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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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."

Simon Owens of Bloggasm, a blog that focuses on online media and journalism, recently conducted a very intriguing ‘mini-study' centered about the idea of personal blogging done by reporters, journalists, and other professionals.

He was inspired by the recent firings of two prominent writers, both of whom were fired due to participation in personal blogging.  Chez Pazienza, a former producer for CNN, was fired from his job in February because he wrote for Huffington Post and other high-profile blogs.  CNN has a policy against any outside writing without prior approval.

In April, Michael Tunison was fired from the Washington Post after he revealed that he wrote for the sports blog Kissing Suzy Kolber. His bosses told him that he had brought "discredit to the paper" through his blogging.

In order to find out how other newspaper editors and higher-ups felt about this issue, Owens contacted 250 of them, basically asking if they would be against personal blogging on non-beat issues by their writers.  Of those that responded, 44% "either required disclosure of the blog, issued caveats over what subjects couldn't be covered, or had outright bans on having personal blogs at all."

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The Bivings Group is a busy web development firm, and as such we don’t always spend the time we should on our own websites. As a consultant, you focus so much on helping clients that sometimes you don’t spend the time to help yourself.

In an effort to improve the performance of our own online program, we are going to take some time this summer to update the content, graphics, etc. on our main site, our blog and the website of our principle product, ImpactWatch. One of the first things we are doing is looking at ways to improve our performance in search engines. Our sites do pretty well in Google, but, like anyone else, we want to do better. We know that search engine optimization (SEO) is an ongoing process, and that if we don’t consistently put in work our ratings will drop. (more…)

Once again, the Internet is abuzz with predictions and theories about who is going to win American Idol.  In the early days of the competition (back when Kelly Clarkson was still a nobody singing karaoke and we only hypothesized that we hated the British without actually knowing it through Simon Cowell), there was much less web traffic about the show.  This season and the previous one, however, it's all the Internet can talk about.

This leads people in finding numerous ways to predict who of the now-6 remaining contestants will be voted off each week.  After all, this is a show that purports that the American public gets to decide who is going to stay and who is going to go.  Polls, blogs, and fansites may all play an important role in deciding the overall victor, much like a modern day political campaign. 

TV Squad, a popular television site, uses polls from various sources as well as their own intuition to predict the next bootee.  Most of the polls incorrectly predicted Syesha Mercado's demise, while the real loser was Kristy Lee Cook.  Obviously, this is not an accurate way to predict the contestant with the lowest votes.  The polls are simply too specific in the sense that only those Internet snoopers that come across them will actually get a chance to vote in the poll.  This does not represent an accurate view of the American public.

DialIdol.com has found a more inventive way to predict the successful contestants.  Their software measures the busy signal of each phone line to determine who is getting the most votes.  They started the program during the previous season, but achieved only moderate success in the predictions.  The company also sells software to enable one person to vote many times for a contestant.  Many sites have reported that the software is now known by the American Idol producers and rarely works anymore.

Tivo also found a creative way to measure the votes.  The company claims that they can predict who is going to be voted off by which minutes of the recorded programs are re-watched.  The theory is that Idol favorites will have their performances re-watched by their adoring public, while soon-to-be eliminees will have fewer views.  Unfortunately, the system seems to not be altogether accurate, since Tivo has incorrectly predicted Mercado two weeks in a row.

Another social media company, BuzzLogic, uses their "influencer blog" ratings to follow the entire competition via their blog.  I was impressed by the fledgling company's efforts at first glance, but upon closer inspection realized that few, if any, of their predictions have been true.  In addition, BuzzLogic gives very little explanation when they are incorrect.  This does, however, bolster my recent opinion that Katie Paine's connection between online activity and offline activity is flawed.  Many ‘influential' bloggers may be writing about certain candidates for American Idol, but that does not necessarily mean that they are voting for them, or voting at all.

I decided to tackle the task of predicting American Idol, ImpactWatch style.  Instead of using news articles, I used Tweet Scan to analyze 90 tweets per remaining contestant, using two separate searches for each.  I searched for each contestant's full name as well as their first name and the phrase "American Idol".  I read and ranked each tweet post as positive, negative, or neutral.

There are two reasons why I believe this method to be more valid than the other ways that were described above.  First, tweets represent impulses and first impressions, which I assume mirrors the mindset of actual voters.  Secondly, this is the only method that ascribes a positive or negative take on the information.  Polls just rank the favorite, while the Tivo system lacks any real information about why certain parts of the show are re-watched.  BuzzLogic's system has merit, but suffers from the need of personal input by its bloggers to explain anomalies in the amounts of influencer blogs.

Using my ImpactWatch inspired protocol, I found that David Cook and Jason Castro have the highest amount of positive tweets.  Sure enough, after doing some extended research, I found that the two received much praise for their performances last week.  All three females had an identical number of negative tweets (45), but Mercado has the lowest amount of positive tweets at a scant 30.  This is preliminary, but on Wednesday morning, I will post an updated tweet analysis (since Tuesday is when the contestants will perform their new songs).  Voters will most likely be tweeting away while they are waiting to vote.  Let's see if I can accurately predict which Idol will fall.

My current results are summarized below, using a graph created using ImpactWatch.

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…)

"Ideas worth spreading" is the motto of a growing annual convention that is held in Monterey, California.  The Technology Entertainment Design (TED) conference covers a wide range of topics, from science to the arts, and nearly everything in between.  My fraternity brother, Chris, recently made me aware of this conference, which has been conducted since 1984.

There is an annual membership fee of $6000, however, this fee not only covers attendance to the events, but also attendance for other special gatherings and DVDs of the presentations.  Since not everyone can afford to be this enlightened, the official website was created in response, providing the highlights and best speeches from the conference.

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A little over a year ago I wrote a post that guessed which emerging technologies would have an impact on the 2008 election cycle. I figured I’d take a quick look back and grade my predictions, as well as list a few new technologies that have emerged since I last covered this ground.

Here are the grades I would give my predictions (original post is here for background):

(1) Ning (Niche Social Networks)

I’d give myself a C on this one. Many of the major Presidential candidates launched niche social networks on their campaign sites, hoping to encourage connections among volunteers. However, none of these niche networks really got that much traction except for Barack Obama’s. And no campaign used the specific service I recommended, Ning (which I think is still worth trying). Ron Paul supporters took the novel approach of trying to turn the entire Internet into a niche social network about Ron Paul, which is another thing entirely. I think there is still something to the idea of niche social networks around campaigns, but most of the action has been taking place on the more established networks (Facebook, MySpace, etc.).

(2) Mozes (Broadcast Text Messaging)

I’d go with a B for this one. The Obama campaign launched a quite aggressive text messaging effort where users are encouraged to text the message “Hope” to 62262 to subscribe to text alerts alerts. Other campaigns have experimented with similar programs. The Obama campaign program works pretty much the exact same way as I described in my post, but no one is using Mozes specifically. It is also really hard to measure the impact of these programs without getting access to subscriber figures.

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<Cross post from our ImpactWatch blog> 

Most people want to boil the success or failure of a website down to two easy-to-digest statistics. How many people came to my site? How many pages did those folks look at? Take those two numbers. Draw a line over time. If they go up, we’re doing good. If they go down, we’re not.

As the web has gotten bigger, these broad eyeball-based metrics have become less and less useful. Sure, eyeballs are still extremely relevant for websites that are selling online advertising. But for most websites, the total number of visitors really isn’t that important except in giving you very broad strokes. More important is whether your website is reaching its target audience.

Let me give you a couple of examples from our own blog, The Bivings Report.

(1) A while back this article of ours made it on to the homepage of the social news site, Digg. For those of you not familiar, this means we got thousands of visitors coming to our site all at once (this phenomenon is actually called the Slashdot Effect). To this day that is still the day we got the most visitors to our blog.

But to what end? As you’ll see, being on Digg didn’t lead to some great discussion in the comments on our site. In looking at usage patterns before and after being on Digg, we didn’t see a long term bump in users or RSS subscribers. Basically, being on Digg was (1) a nice ego boost for us and (2) a fun way to run an ad hoc stress test on our servers. Beyond that, it really didn’t accomplish much.

(2) Similarly, we wrote an off-point blog post a while back on HD-DVD vs Bluray. Based on our site stats, I’d a lot of people are researching which to buy as hundreds of people are visiting our blog each day after finding our article on Google. Like with Digg, this traffic is doing us very little good. We’re not a consumer electronics blog and the people coming from Google on that particular search aren’t being converted from visitors into readers.

If you boil our bottom line for this blog down to a line chart showing visitors over time, these two events make us look great. Our trend line is going up. Hurray. But in both these cases, the people we attracted aren’t really interested in what we write about on our blog and aren’t members of our target audience.

The overall traffic numbers don’t really tell us whether our blog has been truly effective or not. To know that, you’ve got to look a lot deeper than visitors and page views.

Now more than ever, presidential candidates are making their respective presences felt online. Mediums such as blogs, YouTube, and social networks like MySpace and Facebook are giving candidates a new platform to utilize. Inspired by TechPresident and the Social Media Index concept, we decided to take an aggregate snapshot at how much buzz the candidates are getting in advance of Super Tuesday. Those making the biggest splashes on the web aren’t necessarily the same ones leading the polls. While pollsters employed by the likes of ABC News and CNN show Hillary Clinton and John McCain as favorites to square-off for the White House in November, the two aren’t their own party’s most popular candidates online.

With over 12,000 links to his official website from Google Blog Search, 350,000 Facebook supporters and more than 15,000,000 people viewing his YouTube channel daily, Barack Obama seems to have the internet race won among Democrats. Compare those numbers to Hillary’s less than 9,000 Google Blog Search links, less than 88,000 Facebook supporters and only 5,693,448 in daily YouTube viewership. Obama also enjoys more support on MySpace, with over 252,000 friends to Clinton’s 171,761, all according to the latest techPresident stats.

As for Republicans, the most popular man online is ironically the same one sitting next to last in the polls. Ron Paul has 14,215 Google Blog Search links to his official site, more Facebook (81,639) and MySpace (125,733) support, and more daily YouTube viewers (12,104,767) than anyone else competing for the Grand Old Party’s ticket. No other Republican comes close to Paul’s online celebrity. Mitt Romney is second on Google Blog Search with 5,905 links. Mike Huckabee has the second most YouTube viewers a day with just over 5,000,000. John McCain is second on MySpace with 44,689 friends, and Huckabee is currently second among Republicans with 47,510 Facebook supporters.

As most of you know, The Bivings Group was a part of the team that built Fred Thompson’s Presidential campaign website. Our main client contact on the project, Michael Turk, has a good post up rounding up the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of the online program we all put together. It is worth a read.

In the piece, Turk points out that one of the most successful aspects of the program was the campaign blog, the Fred File. He writes:

As an example of the strength of Thompson’s online effort, look at the Thompson campaign blog and you’ll see something remarkable for GOP candidates - comments. And not just a few comments, but hundreds and even thousands of comments.

Rudy’s blog doesn’t allow comments. Romney’s gets a few per post. Ron Paul just recently launched a blog (despite the fact that blog software is largely free). He currently gets between a handful and a few dozen comments.

I don’t think this indicates a lack of supporter enthusiasm as much as it indicates that the campaigns have created a blog with nothing to say on sites that are so scrubbed of interesting content they’re almost sterile. Most of the posts are rehashed press releases, rehashed campaign e-mails, or occasionally a video so overscripted it becomes almost completely unwatchable.

I think Turk is right on here. With any successful blog, 90% of the battle is producing readable content and engaging with readers. Many, many campaigns want a blog in theory but don’t have the stomach to do the heavy lifting that will make it actually work.  The Thompson campaign, lead by staffers Sean Hackbarth and Austin Walne, deserve the lion’s share of the credit for the success of the Fred File. But I also think there were some small, more technical decisions that were made that helped give the blog a greater chance to succeed. (more…)

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.

Jerry Johnson of Jerry's Juice Bar fame, and a friend, colleague, client and golf partner has put up a blog called "Taking The Blogosphere Seriously ." He's got some trenchant things to say about both the Serious and Not Serious sides of the Blogosphere.  Give it a read and add your comments. He'll be taking them with him as a panel speaker to the Consumer Electronic Show next week. I know Jerry; he'll give full attribution to whatever you have to add.

Every once in a while we like to point out how non-profits and charitable causes can harness the Internet to better achieve their goals, and this post highlights the successful efforts of Goodwill of Greater Washington using a blog — about fashion.

True, Goodwill is about community development projects like job training for lower income folk and sales from used and thrift clothing helps fund such programs, but fashion is not one of the organization's main concerns. 

However, it understands that Napoleon Dynamite and others find cool second-hand threads at thrift shops to don.  These hipsters frequent thrift stores since they know that the fine line between "thrift" and the more haute couture adjective "vintage" is razor thin — price.  Further, many high end boutiques buy some of their stock at places non-profit second-hand stores and jack up the price.  Why can't organizations like Goodwill cash in more on "vintage" as well?

To counteract this trend, Goodwill here in DC hired Em Hall to write the DC Goodwill Fashion Blog in order to attract more customers to the stores.  Through this blog she spotlights (and, dare I say, markets) trendy items found on the racks and even auctions off higher quality and more haute items.  In some cases, these items fetch a far higher price through the on-line auction than a transaction in the store.  Thus, Goodwill gets more money to devote to its community projects.  In fact, Goodwills in other parts of the country have approached Ms. Hall to try similar blogging ventures.

This is a creative way that a non-profit organization has used a blog, and the best part of it is that blogging is cheap and easy.  But it does require some creativity and, in this case, a good sense of fashion.

Hat tip: Rachel Martin and Win Rosenfeld of NPR's The Bryant Park Project.

On Tuesday of this week (December 18, 2007) NPR's new morning show The Bryant Park Project did a segment on the local perception of Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul, and his large and ardent Internet posse came up.  Like many others Bennett Roth of the Houston Chronicle guesses that Ron Paul supporters "are a little bit younger, a little bit more male, and certainly very disaffected."

Instead of letting the story end there, the show's on-line editor Laura Conaway decided to ask, "Who Are Ron Paul's Supporters?"  Unsurprisingly, Paul activists have flocked to the post to leave comments — 3,189 as of this posting.  However, not all of the supporters claim (hopefully, they're honest) to fit the stereotype that many of us think of this ardent group.

One is a "47 year[s] old, male, married, two children and a computer programmer. Never involved in politics until someone introduced [him] to Rep. Ron Paul's message."

Another is a "Fifty-something single female, employed in the arts."

Another respondent is a "54-year-old divorced woman… [and] very concerned about the decline of the dollar and inflation."

While another person is a "29 year old woman and married" who is works as a "self-employed Independent Sales Trainer, writer and stay-at-home mom."

One commenter states, "I'm an NPR listener and one of the 'secular progressives' so feared by the Fox news crowd."

Granted, many of the respondents are in their 20s or 30s, male, and work in a technical field, but not all.  Hopefully, The Bryant Park Project will interview of some the respondents who don't fit the stereotypical Ron Paul supporter to ask them why they support him.

When I showed this to my friend Kevin Anderson, who is the Blogs Editor for The Guardian in the UK, he was impressed by the response to this simple blog post since he could see how it can add to the greater Ron Paul story.

"I have often said to our journalists that only a fraction of our audience will respond to [a] traditional article, and often those responses won't add much to the story," Kevin e-mailed me today, "However, by guiding the discussion with a simple question or some framing of the debate or issue, I think participation not only increases but it's also broader and more diverse."

His remarks confirmed what I was thinking.  Not only do simple questions help participation on blogs, but they can have significant impact on the journalistic value of blogging.

Update: Due to the "Paul-valanche" of comments, The Bryant Park Project has turned off comments on the post.