The other day I came across this little number by Christopher Null of Yahoo!, discussing seven legitimate issues with Apple's latest version of the iPhone. And there's in-fact more than that.

A while back, I talked about whether waiting for the newest run of Apple's showpiece mobile device was worth it. But that focused mainly on some favorite alternatives, while Null delves into the details of the iPhone's shortcomings.

Highlighted are the cost (roughly 160 bucks more over the next two years), the wimpy 2 megapixel camera, a battery you can't replace, no MMS capability, no ability to stream live TV, and limited storage space. And as one heady commenter pointed out, there's an eighth pretty annoying problem; no memory removal or expansion. In a world of SD and micro-SD-ready options the iPhone is inexplicably lacking, again.

These issues, standalone, may not be deal-breakers for some. But combined, how can they not be? Especially for the kind of money Apple expects us to shell out.

I had a great time at the Personal Democracy Forum earlier this week since I met wonderful people and learned about interesting projects.

The whole point behind PDF is to discuss how technology can help individuals participate in the political/governing process and improve governments' ability to serve their citizens.  While attending the Design Principles for Online Democracy panel discussion, Tom Steinberg of mySociety in the UK discussed various projects that his organizations have done for the British government. 

In my opinion, the coolest project so far is fixmystreet.com.  On this site people living in Britain can report sections of road that need repairs or attention.  These problems can run the gamut from potholes to "fly tipping" (Brit-speak for "littering").  Local governments can then use this site to determine where they need to deploy their employees to make repairs or correct problems.  Further, this site allows the public to make sure that the problems reported are corrected.

I think that this is a marvelous idea.  This site enables citizens to work directly with their local governments to ensure that important tasks are accomplished, and that makes fixmystreet.com a great example of what PDF is trying to accomplish — use technology to improve government.

Elizabeth Edwards spoke to guests at the 2008 Personal Democracy Forum about how the internet is influencing the world of politics. But it was husband John that later stole the show with his surprise (even to him) appearance.

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Another one of the presentations that I’d like to highlight from the Personal Democracy Forum is the one by Mark Pesce, who is currently an honorary professor at the University of Sydney.  I was glad that Pesce decided to make the trip because his speech was by far my favorite of the two-day forum.  A great written version of the speech can be found on his blog here, so I will save you the summary and simply discuss the fun facts that I found most intriguing.

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<cross posted from our ImpactWatch blog>

Since its launch in 1999, our ImpactWatch media monitoring platform has been focused on serving the enterprise market.  The product has been aimed at organizations that receive a high volume of coverage from both traditional and online media, require a large number of employees to access the data ImpactWatch collects and need high-end  reporting and analysis of coverage.  Due to its robust feature set and flexibility, ImpactWatch remains a great solution for these types of enterprise clients.

But in showing ImpactWatch over the years, I’ve run into a lot of people who love ImpactWatch’s interface and base tool set, but who don’t need all of the advanced features we’ve built into ImpactWatch over the years. They were looking for an elegant and affordable way to manage and report out on their media coverage as opposed to an enterprise level media tracking platform.

In an effort to provide these folks with a product they can use, we are in the process of rolling out two new ImpactWatch product lines that will enable the IW to serve the needs of organizations of all sizes.  Specifically:

1. ImpactWatch Basic - Aimed at groups that get a limited amount of coverage (approximately 1-50 clips a day) and only need for a handful of people to access data.
2. ImpactWatch Professional - For organizations with a higher volume of coverage (50-100 clips a day) and who need a few dozen people to access the system.
3. ImpactWatch Enterprise - This is our current system, which is aimed at organizations with a high volume of daily coverage (100+ clips), a large number of users and that need access to some of ImpactWatch’s high end reporting features.

I know this is vague, but we are in the process of a big development push and aren’t ready to talk about all the details yet.  Check the ImpactWatch blog for updates on our progress and look for us to roll out the new product lines later in the summer.

We’re excited.

We are just back from a great trip to the Personal Democracy Forum in New York, NY. We’ll be putting together a few panel recaps over the next couple of days.  In the meantime, I wanted to do a quick post about one of the more talked about exchanges during the event - the discussion between John Edwards campaign blogger Tracy Russo and John McCain e-campaign director Mark Soohoo about McCain’s computer skills (or lack thereof).

Predictably, Russo thinks that the ability to use a computer is critical to understanding the world we live in now and Soohoo disagrees.

While the exchange is undeniably entertaining, it struck me as the type of political theater we already see plenty of on a seemingly endless number of political talk shows.  It would be a shame if this “gotcha” moment attracted more attention than other, more interesting discussions that took place at the conference.  Anyway, we’ll do our part to make sure that doesn’t happen by sharing our thoughts on some of the better discussions we sat in on.

Several members of The Bivings Group team are present at the 2008 Personal Democracy Forum, which aims to prove that technology is changing the way that we do politics.  Currently, I am sitting in a forum titled "Clickocracy" which hosts four journalistically inclined panelists: Jose Antonio Vargas, Ben Smith, Ana Marie Cox, and Sarah Lai Stirland.

One of the most interesting things about the forum is that it takes full advantage of Web 2.0 tools.  In the background of the panelists is a large screen which displays questions and comments submitted by the audience in real-time.  The moderator (Jeff Jarvis) attempts to ask as many of these questions as possible, while searching through the numerous "Obama FTW!!!" comments.  What is it about anonymity on the Internet that turns everyone into a five-year-old?

Topics covered on the panel included the newest tools (Twitter!), the now famous My.Barack.Obama site, and if the number of Facebook friends can determine the outcome of an election.

A large majority of the conversation centered on the new definition of a "journalist".  After all, now that anyone can post anything on the Web, is there a true definition of a "journalist"?  Arguments have raged back and forth that journalism is a dying art that anyone can now pursue, from an 85-year-old widow to an 8-year-old kid, to the fact that 'true journalism' is now more important than ever.

In my opinion, the rise of blogging and other online forms or conversation has only helped me to weed out the bad writers from the good ones.  Instead of having to accept the only available journalism as the best of the bunch, I can now pick for myself.  In this way, the authors who have gone to journalism school, possess a sheer talent, or simply work harder than their counterparts stand out.  The rise of the semi-pro journalist, as one panelist coined, has only made me appreciate the fully-pro ones more.

As Hosam (another TBG employee) said at the end of the forum, "You can tell that those panelists really love what they do."

One of the biggest tiffs that I’ve had with Google is that their customer support is well…lacking.  If you have any problems with Google Apps other than the most rudimentary “How do I?” question, you are going to run into some problems.  And good luck and Godspeed if you want to talk to a live person on the phone.  I’ve gotten so confounded in automated responses that I have lost all track of time, space, and self.

One of the biggest problems facing Google is their own popularity.  To meet the needs of its ever-growing client base, they would need thousands of technical support personnel.  That’s why I find the news about Website Optimizer service plans so fascinating.

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Traffic on The Bivings Report has been going crazy the last two days due a link to our blog within the extremely viral Inside CRM piece “The Twitter Hall of Shame: 50 Tweets That Will Echo in History.” The Inside CRM post could serve as a guidebook on how to create a viral article:

1. It is a list post.  People love list posts.
2. The article contains links to 50 other articles and blog posts on the web.  Most of the bloggers they link to will read the post, and then probably pass it around and/or add a link to the Inside CRM article (as I am doing now).  Inside CRM also smartly sent us a quick email to let us know about the article, in case we missed it or didn’t notice all the traffic they were sending our way.
3. The article is about Twitter.  First of all, people are just generally obsessed with Twitter.  Second of all, people obsessed with Twitter love to share stories about Twitter on Twitter.  I would guess Inside CRM is getting a lot of traffic from people passing this story around through Twitter.
4. The article is pretty damn entertaining.

Anyway, check it out.

Update: Regarding #3, my colleague Chuck, who works on our ImpactWatch team, points out that there have been 122 mentions of the phrase “Twitter Hall of Shame” on Twitter in the last 22 hours, according to Summize.  Lots of other people probably linked to the piece without using the exact article title.  So it looks like the piece is definitely making the rounds.

In light of the ongoing UEFA Euro 2008 football (yes, I mean soccer) tournament – which I must say has been pretty average apart from the Turkey/Czech Republic thriller last weekend – yet another social networking site was launched. The niche? You guessed it, soccer. Or football, or futbol, or footy, whichever you’d like (we aim to please).  So what better time to launch than now? Perhaps the World Cup would be ideal, but I doubt that’s worth pushing the launch back two years. (more…)

Yesterday, the New York Times launched a beta version of Times People, a lightweight social networking feature that allows readers to connect around NYT content.  Currently, Times People can only be used as a plugin in Firefox (this will change soon) and functions as a social bookmarking tool similar to del.icio.us or Mento.  CNET’s The Social has a good overview of Times People, complete with a video interview with the folks at the Times that created the tool.  Mathew Ingram, Mashable Silicon Valley Insider and DigiDave all have good reviews up as well.

When I try out tools like this, my first instinct is to figure out if it is something I will be using on a regular basis.  With Times People, the answer is clearly no.  Although I visit nytimes.com a few times a week, I am not really actively engaged with the site.  I’ve never left a comment.  I’ve never explored the restaurant and theater reviews.  I don’t live in New York.  I basically drop in on the Times site to get the paper’s take on the “story of the day” or when someone links to the site.  In summary, I’m not the target audience for Times People.  The tool is clearly aimed at people who have a stronger relationship with the Times brand than I do.

I think Times People has the ability to grow into a very useful for people who do have that relationship.

Some have criticized the tool for being too limited in focus.  I think its modesty is actually its greatest strength.  Times People is trying to complement the way readers are already using the site, not change the behavior.  That’s smart.

Let me explain.

Sites for newspapers like USA Today have full bore social networks built right in.  Users can set up full profiles, upload pictures, maintain a blog, friend other users, etc.  They function like a mini version of MySpace or Facebook. It just feels like too much. There are many, many better platforms for maintaining blogs, sharing photos, etc.  Why would anyone want to do all of this stuff on the USA Today website?  I’m left thinking about the old cliche that the decision about what to leave out is just as important as what you leave in.

Times People recognizes that the New York Times brand is its content.  Instead of trying to shift activities like blogging and photo sharing to its website, the Times is adding social features that complement activities readers are already performing - leaving comments, reading stories and writing reviews.  The focused nature of the tool also allows it to evolve organically as the Times reviews how people are actually using it.  This is how the best websites always approach thing.

I have no idea whether Times People will be a success or not. But for experimental features like these, I think starting small and taking an iterative approach is always a good thing.

We're excited to post a new document about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to the research and articles section of our site.  This is an important discipline in web development.  It is the process in which one tries to boost how search engines like Google and Yahoo! rank a web site when they provide search results to their users for specific keywords.

Many people openly discuss SEO on the Internet, and we wanted to contribute to the discussion by writing our document, SEO Basics (click to download it in PDF format).  While there are many great resources out there, we hope that we present things in a different way so that we can help more people understand this field.  We hope you like it and welcome your feedback.

In it we briefly define SEO and then discuss keyword selection, title and meta tags, content, site structure, link properties, and content management systems (CMS). It is important to note that in this document, we focus on on-site optimization.

There are many aspects of a web site that one can control, and we have focused on the major ones.  Having said that, there are many factors that a site administrator cannot control that have major influence on a site's search engine rankings.  One such factor is the links pointing to a site, and collecting and managing the links pointing to a site is a very important part of SEO that we do not focus on in this document. So, please keep that in mind as you read our document.

As a bit of an experiment, we just launched a page on Facebook for The Bivings Report.  Visit the page to become a “fan” of The Bivings Report and to connect with the blog’s authors and, more importantly, other readers.  Or visit just to make fun of us for setting up a fan page for our blog. 

In case you didn't know, Tuesday, June 17th is a big day… for the Firefox community.  That's when Mozilla will release Firefox 3.  It also hopes to set a new Guinness World Record (they've been some wacky ones) for the most software downloads in 24 hours on what it dubs "Download Day 2008." In fact, on the day's official site, people are asked to pledge to download the new browser on that day.

Firefox is one of the most popular alternatives to Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, and it has a cult following.  Thus, it is not surprising that Mozilla, the non-profit organization behind it, actively taps into this crowd to spread its product, and Download Day is one way that it can help foment excitement with the fans.

The whole concept of creating a special day to set a new world record may seem gimmicky, but it is also creative.  While a more traditional advertising and marketing campaign might promote the release of the new browser well, Mozilla likely lacks the funds to adequately pull this off on a global — or even national — scale.  Further, Firefox is an Internet-based product, and advertising and marketing is different on-line than it is off-line.  However, that's not necessarily a hurdle since a well devised scheme can cheaply and quickly turn into a viral phenomenon.

While I bet existing Firefox proponents will make up most of the potential world record participants, the novelty of helping set a record might attract some people to give the browser a test drive.  However, the hoopla is mainly for the current user.  It gives them a chance to revel in using the program.

Are you excited about Download Day 2008?  Do you like to have special days to celebrate your favorite products? 

The Las Vegas Sun is known for having one of the best websites of any newspaper in the country. The reputation is warranted.

In my experience as a web developer, I’ve found many sites that do a few things well. A site might have a nice homepage and a few cool features, as an example. However, it is a very unusual to find sites that deliver consistent excellence through the whole experience. To take care of the details that are so important in delivering a great experience. The Las Vegas Sun website does that.

Following is a list of some of those details that make me really appreciate the Sun website, as a web developer.

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