I'm sure that there are some videos on YouTube of people driving angrily, and there are probably some of people who are angry about their drive.  In fact, I'm betting that more of the later will appear on the site soon.

The cash strapped Northern Virginia Transportation Authority (NVTA) — especially after the Virginia Supreme Court stripped it of the taxing authority the governor and legislature gave it — is asking residents of the Washington, DC area to make videos of their commutes and post them to its "Piece of My Commute" campaign page.

NVTA officials hope that if state legislators see how much long commutes affect quality of life in the state through videos submitted by commuters, the legislature will provide more funding to the authority to build and improve roads within the state to alleviate traffic jams.  This idea has potential since it is: (1) cheap for the NVTA to pull off, (2) got it some free media exposure, and (3) using a website that is accessible to many state residents.

I'm interested to see how this campaign performs as it can serve as a great case study on how creativity mixed with some social media savvy can help an organization cheaply accomplish a goal. 

It is very important to note that NVTA doesn't want to risk drivers' safety to get more funding as it mentions on its site: "Warning! Please Don't Use Cameras While Driving. Tripods Are Prohibited In Metro Stations.Please Use Hand-Held Cameras Only On Metro."  Further, I highly doubt that this gives us a license to do other multitasking while driving.  While you can star in your own commuting reality show on YouTube, the NVTA likely doesn't want you to eat entire meals, apply make up, conduct entire meetings, and do other such activities while driving.

Today the Newseum , Washington's museum about the news, is officially opening to the public. 

I was able to visit the museum a few weeks ago since a friend of mine is a volunteer there, and many things interested me about it.  One of the most prominent thoughts that I walked away with was although the museum mainly focuses on newspapers and TV news, it devoted what I consider a surprising amount of attention to new media. 

There are exhibits that explored the heated debate about whether how blogging can fit into journalism and vice versa.  In fact, I walked out with the impression that — at least in the eyes of the Newseum — some blogging is solid journalism. 

Of course, personalities like the original Wonkette, Ana Marie Cox herself, and Matt Drudge were featured.  Further a major focus of the Bloomberg Internet, TV and Radio Gallery is how the Internet has affected journalism.

Unsurprisingly, many major news organizations are ogling over a museum devoted to glorify their business, and hopefully, its emphasis on new media will help alleviate some of the resistance of some journalists and organizations to the burgeoning importance of new media — from blogging to podcasts to flash presentations.

Twitter is an addictive micro-blogging platform that has experienced explosive growth since launching a few years back (my account is here). I’ve come across a few cool Twitter tools in the last few weeks so I figured I’d share.

(1) Twhirl

This is a slick little application that allows you to receive and send tweets from your desktop. This is a powerful tool, but the main things I like about it are:

• You can manage multiple Twitter account through one interface.
• The interface allows you to sort your tweets in a variety of ways. I found being able to just view tweets that were direct replies to me a very useful feature, as I was missing a lot of these due to the way I was using Twitter before.
• It has powerful tools for shortening URLs and adding pictures to your account via TwitPic.
• Most importantly it is an application that I can open/close whenever I want, so that Twitter doesn’t clutter up my IM windows or phone. It makes Twitter less of a distraction and allows me to get more out of it in less time.

Below is a screenshot of the interface.

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I have written a few times about the various options available for the hosting of videos online via third party services. If I have a choice in the matter, I use Blip.tv for all the reasons you’d expect: interface is easy to use, they allow the posting of video in higher quality than most providers, they’ve help when I’ve had questions, it works, etc. It is the best third-party option I have found, as a web developer.

But I think my favorite thing about Blip.tv is their Flash video player. It is awesome for a couple of reasons:

(1) You can remove all Blip.tv branding from the video player and replace with your own site name or URL, meaning you don’t have to turn your website into an advertisement for your video provider if you don’t want to.

(2) You can turn off any options in the player you want to. So if I can turn on/off options like embed code, autoplay, view in full screen, ads for other videos on Blip.tv, etc.

(3) You can customize the colors of the Blip.tv player so that it matches your site’s colors perfectly. This allows for designers to really seamlessly integrate video into the sites they build.

(4) The player is just really good looking.

Basically, the Flash player is super flexible and gives you the ability to do whatever you need to with it to make it fit into your site.

Below are some examples of the Blip.tv player being seamlessly integrated into various sites. Please click on the images to view the player on the actual sites.

WallStrip

This is basicallly what the player looks like by default.

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[This post is cross-posted at the ImpactWatch Blog] 

To follow up on a recent post concerning Comcast’s effort to answer consumer complaints via Twitter, I used Tweet Scan to search specifically for Comcast posts and research exactly with what we are dealing. A basic one-word search found well over 1000 tweets about Comcast within just the last couple of hours, so I narrowed my focus down to the most recent 300. I read each of them, and categorized them in three different ways.

The first specification was whether the tweet was positive, negative, or neutral, overall. The results are as follows: 26 of the tweets were positive, 86 were neutral, and a majority of 188 were negative. It is a pretty negative environment for Comcast on Twitter right now.

The second category dealt with what category of complaint or praise under which the tweet fell. There were four distinctions: Not Working, Slow, Prices, and Company. “Not Working” and “Slow” deal with complaints about the Internet and cable service. “Prices” concern any complaints or praise about cost or billing issues. “Company” refers to any mention of the company that does not fall into one of those categories, or short tweets with little information (i.e. “grrr…Comcast”). 178 were about the company itself, 66 were problems with the Internet or cable completely not working, 33 were about slowdown, and 22 were about pricing concerns. It is interesting that on Twitter there is a lot of general venting about Comcast (bad for the brand), and less specific complaints.

The final category is whether or not the tweet contains cursing of any sort. From a quick skim of the 300 tweets, it seems like this is a good indicator of the level of frustration by the writer of the tweet. 35 contained curse words, and 265 did not.

Found below are some examples of Comcast-related tweets, as well as a document containing all the graphs above. This post is similar to the kind of analysis we perform through out service ImpactWatch. Interesting to note is that several of the tweets among the 300 were by the same user, who claims to be a representative from Comcast. Also, many of the tweets contained links to articles referencing the recent customer service use of Twitter by Comcast. Unfortunately, the representative could only handle one consumer problem at a time, so the use of tweets was just as effective as phone consumer services. The links below represent the tweet-by-tweet written data, some examples of Comcast-related tweets, and analytics.

All Data Collected

Example Tweets

Graphs Made in IW

Over the weekend, two of the users I follow on Twitter, David All and Techcrunch (Michael Arrington), had separate problems with Comcast and vented about them via their Twitter accounts. Comcast apparently monitors Twitter and proactively reached out to both of them.

Here is the relevant tweet from Techrunch:

And here is the tweet from David:

An article in the Consumerist confirms that other users have received responses after complaining via Twitter. In a follow up article about his problems, Michael Arrington offers advice to folks with a Comcast service problem: “Skip the hold time on their customer service line and go on the attack at Twitter instead. You may find your problem fixed in a hurry.”

Three thoughts on this:

(1) I think it is great that Comcast is listening to people on Twitter and reacting proactively to fix problems. Based on a quick search, there appear to be plenty of problems to that need addressing. More companies should monitor and participate in Twitter in a meaningful way (we are working on doing Twitter tracking through our ImpactWatch service).

(2) As a consumer, I’m bothered by the precedent of the squeaky wheels on Twitter getting preferential treatment over people who go through normal channels.

(3) Not speaking specifically about Comcast, I think the focus some companies place on social media is more about PR/crisis management than a true commitment to customer service and dialogue. Performing triage on complaints that come in through Twitter may keep the customer revolt at bay for a short time, but when that levee eventually breaks, it isn’t going to be pretty.

Despite the constant emergence of new technology, old trends still reappear from time to time to remind us all that some times the best things were in the past.  The glorious return of point-and-click adventure games to console gaming marks one of these occasions.

I used to absolutely love point-and-click games for my first computer.  Each one came on its own floppy disk and was DOS gaming at its finest.  My pride and joy was a collection of all three sequels to the Hugo's House of Horrors series, purchased for me by my mother.  The appeal of the games is that they contain so many secrets that the replay value tends to be through the roof as avid gamers play again and again to find every single Easter egg possible.

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The Bivings Report is built in Wordpress, which comes with a robust commenting system out of the box. Due to this, I’ve very rarely looked at third party commenting systems like Haloscan. I haven’t really had a comment problem so there was no need to experiment with these third party tools.

But I recently set up a personal blog on Tumblr, which does not have commenting built in due to its reliance on reblogging instead (which is cool). I wanted people to be able to comment on my blog so I spent the ten minutes it takes to integrate Tumblr with the third-party tool Disqus. (Check out Fred Wilson (A VC) or Dave Winer’s blog for good examples of the tool in action).

Here is a quick breakdown of what I see as the pros and cons of Disqus after playing with it for a few months: (more…)

Before I write the rest of this slightly snarky blog post, let me preface it by saying that I am 100% pro-environment.  After all, the environment is where I keep the majority of my stuff, such as my house, car, and cat.  I would like to keep the environment as is, and I applaud ‘green' programs that aim to protect/restore/embiggen the earth.  However, I also believe that the majority of these programs are doing so simply for PR.  Call me a cynic, but it's true.  "Going Green" makes your company seem more family friendly and nicer in an otherwise cold, dark world of business.  In an attempt to rid myself of this pessimistic view, I scoured the Internet for five examples of companies or organizations that truly seemed to harbor an honest spirit of environmentalism.  In no particular order, here is a list of them:

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I must admit that texting is not my favorite activity.  It's something that I rarely do.  In fact, when friends send me text messages that require a response, I typically call them back hoping that the they get the tacit hint.  However, Amazon may change my druthers.

The Associated Press reports today about Amazon's text message shopping feature, which launched late yesterday.  Now people can send a text to 262966 (which spells "Amazon" on the telephone keypad) with the description, UPC, or ISBN of an item.  Amazon will see if it has the item and send back two items at a time.  The texter can request more items or buy the item by texting back.

That's pretty spiffy and useful.  Who would've thought that text messaging would serve as a viable comparison shopping tool?  Since I like to use Amazon, this might coax me to text more. 

However, one thing that I do have to consider is the occasional impulse buy.  Do I really need that toothbrush shaped Pez dispenser?

If there is one underrated holiday out there, it's definitely April Fool's Day.  Don't get me wrong; the holiday receives a decent amount of attention.  Every year the public hears about one joke or hoax that really got some people good, but typically the day goes by without much of a nod.  I have always made it my personal duty to prank at least one person on this day.  After all, it's my patriotic duty.  Today, instead of helping myself, I am going to help anyone who reads this prank his or her friend, housemate, coworker, or spouse.

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