Yesterday I attended the Modern Media Strategies Workshop at The Heritage Foundation.  There were many panels during the conference about how those in the political sphere can harness new and social media.

While blogging was one of many topics, many people from political organizations and congressional staffers asked the speakers about how one can find prominent blogs.  Panelists suggested Google Blog Search and Technorati, among other blog search engines, as places to get a general idea about different blogs.

I would like to add two other resources: e-newsletters and blog aggregators. 

Some newsletters track blogosphere chatter about a specific topic, and following this coverage is an excellent way to determine which blogs are influential.  The Exoro Group's Utah Policy Daily is a great example from my old stomping grounds.

Blog aggregators cull posts from a set of blogs focused on the same topic.  Thus, you can use these sites to easily track many blogs at once to determine which are the most prominent.  Staying close to my previous example, UtahPolitics.org is an example of a site that captures political blog chatter in the state. 

These are just two types of helpful resources.  What do you use to find important sites?

The left-leaning news and opinion site The Huffington Post announced a new commenting policy to its community last Thursday.  It'll promote top commenters to regular Huffington Post bloggers. 

Community members will help determine who gets this honor by using the site's new "I'm A Fan Of" and "Favorite" links for comment and user profile pages. Paul Berry explains, "Our decision will be based on how many fans a commenter has, how often their comment is selected as a Favorite, and our moderators' preferences."

I think that this is a great idea since community driven sites need to find ways to award their members, and this is an interesting strategy.  First, commenters who earn this promotion will have to prove that they'll particiate on the site in an intelligent way.  Second, it'll encourage commenters to do their best to contribute in a constructive fashion so that they'll even have a chance to win a blogger spot on the site.  Third, promoting the best commenters is a great way to retain and encourage active participation on the site. 

Last week The New York Time purchased [clarification: the paper is, as Jeff Jarvis notes, "hosting it, selling ads on it, promoting it, but not buying it or hiring its creators"] the sometimes irreverent Freakonomics blog run by University of Chicago economist Dr. Steven Levitt and writer Stephen Dubner. Clearly the newspaper saw that this informative blog had a community worth transplanting to its web site.

Was it a brave move to purchase a blog that isn't control by NYT staffers? Yes, especially since Leavitt pondered about how to maximize a terrorist attack — commenters went wild –shortly after his blog switched over to nytimes.com.

However, buying a blog is another example of how old media organizations are missing the point. Old media companies should focus on fostering innovative new media properties themselves and not simply purchasing them when it makes sense cents. [Update: While partnering with a blog like Freakonomics is definitely a wise move, it doesn't take place of the need for in-house innovation.]

As we've observed here at The Bivings Group, newspapers and their traditional media counterparts seem schizophrenic when it comes to new media. They want to succeed but are unwilling to allow their employees to do what it takes.

In fact, sometimes their current employees won't cut it as The Economist's Project Red Stripe proves. In this case, employees were given time, resources, and freedom to create something new and extraordinary but, as Jeff Jarvis explains, failed to capture the new media or web 2.0 vision perhaps since they came from a traditional background.

BBC News, in contrast, hired Ben Hammersley — who has a new media background and is young enough that he isn't bogged down by the old media model — to launch its multi platform social media reporting on non-BBC sites. Will this idea succeed? I don't know, but in this case the organization is trying and testing to develop its own new media project instead of buying one. Hopefully, the Beeb will continue to allow social media savvy folk like Hammersley and its Director of Global News Richard Sambrook to experiment.

If old media companies want to truly tap into and succeed in the new media world, they need to rethink their strategy. Instead of buying successful blogs, podcasts, or social networks, perhaps they should either hire or reassign people who are new media innovators and give them freedom to develop a successful product.

Further, it is likely cheaper to hire people than acquire established products and brands. [Update: Perhaps a partnership, as in the case with the Freakonomics blog, is cheaper, but this can come at an expense when the deal ends if The New York Times hasn't found a way to build new features and communities around Leavitt and Dubner's genius.] 

I'd like to take a few sentences here to point out something new going on over at Problogger.  Blogger Darren Rowse always has useful and interesting posts for people who take blogging seriously.  This month he's focusing on offering up some of his best blogging tips for his readers.  August is "31 Days to Building a Better Blog ", and there have been some good tips so far with many more to come, I'm sure.

Another great part about this project is that by rounding up reader posts on the same subject, Darren has in effect created a central location for some of the Web's best pointers on creating a successful blog.  Here are three posts I think are especially helpful:

• Top 7 Blogging Mistakes to Avoid 
• 10 Things to do When You  Have Nothing Else to Blog About
• Got Blog? Grow it with some Special Spice

When I blog, I usually focus on a couple of items:

• Link, link link!  It always helps to link to other bloggers' posts (this is a no-brainer).
• Catchy titles.  Not only can the title of your post make your post more searchable, but it will probably grab the attention of at least a couple of people.
• Stay topical.  Timely writing about events in the news or other media can help you get some extra traffic. I'm not saying you should blog about Lindsay Lohan every day, but discussing some relevant and popular issues or stories doesn't hurt.

Anyway, if you're finding yourself in a blogging rut, the current Problogger project is a great place for some inspiration and advice. 

Beyond measuring Dell Hells, it is helpful for those who track blogs to measure relationships between them.

When dealing with a small set of blogs, it is easy to determine if and then how they're related.  However, with millions of blogs no person or organization has the resources to accurately track all of them.  Thus, having a automated system to establish relationship is very helpful.  That's a gap that search engines fill for the Internet in general. 

Relationships could form around a myriad of factors like: topic, geography, style, stance, etc.  For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to focus on topic for this post.

There are many ways that blogs can align themselves with others around a topic. 

Semantic analysis can determine if blog posts have a large set of common specialized words that tie them together.  Data mining isn't perfect though.

How about links?  Bloggers can link to other sites that address the same issues that they do.  However, linking is not standardized throughout the blogosphere.  In many cases links will lead to sites which cover a wide variety of topics.  At times bloggers don't hyperlink to other sites, even if it is helpful.  Many people simply posts a list of links that interest them while others will include links in their text.  Then we have to ask: What's a more meaningful link — one in the blogroll, in-text, or part of a list of several other links to sites discussion different topics?

If a blogger is generous with links, then tracking the sites linked to is useful.  It makes sense to connect two blogs to each other if one links to the other in at least half of its posts.  But as I discussed above, measuring this way is hard since linking habits differ greatly.

Bookmarking and tagging sites like del.icio.us are helpful when establishing blog relationships as web surfers classify blogs and posts by using keywords and writing their own headlines.  As David Weinberger explained in a commentary piece "The Value of a Man-Made Mess, on the Internet" during NPR's All Things Considered on June 11, 2007, people can categorize web content in a variety of ways.  For instance, tags like "Africa," "animal," "pachyderm," and "mammal" are all applicable to a blog post about elephants.  Further, one can tease out blog relationships by looking at how people have tagged or bookmarked a blog and posts.  Granted, such categorization is rarely standardized, but Weinberger argues that's not necessarily bad either.

These are just some ways I can think of measuring and defining relationships between blogs.  What are some other methods?   

ImpactWatch is one of our main products. It is a PR measurement tool that our clients use for mainstream media coverage, but blogosphere measurement is harder to assess since readership and authority aren’t easily quantifiable.

Companies simply lack the resources to closely monitor all that is said about them, and blogs have expanded their radar screen. I don’t know if the blogosphere has increased the number of people who chit chat about a company with others, but it has created a forum in which many more voices are measurable.

However, not all voices are equal in their importance to a company. Concerning this fact, one of issues I’ve grappled with is how to weigh general influence and influence within a specific topic.

For instance, using Dell as an example, most of the A-list bloggers very rarely discuss the company and its products directly. Granted, top blogs like Engadget and Techcrunch should interest Dell since they focus on technology, but what about other blogs like Boing Boing and The Huffington Post?

I use Dell as an example since the company has had to deal with a top blog that doesn’t focus on its arena. Remember Dell Hell?

Although Jeff Jarvis and his BuzzMachine blog are prominent, they focus on media, not technology. Thus, they typically shouldn’t worry Dell, but when Jarvis blogged about his “Dell Hell,” the rules changed. In fact, sometimes when bloggers (especially an A-lister) complain about a company and its products, word can spread fast. Sometimes even the mainstream media picks up on such rants.

Measurement is tough in situations like Dell Hell. Does Dell need to devote resources to scrupulously follow BuzzMachine? No, since Jarvis mainly blogs about media and not computer hardware and software. However, Jarvis was worth Dell’s attention for a while.

How can a company determine which bloggers who don’t focus on the company and its field require their attention? Then, when should they start and stop monitoring such blogs?

I came across an interesting vlog this afternoon — Alive in Baghdad.

Through this site a team of Americans and Iraqis post a weekly video entry about life in Iraq from the perspective of a normal citizen.  In one video a man describes how he was tortured while another presents challenges at a girls school in Baghdad.

The site's staffers hope to use the compelling storytelling of ordinary Iraqis "to counter the sound-bite driven, 'Live From' news model,"  the Internet has enabled this project and many others to provide news, information, and opinions. 

Vlogs like this are either an asset or competitor to mainstream media; hopefully, news organizations will harness such productions by either partnering or acknowledging such work. 

However, the challenge is to sort through all the content on the web to find the most relevant.

When I referred to a post in which journalism professor Jay Rosen of New York University expressed concern over how Mother Jones addressed the political web in its package "Politics 2.0" I was surprised that Clara Jeffery, one of the magazine's co-editors, commented on my post (and then another time).  Jeffery defends the magazine's reporting, and while I'll stand by my stance, I would like to point out that Mother Jones seems to get blog outreach much better than most other news organizations.

In response to criticism in the blogosphere sparked by Rosen's piece on his Press Think and Huffington Post blogs, Mother Jones staffers — including editors — dispersed and joined the commenters in discussing the piece.  Clearly, the magazine is defending its reporting, and it sees the importance of participating in the dialog.  By chiming in it gets to present its side of the story while bypassing middlemen (if bloggers allow unrestricted commenting), directly address questions of potential readers, and challenge the criticism directly.  Further, by doing this in the comment section, they get their input out in the open, and in some cases it is close to the actual criticism.  Besides, why challenge the on-line political pundits if you're not willing to defend yourself on their turf?

While I haven't noticed such action before, I feel that it is important to point to Mother Jones as an example.  It has shown that it is not afraid to use the Internet to debate, defend itself, and interact with normal folk.  Unfortunately far too many journalists and news organizations cower behind their pretentious job titles and virtually ignore the opportunity to strengthen ties with fans, win over some enemies, or maybe at least foster respect from an opponent.  Blog outreach efforts engages the audience and perhaps turns it into a community.

Way to go!

When I first heard that the BBC assigned a reporter, Ben Hammersley, to report about Turkey's elections via several social networks, I wondered how the Beeb would present the reporting. 

Would it just leave all the information at the individual sites and hope that people would navigate to the other reporting?  Would it place links or somehow coax the social networks to allow it to advertise the other sites on each reporting page?  Or would it cull all the data into one place?

It has chosen the third option; see the Webreporter: Turkish journey page.  I like how this page serves as a quasi-portal to the reporting spread out over various sites.  This serves as a place for the reporting to combine while maintaining a consistent layout (with the exception of the Google map with Hammersley's route) but still leaves reporting spread out.  In a sense, the reporting serves as bait to lure flickr, del.icio.us, Twitter, etc. users to the BBC's site — a rather interesting marketing campaign.  I wonder how Twitter, Yahoo!, Google, etc. feel about this.

Oh yeah, thanks for the link and traffic to my previous post, BBC.  I'm chuffed.

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen harangues Mother Jones, the left-leaning investigatory magazine, for its feature package titled "Politics 2.0" in which it basically asks, "Are we entering a new era of digital democracy-or just being conned by a bunch of smooth-talking geeks?"

Rosen, an open source advocate, accuses that "The Mother Jones editors had a great story about politics and the web within their grasp, but they were too busy fabricating myths they could bust up later— and so they missed it."

So, what do y'all think about Politics 2.0?  How would you answer MoJo's questions like:

Blogs, social networking, and viral video are redefining where political discussion takes place. But are they just replacing the old machine bosses with a new group of bullies?

Is old media dead, or is the blogosphere just a flash in the pan?

I don't think that Politics 2.0 is dead since most of the major 2008 presidential hopefuls are courting bloggers, using video sites like YouTube, or deploying social networks on their campaign sites.  In fact, it probably is growing since the mainstream media just loves covering politics on the Internet as well.  However, I'm biased.

Our blog has run off Wordpress for awhile now and for the most part we’ve been pretty free of comment and trackback spam. The Akismet plugin combined with some manual intervention on occasion has usually been all that was needed to keep our comments area relatively clean. Akismet has blocked 300,000 spam comments since we started using it.

The last few months, however, our spam problem has been getting progressively worse and we’re all spending more time than we want to manually deleting comments that make it through. We’ve installed two additional plugins to try to address the problem.

(1) Comment Timeout

In our case, most of the comment spam has been on posts buried deep in our archives. This plugin automatically closes comments on posts after 180 days of active commenting.

(2) Protect Web Form

We installed this plugin that makes users enter an annoying little code when posting a comment. This helps prevent the bots from automatically posting comments. I hate these things and we may take it off and hope the Comment Timeout works by itself.

Since making these changes, we haven’t gotten any spam comments at all. So mission accomplished. But in the process we’ve also ended the conversation on our older posts and made it a little harder for people to post comments.

Anybody else have any better ideas for how to deal with comment/trackback spam?

In all the talk about the Ron Paul online machine, there has been very little discussion of his actual campaign website, which has recently undergone a facelift. His approach is novel. Instead of building an infrastructure on his own campaign website. like most candidates have done, Paul has created a portal to his presences on various third party websites.

The Paul website itself essentially consists of a homepage, an issues section, a bio page, a donation form, a sign up form and a blog. Interestingly for the social candidate, his blog doesn’t even allow comments. Instead, it encourages visitors to discuss/interact with the blog content on social sites like Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Facebook. He seems to deliberately avoid building a community on his own site. Due to this, supporters have no choice but to organize elsewhere.

Paul relies on third party tools for fundamental aspects of his website:

(1) Videos are entirely hosted and served from his YouTube account.

(2) Campaign news gathering and discussion of said news is done via Digg. Paul is the only candidate I’ve seen that includes a prominent link to a Digg search of his name right on his own homepage.

(3) Paul’s schedule is kept exclusively on Eventful.

(4) Supporters are encouraged to create their own events on Meetup.

(5) Campaign gear is sold exclusively through a store hosted by Cafe Press.

(6) All photos are on Flickr.

(7) Social networking occurs on Facebook and MySpace.

His website is basically a mashup of all this stuff, with only a few core functions being performed by the website itself. Lots of campaigns have played around with this stuff. Paul is the only one I’ve seen that truly relies on these tools to perform mission critical campaign functions.

Obviously, as a long shot candidate with a limited budget, the use of these free tools is done out of necessity. But the strategy here is also very sound: by not giving supporters much to do on his own site he maximizes the amount of noise they make in other venues. It is the perfect approach for an insurgent candidate like Paul.

As 2008 grows nearer, I’d expect other insurgent candidates to mimic the Paul approach. Front runners? Not so much at this point. The buzz this approach creates is great, but there is also a lot to be said for having control over all these tools and all the data they generate.

Fred Thompson disclosure.

We've talked about lots of different ways blogs can be used here on TBR, but the blog written by the Japanese ministers of health provides us with some new material.  In response to increasing obesity rates in Japan, Vice-ministers Noritoshi Ishida and Keizo Takemi pledged in December to lose at least 5 kg (11 lbs).  To hold them to their promises, the ministry of health provided these officials with a blog where they track their progress, list the foods they are eating, and describe their exercise regiments.  According to the Washington Post, this strategy has worked for Takemi, who has surpassed his goal by losing about 16 lbs.

What's so remarkable about this topic isn't that these Japanese ministers are losing weight or that they are setting a good example of healthy lifestyles.  Rather, what I find interesting, is that this is an example of high-ranking officials using the internet in a real way. The vice minister admits that losing weight and sticking to a healthy diet hasn't been easy, but hopes that his experience will be helpful to others trying to lose weight.

I found this story quite surprising given the general lack of participation online by Japanese politicians and the overall informal nature of blogging in Japan. For example, while many American companies use blogs as a tool for marketing, discussing corporate issues, or reaching out to customers, it is quite uncommon for Japanese corporations to have official blogs (we discovered this last year when we were researching the prevalence of corporate blogs here in the states).  Similarly, when researching for our international political website study last year, we also read that while the Japanese were pioneers of using the web for political campaigns, this campaign tactic has fallen by the wayside–Japanese campaign websites were less common than their American counterparts.  The health blog of ministers Takemi and Ishida are thus setting a great example for politicians seeking to use the web in new, interesting, and productive ways.

When I was in high school during the late 90s, educators and other experts told me that I would probably have a job that no one had even thought of back then (forget positions like accountant, pilot, programmer, etc.) since the Internet and computer technology were accelerating at such a brisk pace during the Dot-com Boom.  While a very few people knew the publishing technique that is now known as blogging then, it wasn't until about 2003 or 2004 that blogging gained more exposure.

On Sunday The New York Times had an article by Barbara Whitaker titled "Can Blogs Become a Big Source of Jobs?"  It discusses how there are now thousands of blogging jobs, and while most paid bloggers only earn a few hundred dollars per month, some earn upwards of $50,000 a year — that's a regular full-time job. 

Whitaker touched upon the fact that blogging or understanding the practice is now part of many traditional jobs.  For instance, how many journalists blog now?  They still do what they have traditionally done, but blogging is just a new duty.

However, it is no surprise that blogging is part of my job description since I work for an Internet communications firm.  Perhaps the notion that I would have a job that no one had though of was more or less true. 

Blogger Removed from NCAA Baseball Game for Live Blogging (via CNET): Courier-Journal staff blogger Brian Bennett was removed from an NCAA baseball game by officials who told him that "blogging from an NCAA championship event is against NCAA policies". CNET author Daniel Terdiman hit the nail on the head when he said,

"It's understandable if sports organizations like the NCAA want to control access to video of their games, but it's hard to see how they can expect news organizations to keep from reporting the news as it happens.  And when they do, it makes them look like they are stuck very, very far in the past."

Why Real Estate Agents have Good Reason to Fear the Web (via Techdirt):  A study released by two economists from Northwestern University shows that home sellers in Madison, Wisconsin who use real estate agents do not get higher sale prices for their homes than people who sell their homes by themselves.  Apparently, Madison is home to a robust for-sale-by-owner website (FSBOMadison.com ) that allows people to circumvent real estate agents and successfully go it alone.  Authors on TechDirt and in the New York Times conclude that for-sale-by-owner websites legitimize real estate agents' fear of the web.  I think, however, that the success of this website is that real estate agents should expand their use of the web for marketing and outreach rather than shy away from it.  I found this report interesting given the relatively new popularity of real estate websites.

Google Gives Advertisers More Control (via CNET ; also see HULIQ): Google is changing its AdWords program to allow advertisers to see exactly which sites their ads appear on and to run placement performance reports, which will show advertisers performance metrics for each site where their ads appears.  These changes are an effort by Google to give advertisers more control over their ad campaigns and to provide more transparency to advertisers.