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? 

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Patrick Ruffini has a good post about an online poll he came across that asked what technology would have the biggest impact on the 2008 election cycle.  YouTube is winning the poll in a landslide.  Ruffini writes:

That’s a “fighting the last war” mentality. Ask the pundits to predict what will work in the next election cycle and they’ll repeat what worked in the last one.

I agree.  So in a fit of stupidity, I'm going to list some of the technologies I think will impact the 2008 cycle that haven't already been hyped/written about to death.  Technologies that haven't really hit the political world yet.  Chances are none of these will actually have an impact and it will be something else, but it is worth a shot.

(1) Ning (Niche Social Networks)

The social network creation tool Ning relauched yesterday and it looks very, very promising.  Ning allows users to create their own highly specialized social networks through a slick drag and drop interface.  As an example, a network has been created to draft Al Gore for another Presidential run.  Ning is not the only player in this field - there are tons.

The implications here are pretty obvious.  These tools will allow activists to create their own networks around the issues or candidates they are passionate about (they are essentially a more powerful version of Yahoo Groups).  Campaigns can build their own social networks without spending a fortune to build inferior tools.  Bloggers can build communities around their sites. 

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The buzz about Yahoo! Pipes is through the roof – as of writing number 6 on Technorati’s top searches list. This confirms what a lot of us here have been saying all along: people want to look at web content in a completely customized way and on the platform of their choice be it Netvibes (we're big fans), Windows Live, Newsgator or whatever. Yahoo! Pipes provides an assortment of interesting tools that allow people to manipulate of web content feeds to their liking, something I think is an increasingly clear a sign of things to come.

I’ve played around with Yahoo! Pipes a little over the last few days. One of the easy things you can do with it is to create a single RSS feed made up of multiple RSS feeds and filter the results based on keywords.

For those interested in receiving a single RSS feed with, say, news about a specific political candidate from multiple websites, Yahoo! Pipes makes this fairly easy to do. The alternative would be having to scour several RSS feeds looking for the nuggets you are interested in. I talked about an alternative method of doing this a few months ago, but Yahoo! Pipes makes this process a lot easier to manage.

Yahoo! Pipes has a lot of work to do in making the tool more user friendly and less buggy, but it’s a great start. In its current form it’s going to turn most users off of using it as you need to be pretty comfortable with basic programming logic to get started. It also lacks any sort of tutorial that makes things harder still, although it does provide a few usage examples.

Here’s an example of a feed I created using Yahoo! Pipes that pulls in news containing the keywords "Obama", "McCain", "Clinton", and "Giuliani" from Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Houston Chronicle, Reuters and Associated Press.

You can explore the actual Pipe I created to make that feed. If you've got some other interesting ideas on content filtering/customization or applications of how to use Yahoo! Pipes to customize web content feeds let us know in a comment!

I trashed the political social networking site Hotsoup pretty good back in October and immediately forgot about it and moved on with my life.

Then today I came across a post over at Fishbowl DC comparing Alexa traffic of Hotsoup to that of sites like DailyKos and Instapundit.  Hotsoup did not fair well. 

So I lowered the stakes and compared Hotsoup traffic to that of our modest blog, The Bivings Report, over the last three months.

That, my friends, is what you call a BAD SIGN.  Sure, Alexa data is unreliable, but after all that hype you'd think they'd be doing a lot better than our stupid company blog. 

Mashable summed up the problem pretty well in their launch review: "too many politicians, not enough programmers."

I was quoted yesterday in an article about the 2008 Presidential websites that ran in the New York Daily News. 

The article takes the position that the websites of the main Democrat contenders are ahead of those of the Republican top guns.  To this point, I'm quoted as saying:

"The Democrats have come out full force," said Todd Zeigler, vice president of the Bivings Group, an Internet communications firm. "Rudy Giuliani and John McCain have placeholder sites so far."

I think this is pretty much a statement of fact.  But it really doesn't mean much this early in the game.  Lets see where folks are in three months before passing judgement.

The other point I tried to make that didn't make it into the story is that how candidates are using the Internet is only part of the picture.  The other, more interesting, story that needs to be told is how regular people are using the Internet to change politics and politicians.

We've been a bit preoccupied here at TBG with the emergence of a new crop political websites.  Taking a break from politics,  here's a quick roundup of some nifty little Web apps that I found recently. 

Visual Page Rank

• Ever wonder what links get the most traffic on your webpage or blog?  When you type your URL into Visual page rank, this tool shows your the Google PageRank for your site and all the links you provide.

TeleFlip

• This program allows you to send messages from a computer to any cell phone.  You just type in the recipient's cell phone number, followed by @teleflip.com, into any email program, then type a brief message.  The recipient gets your email as a text message.  I tried this out with my own cell phone, and it only took about 7 seconds for the message to reach my phone.

TagMaps

• This service combines Yahoo! Maps with Flickr.  Just type in a location and float your mouse over a spot on the map, and any Flickr pictures tagged with that location show up on the right hand side of the map.  Here's a search for Washington DC.  You can also embed TagMaps in your blog.

3-D Digg

• View and surf Digg stories in 3-D flash.  Honestly, I'm not exactly sure what the point of this is or how it works, but it is pretty cool nonetheless.

Shelfari

• Social networking meets books.  This sort of reminds me of the networking functionality on Netflix, only with books instead of movies.

iJigg

• Digg meets music.  On this site, you can listen to, vote on, and share songs, but don't expect to download them.  You can only listen on the iJigg site.

After the fifth book of the Harry Potter series was published, Francisca Solar decided JK Rowling's version of the story wasn't good enough.  She was so dissatisfied with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix that the then 21 year-old Chilean journalism student decided to write her own "fanfiction" sequel.  Entitled Harry Potter y el Ocaso de los Altos Elfos (Harry Potter and the Decline of the High Elves), Solar published her 756 page novel on FanFiction.net.  According to the BBC, Solar's story was viewed over 80,000 times and received positive reviews from all over the world:

"When I read the fifth book, I was so disappointed - I'm a very critical reader, and I'm a huge fan, so the expectation of this fifth book was great," Solar said. "I took the principal characters and I did a story that is more rich than Rowling's story, because you can have access to the thoughts and feelings of all of the characters…Many people from all around the world have written to me, from the US, from the UK, from Asia," she said. "All these people wrote to me about the fanfic and said they liked it more than the official sixth book (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince)."

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This weekend, Todd mentioned that Time Magazine named "You" the  person of the year.  And by "You", Time means, me, you, us, and them: all the bloggers, You-Tubers, Facebookers, and everyone else that has helped to make the Web and the world of cyber-journalism what it is today. 

I think this was a very interesting choice on the part of the magazine, whose persons of the year are typically incredibly high-profile and mainstream individuals who have had a profound effect on the general public.  As an example, here are some examples of Time’s past Persons of the Year:

• 2005: Bill Gates, Bono, Melinda Gates
• 2004: President George W. Bush (again)
• 2003: The American Soldier
• 2002: "Whistleblowers" Sherron Watkins (Enron), Colleen Rowley (FBI), and Cynthia Cooper (WorldCom)
• 2001: Rudy Giuliani
• 2000: President George W. Bush
• 1999: Albert Einstein
• 1998: Ken Starr and Bill Clinton

Choosing the American cyber-junkie as the person of the year seems like a role reversal: instead of choosing the people that affected the lives of everyday Americans, Time chose the everyday Americans that affected the lives of mainstream celebrities.  This in itself is a testament to how bloggers and citizen journalists have affected ordinary media.

We all know how YouTube and blogs have affected political campaigns and the traditional print media.  But have we ever stopped to think where we would be without Web 2.0?

I think the writers at Time hit the nail on the head when they said:

We’re ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.

That’s what the blogosphere is all about.  No longer do Americans want to accept everything they are fed by the media.  Now, we can decide what’s important, and, thanks to the Internet, we have the tools to make a difference.

I also find it interesting that Time, the nation’s 8th largest magazine, cited its prime competitor as the most notable person of the year.  Is this mere flattery, or does the publication realizes that it needs the blogosphere to survive? 

So who is going to be 2007’s Person of the Year?  It would be great to see the Web editor of a major publication, like the New York Times, nominated for opening its website to Web 2.0 and citizen journalists.  In 2008, it would be great to see a victorious politician who used grassroots Web support to win an election.  Likely? Maybe not.  But a blogger can dream, right?  What’s your prediction?

The Society for New Communications Review hosted their Inaugural Symposium and Gala last Wednesday and Thursday in Boston. I attended and am happy to report that your favorite blog, The Bivings Report, won SNCR's coveted Award of Merit in the Business category ! It is a great feeling to be honored by one's peers, particularly on a team effort like our blog.

SNCR followed their awards and anniversary ceremony with a really interesting symposium on, you guessed it, new communications. Highlights, extremely biased my own by personal and professional interests, are below:

• Paul Gillin gave an interesting summary comparing blogs and social media to traditional media.

New media: Outsource everything, leverage free content, involve the community, go after niche markets, market virally, low overhead, few staff, new web creating a robust set of operating principles, little to no barriers to entry.

Old media: Large infrastructure, supported by very expensive advertising, increasingly relies on blogosphere for niche news content, broader markets, subjective editorial decision-making necessary, significant barriers to entry.

If you want to dive really deep into this sort of thing you might want to check out Paul Gillin's book, The New Influencers when it's published early next year. His study comparing new media to old, was quite compelling, and was the first time I had heard so many things that I've come to take for granted strung together in such a logical way.

• SNCR had a panel of executives from IBM, EDS and Novell discussing blogging a la corporate. Topics included policies and monitoring of employees blogging publicly, internal behind-the-firewall corporate blogging successes and policies, brainstorming via blogs, and public blogging in highly regulated environments. Of particular interest to me was the different ways in which blogs were being leveraged internally in organizations, and the new corporate challenges that blogs are giving corporate communications and PR professionals.
   
• I met with Ted Shelton, CEO of Personal Bee, and one of the sponsors of the event, who was kind enough to give me a personal presentation of his new news aggregator. It's got some great ideas — if you can imagine a categorized feed aggregator, where the categories are created and added to socially, with the results presented in a combination of tag clouds and meme-type groupings then you get the idea. The interface is really slick, and is one of the coolest news products I've seen lately. Anyone interested in RSS feeds or news aggregators should definitely check it out. We might have a review on that one for you soon so stay posted…
   
• A panel of university communications executives explained how they had all tried to leverage student blogging as a recruitment tool with varying degrees of success. While corporate communicators can hammer blogging policies home, this panel reported having a hard time dealing with the transparent nature of blogs and trying to keep the image of their university intact.

• There was a discussion on selling the idea of blogging to corporations and the challenges involved there.

• Finally, there was a discussion on the use of copyrighted music in podcasts and the legal implications of doing so. It seems that the jury is still out on this one, but if you podcast, I would strongly advise against using copyrighted work as part of your podcast without consent.

SNCR will be posting the individual panelist findings and the case studies of the other award winners if you're interested in reading more about them. I can't seem to find them online yet, but will post a brief entry when they're up. I had a great time and would strongly encourage other web communicators to check out their next symposium.

After 200 of Enron's internal emails were placed in the public domain by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioned (FERC) back in 2003, innovative software company Trampoline Systems created the Enron Explorer based on their own SONAR platform. In the Enron case, SONAR was able to illustrate existing social networks and information by analyzing email content from the entire organization during the 1999-2003 time period. Though the 200 emails that became part of the investigation are not representative of every part of the company, the sample does give insight into internal communications at the highest levels at Enron before, during and after its collapse.

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Xeni Jardin filed a report with Wired magazine to describe the new pressure placed on military bloggers, or "milbloggers" by the Department of Defense. Milblogs are written by active duty military personnel, with some directly reporting from the frontlines. Jardin notes that with the number of reporters in Iraq decreasing, milblogs are possibly the only way to get a firsthand account of ground operations in Iraq.

The controversy over blogging is thought to be representative of a culture clash between  Internet generation recruits and seasoned military personnel who are used to controlling information released to the public.

Currently, all milblogs are being reviewed by the Virginia National Guard for information thought to put military operations at greater risk. 

Currently, there are more than 1,500 active milbloggers. An annual convention (not affiliated with the DoD) is held in Washington, DC, to bring together military bloggers and explore blogging and compliance issues.

Check out Xeni's article here.