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We recently completed a study of the use of the Internet by 2008 candidates for the United States Senate.  This report, which is a follow up to similar studies we conducted in 2006 and 2002, examines what features Senate candidates include on their campaign websites.  You can read the full report outlining our methodology here.

The following chart shows the percentage of candidates using each feature we looked at.

Below are some of the more intriguing findings from the report: (more…)

The transparent fundraising techniques (aka the “money bomb”) pioneered by Ron Paul are slowly starting to be adopted by candidates for lower offices.  Murray Sabrin is currently running a “money bomb” on his site in an attempt to pay down the debt he incurred running in the Republican primary for the right to face New Jersey Senator Dick Durbin.  As you’ll see, Murray is trying to raise $175,000 by tomorrow.

Obviously, it doesn’t look like he is going to reach his goal.  Trying to raise money to retire a debt doesn’t exactly inspire the way raising money for a candidate that is still running would.  Still interesting to see that Paul’s tactics are tickling down.

About two weeks ago, National Public Radio canceled one of its newest programs — The Bryant Park Project, which ended its run last Friday.  I've been following this show since its piloting stage.

The BPP, as it was commonly known as, had a strong social media component with an active staff blog, Twitter feeds (one staffer even tweeted every mile during a marathon he ran), and an active Facebook presence.  According to the New York Times, the BPP met NPR's online expectations but a lack of station carriage coupled with a $2 million a year budget led to the cancellation as NPR faces rough economic waters.

Due to the fact that a large number of people found the show through NPR's website or through its podcast, they were sad to see the show go since the show's site and podcast were doing well.  However, this web audience has helped the show continue through a new niche social networking site for the show's community named The BPP Diner.  It was started a day or so before the the show's final episode; social media consultant Rob Paterson, who has advised NPR and followed the BPP, set it up using Ning-powered software.

A few days into its creation, the network is growing, and its members are interacting with each as they mourn the ending of the show.  In fact, Tricia Mckinney, who was an editor on the show, has remained active on the site and has even posted web videos of her continuing the show's daily segment "The Most," which discussed the most popular news stories on the Internet.  Other former staff members are also actively participating on the site.

It'll be interesting to see how long the BPP community continues to thrive on this niche social network.  Further, it would be even more interesting if the top brass at NPR follow it as well.  Perhaps they'll better understand the power of social media.

Today, the Internet is abuzz about a new search engine called Cuil, which claims to return “better results” than Google.

I did a few quick searches and wasn’t that impressed.  As an example, when I search for our company name, Bivings, the first four results are random posts from The Bivings Report about John Edwards, our newspaper study, Daylife and Hotsoup.  Our main website, www.bivings.com, is the sixth result.  As another example, a search for my name returns a lot of nonsense, with the second result being a random account I set up on the DNC website two years ago and haven’t visited since.  A search for my name in Google returns a much more useful set of results.

Obviously, it isn’t fair to compare brand new Cuil to the well-established Google, and I’m sure Cuil will improve over time.

However, no matter how much Cuil improves it is going to be nearly impossible to get me to start using it as my primary search engine.  I’ve been using Google on a daily basis for five plus years and know its ins and outs.  When I do  a search for something I know what to expect.  If I search for a company name, I expect and want to see results for their main website and their Wikipedia entry.   When I search for a person’s name, I expect and want to find their personal website as the first result, followed quickly by links to their Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin accounts.

Basically, I’ve used Google so much that I don’t really know how to judge search results except by comparing them to Google.  Cuil results could be better than Google by some objective measure, but I’d still prefer Google because it returns the results I expect.  It is familiar.

It is sort of like going to Europe and being forced to drive on the left side of the road.  For all I know study after study may show driving on the left side of the road to be far superior to driving on the right.  But all the studies in the world aren’t going to make me feel comfortable doing it.

Update: Search guru Danny Sullivan has a good Cuil review.

I've eaten a lot of crow in my day…but for the first time, I am going to announce it online.  I have been completely overly critical of Google Labs.  For many months, I have lamented at Google Labs' lame attempts to create useless products that are all flash and no function.  I badgered the online waves with rants about the need for them to focus on their current products instead of creating new ones.  Recently, I have been smacked in the face for my past comments, and that smack comes in the form of an addition to Google Maps.

Google Maps recently rolled out the beta version of Walking directions in their overall program.  It's great: if the distance you are traveling is less than 6.2 miles, you will receive the option to click on "walking" and change the map to reflect pedestrian-only roads, some sidewalks, and other quicker jaunts.  Living in a pedestrian-friendly city such as DC makes this feature a Godsend for figuring out just how far away that new restaurant will be from my apartment.

The blog announcement of the new feature is quick to point out that the walking directions are still in the beta testing phase, and many sidewalks, pedestrian streets, and other smaller roads are not listed yet.  As the walking directions become more fleshed out, the program can only get more and more useful.  I'm excited.

There are two additional things that I enjoy about the new feature.  One is that it contains a large yellow warning telling me that walking is dangerous.  Ah, to live in DC.

Second, if you have already selected the walking feature and then change the ‘to' and ‘from' directions to someplace very far away, you get some side-splitting results.  It'd apparently take me over 5 days to walk from DC to my parent's house in North Carolina.  I bet that I could do it.

In my last post I made some remarks pertaining to the McCain campaign website team borrowing the tone of the Obama site. I thought it was a good upgrade to an already well designed site overall. When I popped over the McCain site today, however, I was surprised at the latest similarity. The backlit blue light that the Obama team uses on every page has now made its way to McCain’s latest promotion, McCain Nation, a grassroots event planning/searching tool.

When the Obama team first started using this illustration technique, I really liked it, and it’s been beautifully rendered. But they use it for every promo and now the crowd of wispy supporters that comes with it no longer look like race-less Americans supporting Barack Obama to me…they look like charging albinos. Or ghostly Skynyrd fans. They frighten me. Now the McCain gang wants to start in with the heavenly beams of light and surely the faceless zombies can’t be far behind.

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I wanted to sent out a quick update to share two bits of news:

(1) We will be releasing new study looking at political campaign websites next Tuesday, July 29th.  This cycle we took a look at how Senate campaigns are using the Internet to win hearts and minds and mobilize volunteers.  You can see the 2006 version of our study here and the 2002 version here.

(2) ooVoo is a cool video conferencing service that will be hosting chats with a bunch of political bloggers next week.  My colleague JW and I will be participating in a video chat at 2:00 pm on July 31 where we discuss the results of our study.  Sign up here to come chat with us (look for my name at the very bottom).  It should be fun.

Here at The Bivings Group, we strive to find creative uses for our white boards whenever they aren't filled with our latest project notes and ideas.  Eric, for one, uses his to illustrate 80s hip-hop songs in graphical format.  Freddy displays his latest doodles, and mine is typically filled with two-word to one-word combinations.  My favorite so far is "blogin," which is your login for your blog, obviously!

One day, in a fury of inspiration, I created Bivings Buzzword Bingo, which is displayed below:

Descriptions of each word and more information after the jump:

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