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Watch the introductions for The Pickens Plan’s Heather Lauer and The Bivings Group’s Todd Zeigler during their panel discussion at the Personal Democracy Forum conference this week.

Guest post by Alan Haburchak

The morning of day two here at the Personal Democracy Forum conference was all about online communities, what they mean, how they can be used and what they say about culture and global culture and society today. Randi Zuckerberg (the other Zuckerberg), Facebook's head of marketing was up first and talked a little bit about how communities have arisen on on Facebook that have lead to real-life movements like the anti-farc protests that occurred in Colombia last year. But other than pointing that that that group had used social media to organize, she didn't have much more to say.

Next up was Alec Ross, who serves as Senior Advisor for Innovation in the Office of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Ross explained how Sec. Clinton is re-imagining the idea of diplomacy to not just be able "white guys in white shirts with red ties" talking to each other, but rather a citizen-to-citizen approach. As an example he touted the State Department's SMS-based Pakistani-relief initiative that they pioneered earlier this year.

The really amazing highlight of the morning however was Michael Wesch, a cultural anthropologist exploring the impact of new media on society and culture. Wesch gave a shortened version of a presentation about YouTube as a cultural phenomenon, which he and 200 students at Kansas State University created. There is video of Wesch's talk at PDF09, though the quality is not ideal. The amazing thing was the collective joy in the room as everyone felt the hope that Wesch expressed for what online communities like YouTube might be able to create in the face of the pessemistic attitude that according to Wesch, had been cultivated among a lot of young people since the 1990s. Highlights from Wesch's presentation were his clips from the Free Hugs and MadV - The Message memes.

Finally the morning closed with Mark Pesce, know as a digital futurist, who talked about the inherrent potenital danger of what he called "ad-hocracies" on the web. As evidence, he pointed to the fight between Wikipedia and the Church of Scientology. Pesce's talk was intersting, discussing how because of their size, the members of the church were able to break the social contract of Wikipedia, ultimately leading to Wikipedia banning them from editing the site. Speaking after Wesch's emotionally charged YouTube presentation, Pesce's point came across as too academic, although important as internet communities reach critical mass.

Ultimately what I and I think most people will take away from this look at web communities is the sense of hope in was Ross and Wesch had to say. Diplomacy can be as simple and effective as sending $5 to someone in Pakistan who needs it from your cell phone, and while YouTube comments may be the worst thing on the internet, the ability of that community to be incredibly personal AND to inspire positive action en masse is amazing.

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.

Guest post by Alan Haburchak

It seems like there is a certain generally accepted truth about age and ideology in America: Young people are liberal and vote Democratic while the older generation tends to trend more conservative. There's even that old chestnut usually attributed to Winston Churchill: "If you're young and not a liberal you have no heart, if you're old and not a conservative, you have no brain."

That seems like it would make sense, and is certainly backed up by exit polling in the 2008 presidential race where two-thirds of 18-29 year olds voted for Barack Obama. But in a panel at the Personal Democracy Forum today, Simon Rosenberg and Morley Winograd of the New Democrat Network, presented research that showed political leanings are intensely generational. The Millenial Generation (the kids today, born after 1980 with their Facebook and their Twitter) identify as "liberal" almost two to one. No surprise there.

But, the same survey given to Generation X (those born between 1960 and 1980) when they were the age Millenials are now shows over 60% identifying as conservative, and the Boomer generation (born between 1943 and 1960) split almost down the middle. Young people have not always been so overtly liberal minded as they are now, according to Rosenburg and Winograd.

For Rosenberg and Winograd, the reason for this lies in a theory put forth in a 1991 book called Generations. According to the authors William Strauss and Neil Howe, the twentieth century, and actually the last 400 years of human history can be divided into twenty-year four-generation cycles, with each successive generation conforming to a specific type. Todays Millenials are the current cycle's "civic" generation, they're optimisitic and believe in community action and volunteering (the hallmarks of the Obama presidency). The Gen Xers on the other hand come from the "reactive" generation, characterized by self-reliance and entrepreneurship (the political hero of this group: Reagan).

The relevance of all this theorizing, according to Rosenberg and Winograd, is in how it has and will continue to shape the political landscape of the United States. Given how liberal the Millenials are, and the fact that there are more of them than any generation since the Boomers, they will probably dominate at least the next two electoral cycles, if not even farther into the future. This means that if Rosenberg and Winograd are right, the Dems can plan on another big win in 2012 and probably in 2016 as well.

That begs the question, what comes next in the generational cycle? According to the theory, the next generation is going to fall into the "adaptive" category, which means they might be a lot like John McCain's "silent generation," meaning a lot of them will have deeply-held conservative beliefs and will probably wonder how their parents can be so liberal and open-minded. Plus, they'll want to know why the old folks won't shut up about this Face-Twitter thing they used when they were kids.
 

Search engines meet social networks in Hunch.com , while Bing.com delivers fewer search results with higher relevance – welcome to decision engines.

Flickr creator Caterina Fake Monday launched Hunch.com, a search engine guiding users to their ideal sites and products for searches on business, travel, shopping and even life advice.

Type in a question like “Am I in the Friend Zone?” and Hunch will lead you through a series of questions about your personal relationships and to your answer.

Outside of being an exaggerated version of a Cosmopolitan quiz, Hunch offers quite a bit more analysis and learns about you the more you – and others – use it. The system blends social media advice and internet data to get users to answer other users’ questions as the system builds.

Fake sees Hunch as a useful tool that will grow into an enormous resource.

“It might take five years for Hunch to reach maturity,” she said, according to SearchEngineLand.com. “Right now, it’s like Wikipedia circa 2002. To me, what makes social software great is that it improves over time.”

Also giving traditional search giant Google a run for its money is Bing.com, marketed as a “decision engine” and launched late last month as an answer to overwhelming search results on traditional engines.

Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim reported in May that 42 percent of internet users “are constantly unsatisfied with our initial search results.”

“Search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the Web and find information, but they don’t do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find,” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in a statement.

Like Google, Bing aggregates all types of content on a particular search term, but organizes it in a more useful way. Type in “Rome” and you’ll get searches organized by the city’s history, weather, events, travel deals, etc.

While it remains to be seen how big an impact systems like Hunch and Bing will have on traditional internet searching, it’s clear that innovative technologies focused on quality over quantity and a way to utilize community intellect cannot be ignored.

Twitter was barely off the ground before companies and programmers were looking for ways to monetize it, and a new tool by 83 Degrees has found a new  way to do that.

The tech company on Sunday launched Super Chirp, a subscription-based service allowing Twitter users to require payment to receive certain direct messages.

While most Twitter users aren’t thrilled about paying for Tweets from their favorite celebrities or areas of interest, even getting just a fraction of their fan base to sign up could end up turning huge profits for Twitter publishers with a big enough following.

The Washington Post reported that if even one percent of Shaquille O’Neal’s 1.1 million followers paid $0.99 a month to access a for-subscribers-only direct message stream, “he could bring in about $100,000 worth of extra revenue this year.”

Super Chirp is a little different from past efforts at monetizing Twitter streams, such as Twitpub. Unlike its competitor, Super Chirp doesn’t require Twitter users to create a new account, but lets them set up special direct-message only streams for subscribers, according to TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington.

“Twitter is mobile and it’s real time, two huge advantages over normal fan sites. And it’s constantly refreshed with new content,” Arrington reported Sunday.

The tool runs through PayPal, and Super Chirp keeps 30 percent (including PayPal fees) of the profit. Publishers can charge anywhere from $0.99 to $9.99 for subscriptions.

TechCrunch points out the tool can be utilized not only by celebrities and businesses, but also by charities.

“Loyal supporters can donate to the charity and get a stream of news relevant to that charity,” Arrington reported.

While Super Chirp offers something new over competitors like Twitpub and Be a Magpie, brainstorming ways to profit from Twitter has just begun.

“Super Chirp is just the latest in a stream of third-party services and apps trying to capitalize on Twitter’s social infrastructure,” Arrington said.

President Obama made his way into office with a tech savvy campaign team and promises to use new technologies to change the way government gets its job done. With the campaign over and the administration under way, shifting rhetoric into action has happened in notable ways but also raised major concerns.

The Center for American Progress held a roundtable discussion Monday with a few of those working inside and outside government to improve Federal impact and navigate some of the hurdles presented by opening government up through technology.

“The Web and the Federal Government grew up in different neighborhoods,” CAP Senior Vice President for Online Communications Andrew Sherry said in his introduction.

Speaking directly on how these two elements from different sides of the track are learning to work together was Alec Ross, Secretary of State Clinton’s senior advisor for innovation, who led the roundtable’s central discussion on 21^st century statehood, and what he termed “Diplomacy 2.0.” (more…)

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.

(more…)

Bivings Group Director of Client Services Andrew MacDowell spoke to a panel focused on gaining and utilizing a large supporter base for initiatives online. The panel, titled “Fishing with a Keyboard,” was one of dozens of break-out sessions included in the 2009 Politics Online conference held in Washington DC April 20-21.

Click here for information on The Pickens Plan by the numbers.

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.

Movies, TV shows and podcasts have been readily available online for years, and as syndicating content becomes even easier, internet users can get even almost anything online – but full college courses?

That’s the goal of Academic Earth, an online hub featuring full video lectures and entire courses from some of the nation’s top schools. The idea grew out of a smaller project at MIT that helped out Academic Earth’s CEO and founder Richard Ludlow when he was struggling with a linear algebra class at Yale his junior year.

Since graduating in 2007, Ludlow has merged the best of the MIT program with a site developed at Yale, Ted.com, into a vast online directory of academic resources. Besides working with MIT and Yale, Academic Earth partners with Stanford, Berkeley , Princeton and Harvard.

The site, now in Beta version, is expected to launch by the beginning of April with an onslaught of new features being added over the next six months, said Ludlow.

Outside of including several schools, Academic Earth’s biggest challenge will be utilizing user feedback and interaction to take their product one step further than programs already available. The small but growing team at the New York-based company is developing a social network around their content, where users can interact with professors and other students, make suggestions and complaints, and organize their own course load. Ludlow has already used user feedback for ways to make the site more user-friendly.

“A big step that we’re taking is segmenting these lectures into shorter clips,” Ludlow said. “I see this as a video encyclopedia.”

Ludlow also hopes to see an expansion in partnering schools, subject matter and international connections. Many schools have video lecture content, he said, but are not licensing their content in creative commons, which would make it available for free for non-commercial purposes. Ludlow is hoping the attention to his site, which had 100,000 visitors in the first 16 days, will convince Universities to include their content and to expand the subject matter.

“As our site gains notoriety, (universities) will see which subjects are lacking,” he said. Ludlow hopes to include content from several schools in the United Kingdom and encourage other international universities to partner with Academic Earth on providing foreign language content.

Down the line, Academic Earth even plans on packaging information in DVDs so those without internet access can still gain from their product.

Users can access lectures and courses from a range of subjects – mostly sciences, for the time being – and rate lectures and professors. Despite the site providing full course information, Ludlow isn’t worried that students will opt for online versions of in-person lectures.

“There will always be some value in the in-person experience that you have in college,” Ludlow said, comparing the lecture videos to text books. “Just delivering information can be commoditized. This actually opens up the door for teachers to use more information.”

The first Monday after the New Year brings many of us back to reality after a fleeting period of mental freedom (barring any drama with the in-laws, of course). This time of year many choose to reflect on the previous 52 weeks, and determine what kinds of lifestyle changes will make the next year (in our case, 2009) less lackluster. Instead of boring you with non-existent plans to visit the gym with increased frequency, or a false promise to cook at home more, I've decided to share my list of ways I would like — and have already begun — to change my internet habits.

Online Products Getting the Axe

• Flickr. With more and more of my friends making use of Facebook's photo albums, I have been using Flickr less and less. While I realize there's still a place for the artsy photostream, Flickr, once a mainstay of my daily online repertoire, is largely absent from my browser's address bar.
• Firefox. Nothing personal to Mozilla, and I still run it on my Ubuntu and FreeBSD boxes. But when it comes to my business-centered Windows machine, I have abandoned this once-touted browser champion for Google Chrome. Now out of beta, the UI is slick and it uses far less system resources than the now pudgy Firefox. Disclaimer: I am also a self-proclaimed Google fanboy.
• Technorati. I still view Technorati via RSS, as their headlines are worth a look. However, I used to use this service mainly as a blog search tool, and Google Blog search has simply surpassed it.
• Twitter. After Facebook implemented and revamped its status updates, Twitter doesn't quite have the same sheen it once had. In addition, most aggregate services implement with the Twitter platform if you really need to stay afloat on any crucial Tweets. Not to mention its non-impressive growth over the last few months.

Online Products I Use More, or Have Begun Using

Excluding the mainstays such as Gmail and Facebook, here are some products I've made some room for as we transition into 2009.

• Google Reader. While I did not begin using this recently, the revamp of its design and new features have really set this reader further away from the pack than I had imagined.
• FriendFeed. Upon launch, I was adamently opposed to FriendFeed. After some time to work out kinks and to catch on in popularity (and by nature, functionality), I have found some good news leads and websites through this service. I joined FriendFeed to show how pointless it was, and now it saves me time by aggregating all sorts of websites I'd rather not visit primarily.
• Hulu. I only really watch It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and it's available on Hulu. As are all of the archived episodes of Arrested Development. I watch more Hulu than television by a long shot. Where else can I stream forgotten films of the 80's and 90's for free with (very) limited commercial interruption in 480p?
• Truphone. I make a few calls internationally every now and then, and while Skype is great, without a truly mobile Skype phone available in the United States this service is truly discount calling on the go.

I'm excited to see the innovation that will come with 2009, and hopefully this list will expand itself with better offerings as the year progresses. What kinds of digital changes do you plan to make in the New Year?