My friend Kevin Anderson, an online journalist, wrote an interesting post titled "What is an online journalist?" yesterday on his blog Strange Attractor.

The gist of the post focuses on how it is still common in contemporary journalistic culture to feel that the Internet is not a medium suited for unique quality news reporting and analysis.  Of course, it is a great place to repurpose, publish, or post reporting from other media, but true journalism supposedly cannot originate in the digital realm.

With newspaper ad revenue and dropping, radio and television audiences declining in both quantity and attention paid to specific sources, and a burgeoning amount of sources providing news, news companies and journalists cannot afford to ignore the value of online journalism.  Beyond the fact that the medium lends its well to more up to date and in depth reporting in ways that print and broadcast outlets can't match, more and more people are turning to the Internet as a primary news source.

Hopefully, in 2008, more journalists will realize this and value the online medium by viewing it as a complement to their work and not a threat.

Since the Internet spans the globe, administering the law is a rather fuzzy process when it comes to the web.  It is also rather easy for more than one country to get involved in a dispute over copyright laws. 

For instance, a person who resides in the United States could post an item to their blog hosted on a server in Russia that violates the copyright of a company in Brazil.  Which country's laws are used in this case?

Sarah Bird, SEOmoz's General Counsel, posted an interesting blog post last week about the Internet and international copyright law in which she discusses the various ways the example above. 

While it is very important to note that she doesn't provide legal advice in her post, she illuminates the myriad of minutiae that can complicate legal proceedings.  It is worth a read to better understand how law is applied to the Wild Wild Web.

MySpace (do I really need to link there?) is going to be offering a pay-for-friend model to record distributors. The catch for the record distributor? Give them the user the music for free. We're talking about commercial music that is also distributed in record stores here, not music from some obscure band.

So how does this work exactly? A user "friends" a record label and in exchange they can download an album. The user has the music they want, the record label has an audience for their brands that they can capitalize on, and MySpace gets a little change in it's pocket. Win, win, win? Maybe. I have my doubts as to whether people are really going buy in to an unfamiliar brand because they were able to download some music for free. But it's an interesting idea and definitely worth a shot. Frankly anything that takes current music business models in a different direction is worth a shot. Hats off to MySpace for the imaginativeness.

Speaking of obscure bands, the first band to try this out on MySpace is a band called Pennywise, via their record label Textango's MySpace profile. This will happen sometime next March.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Via AdWeek.

I thought I'd kickstart the end-of-year-prediction-writing season with my own wacky technology predictions for the next 6 months.
 
1. The ASUS Eee laptop is going to sell like hotcakes over the holiday season and other manufacturers will soon follow suit in creating light, barebones, home-use laptops.
Its 2 pounds of weight, small form factor, integrated camera, wifi, few moving parts (read: it's durable), decent battery life, and $400 price tag all spell good news for Asus's home-use ultraportable. It's not a Windows PC, instead it provides users with a suite of basic browsing, messaging and productivity applications over a dumbed-down version of Linux. The word on the street is the preinstalled install is fantastic, although you can install XP on it if you want to. Reviews have been very positive. I think I'll be picking one of these up. (2 months)
 
2. Apple will announce a digital camera with integrated video recording and wifi, and seamless YouTube video upload functionality.
Now before you call me crazy, remember that Apple is now a consumer electronics company. What does everyone want and not have? A way to effortlessly get their videos from their digital camera immediately up on the web. Apple's recent collaboration with Google on the iPhone underscores a relationship that I think will continue. (6 months)
 
3. RIM will release a 3G Blackberry and the Curve will prove to have been a huge success.
This will help Blackberry sales in Europe where 3G has more widespread use and availability than in the US. I also predict that Blackberry's balance sheet will show that the Curve has been a huge success. (3 months)
 
4. PS3 will outsell the XBox360 in the US.
Granted, this has already happened in Europe and, of course, Japan, but here in the US the PS3 has finally found its sweetspot — a lower price and a great new advertising campaign. With every firmware update the platform also keeps getting better and better (read about the recent decision to add local and network play of DivX files - this is huge), and Sony's take on a SecondLife-like virtual meeting place for gamers, Home, promises big time. Couple all that with a slew of games from exclusive franchises coming out in the next 6 months and you've finally got a winner. (5 months)
 
5. The Wii will outsell all other game consoles, but the number of game sales per owner will be significantly lower than on other platforms.
Why? Demographics: the Wii is a disruptive platform that has successfully found a new market of gamers. Still, many of those users are not hardcore gamers and do not spend as much time on the Wii as other players on other systems. Those users will be content with a handful of decent games to play on social occasions. (3 months)
 
6. 24 inch widescreen monitors will hit the mainstream and soon thereafter will become the norm.
Quick on the heels of 22 inch monitors, the price of 24 inch LCD monitors will come down below $300 and people will begin to look at this monitor size as the size of choice. (5 months)
 
7. Cellular providers will start to offer cell-phone Internet plans with VOIP.
It's like what happened to the music business with mp3s — there is just so much pressure on them to open their services up to VOIP that it's simply inevitable. The first provider to cave in will be Sprint. (4 months)
 
8. Google will embrace OpenID and it will finally take off.
For those not in the know, OpenID is an open effort to create a multiplatform sign-in solution for users. That means create an account in one place and use it on many sites. Sounds great to me. Todd wrote about it a while back too. Google is looking to regain some of the goodwill it's lost over the last year. Much like its involvement in creating an app platform with OpenSocial , it will embrace OpenID in the same way. Unlike OpenSocial though, OpenID already has a small following (if you call AOL, LiveJournal, Technorati, Wordpress and Vox small). Google will resist the Microsoft-like urge to copy the OpenID idea and pull together a competing platform and will instead join, support and improve on OpenID. (3 months)
 
9. The Blu-Ray and HD-DVD camps will start collaborating and the price of Bu-Ray and HD-DVD media will be sub-$20.
Blu-Ray definitely had the edge, but with el-cheapo HD-DVD players available over the holiday season and Paramount's exclusive HD-DVD deal, HD-DVD will still remain very much alive. This will force both camps to consider working together. In the end, this is the only thing that really makes sense. Sony's CEO made comments recently that allude to this being more than just a possibility. As far as media prices go, you can currently get a Blu-Ray movie on Amazon for about $24. For some reason Best Buy et al are still selling these at $30 or more. I'm thinking $18.99 is the sweet spot and that we'll hit that in the not too distant future. (6 months)
 
There you have it, my wacky predictions for the coming first part of the year. What do you think?

Disclaimer: these predictions are based purely on my hunches and accumulation of publicly available knowledge, not on insider information or any other type of institutional knowledge. Full disclosure: RIM is an ImpactWatch client.

Many people are buzzing about how snazzy 2008 presidential campaign sites are with their slick designs, multimedia content, and social networking tools, but how many campaigns are taking advantage of Internet text ads?

Awhile ago I took a snapshot at who are buying Google text ads for searches for both democrats and republicans presidential candidates and found that only Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Barack Obama bought ads for these searches.  Wired has taken a broader look at presidential campaign text ads in an article today. 

Sarah Lai Stirland reports that only the McCain and Mitt Romney campaigns are buying ads for issue and news searches. 

Text ads are incredibly useful since they are much cheaper than other forms of advertising, and since they're based on what people actually search for, organizations that use these ads can target their advertising dollars towards people they can better identify as a likely customer, voter, etc.

Richard Ball, founder of Baltimore based search engine marketing firm Apogee Web Consulting, blogged and was subsequently quoted by Wired that: 

For less than the cost of postage, a presidential candidate could have acquired a visitor to their election campaign website. How much would a direct-mail advertising campaign have cost to acquire 1,820 visitors to their site? How much would a radio or TV or print-ad campaign have cost to generate that much interest?

Stirland's article concludes with the fact that the vast majority of presidential campaigns have ignored Internet text ads and are likely missing out on a great campaign resource.  She also quotes Eric Frenchman, political Internet marketing strategist at Connell Donatelli in Washington, D.C, as saying that since people are interested in news and issues candidates should advertise on keywords that they take clear, strong stances on in hopes of luring people to their web sites.  Frenchman is a good guy to talk to since Connell Donatelli is managing McCain's on-line advertising.

As people wonder how political campaigns — perhaps even the candidates themselves — will further embrace social media tools like using videos and social networks to better connect with individuals in upcoming elections, maybe they'll also use text ads more to connect with a broader, yet targeted, crowd.

The Bivings Group's Fred Thompson Disclosure

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?   

The LA Times had a story last week about companies abandoning their presences on Second Life due to poor return on investment. From the sound of things, many companies that have stayed may not be long for the world:

But the sites of many of the companies remaining in Second Life are empty. During a recent in-world visit, Best Buy Co.’s Geek Squad Island was devoid of visitors and the virtual staff that was supposed to be online.

The schedule of events on Sun Microsystems Inc.’s site was blank, and the green landscape of Dell Island was deserted. Signs posted on the window of the empty American Apparel store said it had closed up shop.

The story gets to the heart of the matter when it says, “most firms were more interested in the publicity they received from their ties with Second Life than in the digital world itself.”

You see this all the time. Companies launch MySpace pages or Twitter accounts or iPhone versions with no rationale beyond getting a short term media hit. After the buzz dies down it becomes pretty clear that the emperor has no clothes.

I’d advise a more measured approach to these things. Companies that take the time to do some research and understand the culture of the communities they participate in will have a lot more success long term than those that dive in head first in search of a few press clips.

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!

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.

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.

Not everyone who reads blogs comments on posts or writes their own blogs.  That should not surprise anyone.  In fact, according to Jackob Nielsen's Participation Inequity: Encouraging More Users to Contribute post from last October, only about 5% of Internet users blog. (Hat tip: Suw Charman)

Nielsen explains that "In most online communities, (more…)

Today Cyberjournalist points to a feature on the Washington Post website called Local Explorer. Cyberjournalist summarizes:

You can map information on recent area home sales, crime incidents, schools, fire and police stations, restaurants, bars, hospitals, movie theaters and more. Local Explorer also has facts and figures, local news, classifieds and upcoming events that will help take users further inside area communities.

This is one of the better Google Maps mashups I’ve seen. If you don’t live in the DC area, click here to see the results for zip code 20007 (our office zip).

Gary Bivings and I attended last week’s Politics Online Conference here in DC. Here are some (completely personally biased) highlights from one of my conference favorite panels. Over the week I’ll be posting other things I thought were interesting from some of the other panels I attended at the conference.

Presence in Second Life by politicians has limited effect within Second Life but gets great mainstream coverage. Jerome Armstrong, founder of the liberal blog MyDD and consultant for Mark Warner’s Forward Together PAC said that Warner’s virtual presence in Second Life was not well received at all by political bloggers, but very well received by non-political bloggers, and also received lots of good mainstream press coverage.
My thoughts: Politicians in Second Life has always seemed gimmicky to me. As the novelty of a politician being in Second Life wears off (and it’s wearing off quickly) so will the resulting mainstream coverage.

Campaigns are having big online-only events. Patrick Ruffini , previous eCampaign director for the RNC and currently an online strategy adviser to Mayor Giuliani, suggested that, unlike previous in campaign cycles, ’08 Campaigns are using the web to make major announcements. By having some big events offline and other big events online, the impact of the online event expands beyond the political blogosphere where a candidate. For example Hillary Clinton can have a big online event and in doing so reach out beyond the political blogosphere where she’s not particularly well received (at the moment).
My thoughts: Great observations – I’ll be watching big online announcements with this perspective from now on.

“Flooding the Zone.” Chuck DeFeo, General Manager of conservative hangout TownHall.com fame and eCampaign Manager for Bush-Cheney ‘04, suggested that politicians need to react quickly to bad press, even if it’s in the form of unfavorable YouTube videos. After the Allen Macaca incident, someone searching YouTube for “Macaca” should have found lots of pro-Allen stuff instead of just the Macaca video. DeFeo calls overtaking the negative message with a positive message “Flooding the zone”.
My thoughts: Love the term – campaigns can and should prepare for the worst to happen in new media because when it takes off it will take off virally and like a rocket. Incidentally, everyone at the conference was talking about Macaca and future Macaca moments, but I’ll have more on that in another post.

YouTube is a massive video focus group. Chuck DeFeo suggests that with YouTube campaigns have a huge focus group to help them find out “what’s going to pop and what’s not.”
My thoughts: Chuck is right and campaigns will begin to use YouTube to “test the waters” routinely.

Leverage supporters to be experimental for a campaign. While the general consensus was that politics on the web is not just about raising money and that web campaigns need freedom from the top in order to succeed, Chuck DeFeo noted that “Campaigns are not good R&D environments”. Joe Trippi , Howard Dean’s campaign guru in ’04, agreed but suggested instead that, “Campaigns need to provide tools for supporters to be experimental.”
My thoughts: Trippi is right and campaigns can be good R&D environments if it isn’t the campaign itself doing the R&D but rather the supporters – organize and leverage campaign supporters properly and give them the tools they need to make the experimentation happen. While campaigns are by nature super-cautious, I think things will end up going in this direction sooner or later, but maybe not in a big way in this cycle.

Prediction: the end of big money? Joe Trippi, credited with helping Dean raise more money than any other Democratic presidential campaign in history, thinks that online fundraising is going to take over altogether. “One of the candidates will hit a home run with fundraising in a big way and take over big money and PAC’s.” One message in one debate that appeals to a large grassroots contingency “can totally trip over and change politics.” He thinks it will happen in this cycle.
My thoughts: Either way, we’re definitely in for a great online ride in this campaign cycle.

A few weeks ago, Gary asked me to obtain some "academic" literature on new PR tactics.  I was able to find some interesting articles through my university library that were both relevant and informative.

While these articles were helpful, Gary was disheartened to realize that he couldn't really do anything with them.  Wanting to share these great articles and studies with some of our clients and colleagues, it was frustrating to not be able to link to these articles directly on the Web.

Currently, academia is a super-protected industry, with scholarly journals requiring prohibitively expensive membership/subscription fees, and with articles hidden behind registration walls, firewalls, library access permission, and other types of blockades.

What's the point of having all this great information if it can't be shared?

(more…)

I have an idea for The Economist Group, which has assigned six staffers from various divisions to develop an innovative web based product for the company that can pull content from any of its properties.  They're blogging about their progress on the Project Red Stripe blog and soliciting ideas from the outside world.  Since this group is developing an Internet based product, it better take advantage of what the web has to offer when it comes to interactive features.  My idea is a super-sized Big Mac Index section with community and interactive features that personalizes and expands the scope of the index. 

The Big Mac Index is an understandable way to present currency exchange-rate differences around the world since a Big Mac is a fast food item that is virtually the same to many of us.  Thus, it is simple to understand that Argentina's economy is relatively weak compared to the United States' economy if the Big Mac is significantly cheaper in Buenos Aires than it is in Boise. 

That seems simple enough, but why not flesh it out more? 

(more…)