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This week at the Personal Democracy Forum, a tool we created called Twitterslurp was used to track the Twitter conversation taking place around the conference.  In an effort to empower other organizations and conferences to use the tool, we are releasing the code behind the tool to the open source community.

You can download the code and read the documentation here.

If you use it, please drop a link to your implementation in the comments.  We’d love to take a look.

Guest post by Jessica Rudis

Two of the biggest announcements made at PDF this year complement each other in an interesting way. The first announcement, made on Monday, was that YouTube had launched a reporting center that teaches citizen journalists skills to improve the quality of their reporting.  The second announcement, and perhaps the biggest news to come out of the conference, was that the U.S. Government has launched a project to increase transparency and accountability, providing open data on a new Web site.

These are complementary because, of course, any properly functioning democracy needs to have an informed citizenry.  For years, people have relied on media gatekeepers to set the national agenda, inform them of current events, and act as government watchdogs.  Of course this has changed in recent years, but it will be exciting to see things change even more when citizens are taught how to be better reporters and given the data necessary to track government spending and activity.

Having an army of citizens to monitor government data and report on what’s going on would be a great thing.  It won’t diminish the role of traditional journalism because there will always be a need for serious investigative journalism.  Journalists will still need to go deeper than what is handed to them to make sure the data is accurate, numbers aren’t being fudged, and that secrets aren’t being kept.  The government may say it is being open and transparent, but it is up to journalists to ensure that that is really the case.

One of the themes of this conference, We.Gov, is becoming a reality.  As long as people stay interested in looking at the government data online (which may be hard, with things like the “Charlie Bit Me” video as competition for attention), we can participate more in our government than any generation before us.  We have already proven that citizen participation on the Internet can affect the tone and impact a political campaign, now we have the opportunity to use the Internet to directly affect policy-making as well.

If you will be in NYC Monday and Tuesday for the Personal Democracy Forum, be sure to stop by our lounge in the sponsor area and to check out our panel at 3:45 on Tuesday, “Beyond BarackObama.com: How Social Action Networks Are Changing Politics.”  If you aren’t able to attend, follow the #pdf09 action via our tracking tool, Twitterslurp.  It is going to be a great conference.

We started The Bivings Report back in 2001.  In its first iteration it focused exclusively on online marketing, and was written primarily by a former employee named Andrew Dimock.  Andrew did a great job in those early years of building an audience without much writing support from the rest of us. 

In late 2005, we launched a new version of The Bivings Report that had a broader focus.  We started writing about the work we do and how we do it, and more generally about the things that get us excited.  We also invited everyone in the firm to contribute. 

Expanding the scope of the blog was a pivotal moment for us.  The blog has built a solid readership and is an important part of our marketing efforts.  More importantly, I think the process of writing the blog has made us smarter and better at what we do.

We put up our 1,000th post the other day, so I figured it was a good time to go through the archive and highlight some of our most popular posts and favorites.  Here goes:

• Redesigning USA Today - Our design team took a shot at redesigning USA Today.  Even though the design is three years old, it is still better than the current USA Today and most newspaper site, in my opinion.
• Wordpress vs. Drupal - This post comparing the two platforms still gets hundreds of visitors a day due links and search engines.  It is our most read post. 
• Comcast and Twitter - Now it seems like every other day someone goes in and mines Twitter for  customer service trends.  Back fifteen months ago when we did this analysis, it was still a new thing and this post got a lot of attention.
• 9 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Their Web Sites - This was our first truly viral post, and spawned a brief period when I was obsessed with list posts.  I could relapse at any time. 
• Five Technologies that Will Impact the 2008 Elections -  Another post that went viral during our list post phase.  This was also the first post from our blog to make the Digg homepage.
• John Edward’s 2: The Campaign Site -  I pretty much loved all of head designer’s, Tom McCormick, campaign website reviews (Clinton, Edwards 1, Obama 1, Obama 2,  McCain 1, McCain 2, McCain 3, and Rudy).  But this one is my favorite because it led to hate mail from a few Edwards supporters who don’t get Tom’s sense of humor.

Anyone that has been to a tech conference the last few years knows that there is a huge amount of back channel communication that occurs on Twitter.   People provide live coverage of the talks they go to.  People organize dinner plans.  People stage revolts against panelists.  The conversation is constant, unfiltered and takes place in real time.

The preeminent poli-tech conference, Personal Democracy Forum, takes place next Monday and Tuesday in New York City.  Since we are a sponsor and partner of the Personal Democracy Forum, we decided to launch a tool that will aggregate conversation around the conference.  Check out Twitterslurp for #pdf2009.

We are finishing up details, but here is a list of Twitterslurp’s key features:

• The site will ingest any posts tagged as “#pdf09″, “#pdf2009″ or “Personal Democracy Forum” onto our main page in real time.  We can expand the words we track if other phrases/tags are used.  This will allow us to ingest the entire conversation, and not limit us to only pulling in mentions of a single hashtag.
• Twitterslurp features a leaderboard listing the top Twitter users at the conference based on volume.  Later today, we are going to expand this to feature a fuller leaderboard.  Our hope is that this directory of people tweeting about the conference will make it easy for people to make connections with others at the conference.
• Twitterslurp features a stats page that analyzes the volume of tweets that are coming in.
• We’ll be able to use our backend system to filter out spammers.  At the end of the conference, we’ll also have a database of all the relevant tweets which will allow us to do a full analysis of the conversation post-conference.

Most importantly, we’ll be releasing the code behind Twitterslurp to the open source community next week so that other conferences/organizations can use the tool.

Check out Twitterslurp, and follow @bivings for the latest about the release of the tool.

Along with Heather Lauer of Tribe Effect, I will be participating in a Personal Democracy Forum conference call this Thursday (May 28) from 1-2 pm EST on the topic of “How the Pickens Plan Recruited 1.5 Million Volunteers in Nine Months.”  The call is open to all members of the PDF Network, and you can RSVP here.  Below is a summary of the talk from the PDF website.  I’m looking forward to sharing some of our lessons learned and I hope everyone can participate!

Since its launch in July 2008, the Pickens Plan, a blueprint to reduce America’s foreign oil dependence, has recruited 1.5 million online supporters, built a 200,000 person strong social network (push.pickensplan.com) and produced over 1.1 million emails to Congress and the administration. The campaign won Campaign & Elections’ Reed Award for “Best Use of Social Networking Technology” and the AAPC’s Pollie Award for “Public Affairs Campaign of the Year.”

This Thursday, the team behind the Pickens Plan online program will share detailed insights of how they did it. From 1-2pm EST on May 28th, internet strategy consultants Todd Ziegler of The Bivings Group and Heather Lauer of Tribe Effect LLC will discuss “How the Pickens Plan Recruited 1.5 Million Volunteers in Nine Months.”

To join the call (and get the opportunity to pose your questions directly to Todd and Heather), you’ll need to join the PdF Network.

Once you’ve signed up, you’ll be able to RSVP for this and any of our other upcoming calls with such experts in the tech and politics space as Amanda Rose (Twestival), Eric Frenchman (McCain campaign), Steve Grove (YouTube) and many more.

Oh, and if you’re coming to the PdF Conference in June, your PdF Network membership is included in your registration.

Back in January I started the Master of Information Management program at the University of Maryland, and one of my classes this semester was about information policy. One of the main assignments was to write an issue brief about a contemporary topic, and my classmate Ryan Sydlik and I focused on the new Associated Press initiative, launched in April this year, to better protect its intellectual property from online content scrapers.

Our AP Intellectual Property brief (click to access the report) is posted in The Bivings Group research section where we post our other research. This brief compliments our studies about how the news media uses the Internet.

In our brief we discuss:

• the tactics that the AP has announced it will use to protect its intellectual property,
• how companies like Google and Yahoo! fit into this controversy,
• how the current economic downturn has exacerbated the needs for news organizations to protect their intellectual property,
• the importance of "The Link Economy" that the AP is taking a risk of upsetting, and
• how fair use and DMCA notices might play into the AP's legal strategy.

The Bivings Group attended the Politics Online 2009 conference in Washington, DC, earlier this week to listen to and participate in a large-scale dialogue on how technology is and is going to change the political landscape. Here are a few important lesions I learned.

1. Politicians are getting technical

Actual politicians, not just their IT and communications departments, are learning how to use web tools. Secretaries of State and members of Congress addressed conference attendees on how they’re using new technologies to make their jobs more effective and to improve communication with constituents. Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner is working with Google on the Google Voting Information Project.

California Secretary of State Debra Bowen manages her own Facebook and Twitter accounts, rather than handing the task off to an assistant. The cost of stressing out her communications team a bit is worth it for Secretary Bowen to connect directly with Californians.

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Energy advocates and online mobilization experts gathered at the Center for American Progress Action Fund in Washington, DC, to talk about successes and challenges in gathering activists both on and offline.

Heather Lauer, director of online strategy for the Pickens Plan, talked about the process of gathering the Plan’s 1.5 million-plus participants and building a social network to connect members. (As the technical partner of the Pickens Plan, The Bivings Group has provided ongoing development and support on the Plan’s web communications network, including its primary site and its Ning-based social action network, Push.)

Other organizations, such as the Energy Action Coalition, built supporter bases through focusing on the goals of a particular voting group. The EAC spread its message among young people throughout college campuses and focused empowering the under-30 vote.

No matter the strategy, all members of the panel agreed on the importance of coming together in a combined effort to face energy challenges and the need to reach out to a growing base of supporters.

"We have a tremendous amount of education that needs to be done and we also have no time. This is not something that the good guys are going to win on the inside," said Brad Johnson of ThinkProgress.org.

In order to reach a broader base, Michael Silberman of 1sky.org emphasized 1Sky’s tactic of organizing community events around key issues, which can be effective both online and off. Silberman and his team worked with Greenpeace to organize rallies and push constituents to contact legislators during Congressional recesses.

While enticing audiences to participate in specific events can be a highly productive way of gaining new members, participants on the panel said it is not as effective as maintaining a long-term, sustained strategy of support.

“We’re relying on dedicated Moveon.org members to motivate other members,” said Michael Sherrard, who works on Moveon.org’s recent Power Up America campaign. “To make real progress is going to require a building crescendo of organizing.”

On top of organizational strategy, the panel discussed effective messaging methods of both within their supporter bases and with the public. Panel moderator and Associate Director for Online Advocacy Alan Rosenblatt recommended using a closed-audience SMS communicator to share messages within your group, and “leveraging Twitter makes that dynamic more public” if you are aiming for a broader audience.

The Center for American Progress Action Fund promotes regular InternetAdvocacy Roundtable discussions as part of its Wired for Progress program. Online attendees can watch live streams of discussions and submit questions online. A listing of past and upcoming Internet Advocacy Roundtables is available here.

Note: The following letter was originally sent out via email to friends of The Bivings Group.  We have started sending these updates out once a quarter.  If you would like to be added to the list, add your name here.

Dear Friends,

Many of you have asked how we are faring, a reasonable question given current circumstances.  Never ones to gloat — maybe we’re a bit too superstitious — we are nonetheless happy to reassure friends and colleagues that The Bivings Group is well positioned for these turbulent times. 

For the benefit of all concerned, we hope Warren Buffet’s widely circulated comment that “the economy is falling off a cliff” was an overstatement; we know we’ve been less “buffeted” by the storm. Inevitably in this climate we’ve parted ways with a couple of clients, but we’ve been fortunate to welcome a number of new ones (along with a few clients who have returned to work with us on new projects).

As such, we are moving ahead, prudently but optimistically. Fueled by federal government spending and the needs of advocacy groups and not-for-profits, our pipeline is surprisingly strong; we’ve even hired a couple of new folks. 

A few highlights of the quarter:

• We’re honored to be the technology firm behind the Pickens Plan, and pleased to report that the Plan’s website has won the Reed and Pollie awards.
• We were delighted to have the opportunity to redesign the website for the National Peace Corps Association (i.e., returned Peace Corps volunteers, myself included) which now includes a social network.
• We designed and launched new sites for the Personal Democracy Forum and TechPresident.
• We completed a new site, “Wild Australia,” a joint project between the Pew Charitable Trusts and The Nature Conservancy.
• Our ImpactWatch work with H-P picked up another award, the PRSA Totem award.

In other news, we’ve started a state government transparency project, added a sixth language — Russian — to the International Center for Journalists’ online network, and are very happy to provide technical support for Edmund Burke High School’s DC Filmfest, which is fast becoming the city’s premier high school film festival.

Meanwhile, not knowing any better, we’re sticking to some old-fashioned ideas. We scout for solid opportunities and look to grow revenues while keeping a lid on costs.  As always, we place a premium on client relationships and the quality of our work.

And we continue to be mindful of those less fortunate, including those who have recently taken it hard on the chin. Redoubling our philanthropic efforts this year, we are reminded of what the late Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm once said, ”Service to others is the rent you pay for room on the earth.”

Wishing you all the best,

Gary Bivings
April 7, 2009

We have been writing a lot of self promotional blog posts about our work on the Pickens Plan web program lately.  I am going to write one more and then I promise to move on to other topics. 

The last three days, the Pickens Plan has been holding a virtual march on Washington in support of the elements of the Plan.  The team has recruited over 4.5 million virtual marchers and there has been tons of online activity this week around the March.  In support of the effort, we built some social media tools that help spread the word about the March in various online communities.

Using Hashtag to Promote Action

Prior to this week, the Pickens Plan team hadn’t really been using hashtags as a way to organize content on Twitter.  In advance of the virtual march, we launched the #pickensplan hash tag through our Pickens Plan Twitter account and encouraged supporters to use the tag to promote the Plan.  To promote the tag, we also launched a page on the virtual march site that aggregates all mentions of the tag.  The page includes a leaderboard that recognizes the users that have used the #pickensplan hashtag most frequently and tools that allow users to post Pickens tweets right from the page itself.

This strategy has worked well, as the #pickensplan hashtag has become ubiquitous and a great many users are promoting the march by tweeting our suggested messages.

Contacting Congress via Facebook and Twitter

A big part of the virtual march centers around asking activists to contact their legislators in support of the elements of the Plan.  Like everyone else, the site includes the ability for people to send emails to Congress.  To surround the situation, the Pickens team also launched a page listing member of Congress on Twitter and Facebook and encouraged users to reach out on those venues.  You can see a screen grab from the page below.

If you check out #pickensplan on Twitter, you’ll see examples of supporters reaching out to their Representatives using these tools.  Given its closed nature, it is more difficult to show the results on Facebook.

You can learn more about the Pickens Plan virtual march here.

So far this year, the Pickens Plan has gathered the nation’s most powerful names in energy reform for an incredible energy summit and recruited over three million people for this week’s huge Virtual March on Washington for energy independence.

This past weekend, however, was about celebrating what the T. Boone and the Plan accomplished before 2009 even begun. Sunday night, the Pickens Plan was honored with the Association of Political Affairs Professionals award for best Public Affairs Campaign of the Year. The Bivings Group, which worked on all online aspects of the campaign, is proud to be part of the great team behind the Pickens Plan.

HBO’s “Real Time” host Bill Maher announced the award via satellite and praised T. Boone for his diligence and willingness to put aside political partisanship for the sake of achieving critical energy goals.

The Pickens Plan also won awards in several smaller categories, including best volunteer recruitment strategy.

The AAPC Awards ceremony was the culminating event of a two-day Pollie awards conference, where hundreds in the political and public affairs business gathered to discuss new media strategy and review 2008 campaign efforts.

Other major awards of the night included chief strategist to the Barack Obama presidential campaign, David Axelrod, as Political Strategist of the Year, and CD Online Ads won for Best Use of Technology.

In February we launched brand new, upgraded, and comprehensively re-designed versions of The Personal Democracy Forum’s sibling websites, personaldemocracy.com and techpresident.com.

There are tens of new features and offerings, but highlights include:

PdF Marketplace :  a commercial bulletin board for the poli-tech community.  Job postings, domain sales,  resumes, web services — all have a place here for exposure to a highly targeted audience.

The Pdf Network :  The Forum’s new membership program, providing insider access to key poli-tech thought leaders, discounts on conference attendance, networking, and advance notice on impending developments in the field.  (Bonus:  a subscription to one of several magazines is included in your membership.)

VoteVid :  This is techPresident’s video forum, on which anyone can propose, share, and vote on online political videos.

Topics :  The content produced by PdF’s magnificent stable of bloggers is now drawn directly into a set of seven verticals (eGovt, Fundraising, Mobile, Advertising, Video, Strategy and Cool Stuff)

Ratings and Metrics :  blog posts are now rate-able through an AJAX-based five-star ranking system, and posts can be sorted by such metrics as “Most Emailed ” and “Most Read “.

Charts:  PdF has added charts set to visually track such developing phenomena as the 2012 GOP presidential field, and the latest rankings of key political figures in terms of their Technorati rankings as well as the number of friends each has accumulated on Facebook.

Calendar :  a listing of all of the most important and groundbreaking upcoming events as determined by the PdF editorial team.

Advocacy :  a centralized grouping of the key players in political advocacy, along with profiles of each.

The reaction has been overwhelmingly welcoming and positive thus far, but have a look for yourself. Visit the site , create your free or paid membership , subscribe to the blog, learn about the fast-approaching 2009 PdF Conference .  Then, let us know what you think.

I attended Drupalcon last week, which is a bi-annual Drupal conference for developers, themers and business development types like myself.  I had a great time, so here are some quick thoughts on the conference.

(1) Drupal people are really nice.   Conversations came easily and people are willing to share.  In his presentation, Kyle Williams mentioned that the reason he got into Drupal was because the community was so supportive and positive.  He’s right.

(2) Multiple people wondered aloud why the Drupal alien logo has to be so scary (see alien in upper right).

(3) There were few Republicans at Drupalcon.  David Cohn wrote a great article a few months back about how Drupal has helped power the progressive movement.  Based on the demographics of the folks at the conference and the sites showcased, Drupal is still being used much more aggressively by left leaning organizations than those on the right.

(4) Anyone that has used Drupal for any period of time knows how dramatic the changes are when a new version is released.  There are tons of sites out there still running on Drupal 4 and 5 due to how hard it is to upgrade.  In talking to folks at the conference, that really is by design.  The Drupal community is focused on pushing the code forward.  If the cost of progress is problems with backward compatibility, so be it.  This is in stark contrast to packages like Wordpress that worry much more about relatively easy upgrades.

(5) In his presentation, Neil Giarratana mentioned that one advantage of Drupal is that tons can be accomplished through configuration using administrative tools as opposed to through customization, which inevitably involves hard core developers.  Configuration is relatively easy and cost effective while customizations are hard and expensive.  This has been my experience as well, so it was nice to have Neil articulate the divide so well.

(6) Neil also had a good quote, saying that Drupal is free in the same way a puppy is free.  By the time you feed it, take it to the vet, etc. it actually ends up being expensive.  This is true of all content management systems, but I think it is important for people who launch Drupal sites to account for ongoing upgrades and maintenance.  One of the great things about Drupal is that it is relatively easy to make changes and the development never real ends.  Companies should plan for that when they launch sites.

(7) On the negative side, the sessions at the conference were hit or miss, more so than at any conference I’ve been to before.  I saw a few sessions that were among the best I’ve seen at any conference and a couple I literally got nothing out of despite being interested in the topic.  As someone who submitted a panel idea that wasn’t accepted, the inconsistency got me wondering about how the sessions were selected.  My guess is that it was a bit of a hybrid between votes and editorial process. 

(8) On the positive side, Drupalcon was the first conference I’ve been to with a fooseball table.

(9) If you were on a PC, the wifi at the conference was spotty, particularly if you are on Vista.  If you were on a Mac, it seemed to work fine.  The Drupal community is definitely Mac friendly, so this was probably some sort of conspiracy. 

(10) I saw a lot of examples of great Drupal work at the conference, but I would put our work up there with anybody’s.  I’m really proud of the work my Bivings co-workers have done on complex Drupal sites like IJNet, Personal Democracy Forum, Techpresident and Wild Australia. 

Today, The Bivings Group is proud to announce the release of GlobalMapTiles, the first part of a set of PHP and JavaScript code that assists with aggregating markers on a Google Map. Our clients wanted to be able to display markers on a map reflecting the locations of people who provided their location (city, state, zip, and in some cases, street address), but with tens of thousands of expected sign-ups, it’s not feasible to display all the points on the map at once.

One of the challenges with displaying a map with lots of markers is that if there are too many markers in one location, the placemarks themselves quickly become an unmanageable sea that obscures the map. In some cases, this is the desired effect, but in our case, we wanted to present a cleaner map that showed a single marker that provided an indication of the number of people present in an area. (Less markers also has the advantage of loading faster.) (more…)