements that search engines consider when assessing a site.  These issues range from page title tags to CSS.

It is worth reading.  Other than SEO, what are important issues you consider when selecting a CMS?

I learned about an interesting social network the other day that will interest Bivings Report readers who follow how news is reported on the Internet; it is for tech savvy journalists who want to improve their general reporting skills and better contribute to the field — even if they have few resources.

The network is called Wired Journalists.  Check it out.

After the New York Times abandoned Times select last Fall, making all of the content on its site free, the assumption was that it was just a matter of time before the Wall Street Journal followed suit and went to a free model. Today, the Wall Street Journal rebelled against all those assumptions and confirmed that most of its content will continue to be behind a pay wall. Chairman Rupert Murdoch is quoted as saying:

We are going to greatly expand and improve the free part of the Wall Street Journal online, but there will still be a strong offering for subscribers. The really special things will still be a subscription service, and, sorry to tell you, probably more expensive.

I’m of the opinion that most publications should embrace the free content model online. But I also think the Wall Street Journal probably made the correct business decision here.

While technically a newspaper, the Wall Street Journal’s focus on finance makes it a must read for anyone interested in the topic. It is largely a niche paper providing coverage people perceive that they can’t get elsewhere. In addition, the niche they cover - finance - is one that people have repeatedly proven they will pay for. Bloomberg has made obscene amounts of money covering this sector. I have no idea what the break down is, but I imagine a significant number of WSJ subscribers are companies ordering multiple copies as a business expense. It is one of the two or three newspapers that I’ve gotten at every office I’ve worked at and can buy at any airport.

So it makes sense to me that the WSJ can charge for access to its content. But I think it is very much the exception and not the rule.

The Bivings Group has an opening for a design/production associate. We’re looking for someone willing to come aboard for three months to help us fill some gaps, and then potentially full time after that period assuming both sides are happy with the way things are going. A complete job description is below.

Please email prodjob@bivings.com if you are interested in applying.

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I think the most interesting move a campaign has made this cycle is Ron Paul’s decision to be completely transparent in his fundraising. For the last five or six months the central element of Ron Paul’s homepage has been a counter that tallies how much he has raised during the current quarter. A screen shot of the graphic is below.

In addition to this graphic, the Paul campaign has also published a feed of all its donation data that volunteers can access. This has lead others, such as Ron Paul Graphs, to do mash ups showing donation statistics. If I want to know how much Ron Paul is raising, I can go to any number of sites and get a real time number. This is in stark contrast to most of the other campaigns that, for the most part, keep fundraising information under wraps until they are forced to disclose the information publicly.

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Richard Pérez-Peña of the New York Times reports in today's article "A Venerable Magazine Energizes Its Web Site" that the respected foreign affairs, politics, economics, and culture magazine The Atlantic is revamping its site tomorrow in hopes that it will help the publication turn a profit.

Just over a year ago the magazine's site was, as editor in chief James Bennet explained to Pérez-Peña, "just a marketing arm for the print magazine, rather than publication in its own right."  In 2007, however, it added blogs, video, and increased content from both the magazine and unique to the site, and traffic to the site has grown to several times the amount it had in December 2006.

Tomorrow The Atlantic will continue its campaign to attract more visitors by dropping its firewall that restricts access to most of the articles from the magazine to subscribers.  It hopes that this will boost traffic and will increase advertising revenue to earn the publication something that it hasn't had for a while — a profit.

As print ad revenue drops industry wide, perhaps Internet revenue will make up the difference.  Either way, similar magazines — like The Economist, Harper's, and The New Republic — will likely pay attention to this change.  If The Atlantic fares well, then they may also consider dropping their subscription firewalls.  Further, The New Yorker, which doesn't have a firewall on its site but doesn't publish all of its articles online, may also consider making more of its content available through its site.

This is cross posted from our ImpactWatch blog.

In trying to measure blogs, a lot of people put a great deal of stock in inbound links.  It might not be going too far to say that inbound links have become the standard by which the influence of a blog is measured.  Theoretically, the more links you attract from other sites the more influential the blog must be.  Right?  It sort of makes sense.

But I really think inbound links became the standard out of the lack of a better way to measure.  Specifically:

1. Legit traffic figures for blogs are impossible to obtain.  Sites like Alexa and Compete are notoriously inaccurate and don’t have data at all on smaller sites. We simply don’t know how many people go to the various sites out there and don’t have a defensible way to make comparisons.
2. Inbound link information is really easy to get on Technorati and Google.  This became the standard because it is readily available and easy.

But I really think inbound link information is entirely anecdotal and not a defensible way to truly measure influence or even popularity.

Let me explain based on personal experience.  We launched the current iteration of our main corporate blog, The Bivings Report, around two years ago.  In the beginning, I had an unhealthy interest in our Technorati ranking, a measurement based on inbound links.  The result was an unhealthy number of linkbaiting types of posts, participation in blog carnivals etc.  Basically, I was focused too much on attracting links and not enough on building an audience.   Frankly, it worked - we rocketed up into the top 5,000 blogs on Technorati.  But in the process we learned that attracting links doesn’t really mean more readers (as measured by site statistics and RSS subscribers).  Most links you attract only lead to a few referrers.

Anyway, at some point we all grew bored with trying to attract links and just focused on writing about what interests us.  The funny thing is that as our Technorati ranking has dropped our readership has continued to grow.  We have far more readers (and hopefully influence) now than we did when we had a higher Technorati ranking.

This isn’t to say that looking at inbound links is a useless exercise.  It is a great way to identify an initial list of big players from which to work from.  Just keep in mind that inbound links are not the sole way we should measure the influence of blogs.  Instead, it should be part of a bigger methodology.

More on this later.

Just about every professionally done website you visit includes a copyright date at the bottom of the page. Every January you see websites that forget to update the year in their copyright statement. Many actually fall years behind before catching it and updating the dates. Above is an example of this phenomenon from the website of the Democratic National Committee.

We’ve made this mistake ourselves plenty of times. It is just something that is really easy to forget to do. That is why the best solution is to automate in the process instead of manually updating it every January. Here are two simple ways to accomplish this that our design/production department uses:

(1) If you are working in PHP (like sites in Wordpress and Drupal), use the simple PHP code below to render the copyright date in your footer. The date will automatically change at 12:01 am on January 1 every year.

<?php echo date(’Y'); ?>

(2) If your site is in plain HTML or another language, you can use the following JavaScript to generate the date.

Put this code in the site header:

var date=time.getDate();
var year=time.getYear();
if (year < 2000)
year = year + 1900;

Then place this code where you want to generate the date:

<script language=”JavaScript” type=”text/javascript”>document.write(year);</script>

Two easy ways to save yourself some time/headaches.

Let’s face it… soccer has been a flop in the United States, especially when compared to, well, the rest of the known world, where it’s more-or-less religion. The country isn’t totally devoid of fans though. Those who do care seem to be pretty hardcore. Luckily for the Americans that do follow “the beautiful game,” the internet offers whatever you need to get your soccer, the real football (just kidding, I’m an NFL fanatic as well), fix.

ESPNsoccernet is the perfect resource if you’re into the usual (English Premier League, La Liga, Italian Serie A, and of course the UEFA Champions League). Goal.com is another staple in any soccer fan’s browser bookmarks, offering coverage of the game worldwide.

Some of the web’s best-kept secrets - if you’re not all about the European game – include BBC’s African football coverage. If Asian soccer is more to your taste, FootballAsia is the place to be. The site is currently being overhauled, but their homepage still links you to Asian soccer’s top competitions. And if features and breaking news aren’t enough for you, myp2p links you to live matches with a few mouse clicks, though you may need to download a few peer-to-peer applications like Sopcast. The myp2p homepage tells you all you need to know.

My friend Kevin Anderson, who is over blogging and interaction at The Guardian in the UK, is experimenting with Seesmic, a new video site that is still in its private alpha stage.

Although I don't have access to the site yet, it seems like the child of a marriage between YouTube and a message board.  While you can respond to videos with videos on other sites, it appears that Seesmic is focused on getting people to interact through video.  Uploading and viewing videos is only a small part of participating on the site.

Understanding this expectation, Kevin is using the site to converse with the site's small community to discuss the US Elections, and he is getting some interesting responses.  If you check out his post about this experiment, you can see how people have reacted to his initial questions for readers to respond. 

It'll be interesting to see if a larger community will respond in such a way as this small — which has to be tech savvy — is.  Perhaps this is a great future tool for newspapers.

Since Todd and Tom have recently critiqued Barack Obama's presidential website — apparently in its Blue Period — I was also thinking about the design of 2008 presidential candidate sites.

As someone with a search engine optimization (SEO) background, I probably focus a little bit more on title tags and anchor link text when evaluating a site than a someone who looks at the pretty pictures (or the lack thereof).

Well, I'm not alone.  Li Evans of the Search Marketing Gurus blog does as well, and has done some interesting campaign site evaluations from an SEO's perspective.  You can find them in the Political Internet Marketing category of the blog.

In these posts she discusses various SEO topics like page titles, keyword usage, and the actual content found on a site.  Further, she does look at a campaign's search marketing efforts, if any, and use of social media.  Her posts are worth a read.

So far, here are the candidate (or former ones) sites that she's reviewed:

• Joe Biden
• Chris Dodd
• Duncan Hunter
• Dennis Kucinich
• John McCain
• Barack Obama
• Ron Paul
• Bill Richardson
• Fred Thompson

Disclosure.

Barack Obama’s team has redesigned his website just prior to the Iowa Caucus and, well, I hope you like the color blue. I do.

I also think this redesign puts his web design effort at the top of the heap.

Starting at the top…

The over the top photoshopping of the clouds and lens flare as a background is so dramatically piled-on that you have to give the designers a lot of credit for even submitting it. The fact that it works is a testament to not only the designers but also whoever approved this thing. An extra cloud here, a ray of sunshine there and this effort is a parody. The photo used of the candidate is also pretty gutsy, with him staring into the future or whatever, but again in this new setting works just fine for me. The tone of the site now is one of confidence. No blaring headlines or screaming calls to action. Even the illustration used to announce his victory in Iowa is tasteful.

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