The Starbucks logo switch that had Christian groups up in arms was only the first in a line of logo switches to make the Starbucks coffee brand appeal as a luxury item.  Next in line: Ethiopia.

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Tricked you with the headline up there, didn’t I? Yes I did. There’s nothing wrong with John McCain’s third redesign. It’s just bluer than before with more right angles and stars. It is a nice upgrade from the last version which was not so bad either. McCain’s team seems to have Obama-ed this version up just a bit with the blues, the positive tone, the structure …in fact, look at this (click on image to see full picture).

It’s not a direct rip off by any stretch, but the McCain design team has taken a look at the competition and let’s leave it at that. I would (and have) done the same. Or worse. Here are some first impressions on the latest effort:

The silver star logo remains the branding for McCain and that Republican sans serif font style is right there with it. They’ve now added the url below it to be helpful. Or forceful. Something.

Like most modern political sites, the main focus is on a centrally located media section. McCain’s site is no different and does a nice job of incorporating this into the design of the home page. The video that clearly needs to be pushed is a Four Year Vision piece that once clicked reveals a vision of 2013 where everything is squared away or something. The baritone voice-over made me sleepy but I was then revived by clicking on the colorful Cuban Independence link and asked to sign a petition, which I respectfully refused as I’m very busy today.

To the left of the big dance number is a rubic’s cube of banner ads that magically switch every 5 seconds, creating; 1) a cascading vertical selection of issues to click on and, 2) my left eye to twitch.

The right hand side is the usual Join the Team plea, but nicely and very cleanly laid out. The Action Items (I call them action items because I’m in the biz) below are pleasantly low key and not even numbered. When did that staple of political site design die out? Was I on vacation? It doesn’t matter, let’s move down to the sections no one reads, but everyone needs to put in their own site. News and Upcoming Events are given a lot of real estate and not gunked-up with any icons or thumbnails.

The page finishes nicely with some thumbnails of recent photos that expand smoothly within the browser window.

Overall a pretty decent overhaul. I appreciate that you can cruise through this site very quickly. Except for the crazy moving blocks on the left, the layout allows me to scan the page in seconds and decide where I want to go. This can’t be said of the last 2 McCain designs. On a side note I really enjoy the Parade of Stars background image they’ve chosen. I feel like Lou Rawls might be back there somewhere.

HubSpot is an Internet marketing company that helps company increase their visibility online.  As part of their marketing strategy, they have built an interesting tool that grades how visible your site is in search engines.  Stealing an idea from TechCrunch, I ran a quick report that compared the McCain and Obama websites.    According the the tool, both sites get A’s, with McCain scoring a a 98.7 and Obama a 95.  Below is the a snipped of part of the comparison chart (click to see full table). 

Here are a couple of other tidbits:

• According to the tool the Obama website is written on an Advanced/Doctoral reading level while McCain’s is written on an Secondary/High School level.
• Both sites have a Google Page Rank of 7. 
• Three articles from the Obama site have appeared on the homepage of Digg and the site has received a total of 9,764 diggs from users.  No story from the McCain site has reached the Digg homepage and his site has attracted a total of 203 diggs.
• Pages on Obama’s site have been bookmarked on del.icio.us 1,059 times to 168 for McCain. 

These links will probably expire, but you can view a copy of the McCain report here and the Obama report here. 

For the record, The Bivings Report scored 98.1. 

Last night, the McCain web team launched a graphic redesign of their campaign website (feature set looks more or less the same). I like the new look a lot and think it is a real improvement over the well done second iteration and depressing first version.  This is a very nice looking website.

While I appreciate the professionalism of the design, I can’t help but think that the way McCain’s site looks is sort of beside the point at this juncture in the game.  From the blog that isn’t really a blog to the phony social network to the poorly conceived blast emails, McCain’s biggest problem online is a top-down strategy that has made McCain distant presence on his own site. 

Patrick Ruffini summed things up pretty well in a post on TechPresident last week:

Good online strategy is simple: reflect the very best of your candidate offline. John McCain offline is transparent, accessible, and willing to answer any question. John McCain online is stilted and awkwardly asking me for money. There’s a fundamental disconnect.

I don’t think slapping a new coat of paint on their existing strategy is going to fix that problem.

What do you think of the new site?

Times change, and so should ImpactWatch.  After becoming interested in all the China/Olympic drama while researching for this post on The Bivings Report, I decided that it was time for a new, more topical demo.  Replacing our current Real Estate Demo is a 2008 Olympics Demo.  This one continues to show off the great features of ImpactWatch, but the articles contained within it now concern anything and everything about the upcoming Games.

This new demo tracks media favorability for both the general Olympics as well as the country of China, specifically.  It also tracks which topics are covered in the articles surrounding these games, everything from Burma and Tibet to the worry over China's air pollution.  OlympicsWatch does all of this while retaining the sleek and efficient design that has made ImpactWatch such a valuable resource for so many clients.  The analytics section of this new demo takes full advantage of our recently created graphing tool, so feel free to explore this very useful device as well.

To sign up for a weeklong trial of our new demo, click here to head over to the ImpactWatch official site.

I finally caved…I caved and bought a Wii.  Perhaps it was because I have not had a gaming system since the Nintendo 64, perhaps it was due to the overwhelming press circulating the rarity of finding one, or perhaps it was simply due to the fact that I have a housemate with a giant television, which is perfect for the Wii's motion sensing controls.  Regardless of the reason, I soon found that one of Wii's main selling points was a boldface lie.

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Since when did Alyssa Milano and Ethan Suplee hawk Klondike Bars? (more…)

I have been a Windows user since 3.x on a 33 MHz Packard Bell PC with 2 MB of video RAM, which at the time cost an arm and a leg and blew our Mac 2e out of the water (the video memory was later upgraded to a whopping 4 MB to run Rebel Assault II, a top priority in my life at the time – along with some legendary SCUMM-based Lucas Arts titles , a topic in itself for an entire post). Since then, I have stood witness to several Windows releases, from the industry-changing release of 95 to the flop of “Millenium Edition”.

Somewhere along the way, I fell in love with the philosophy of open source software and was the only FreeBSD desktop user that I knew, but the lack of universal support and the work that went into configuring a usable system (I admit – this was actually most of the appeal) always had me turning back to a Windows-based system.

Now fast-forward to this past April, when the open source blogosphere was ablaze with rantings and ravings about Ubuntu ’s “Hardy Heron” release. I had been an early adopter of Vista, ready to move on after having “eXPerienced” for what felt like an eternity.

Dozens of system crashes later, I had almost migrated back to XP several times – if I could only remember where I had put those disks. After a thorough investigation of Ubuntu’s feature set, and the instant attraction to Compiz Fusion’s eye candy , a friend and I decided to just go all in. A fresh burn of Hardy Heron later, and I was up and running.

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I will be the first to admit that I do not embrace new technology willingly.  A colleague of mine recently described me as someone who "talks like [he] is from this century, but uses gadgets like [he] is from the 16^th century."  And yes, perhaps I was a little too harsh on my good friend, the Microsoft Surface.  I did venture to a bar that housed the machines, and yes, I enjoyed aimlessly flicking virtual bubbles around while making idle small talk.  Ah, the future.

I preface this post with this admission because I am about to ‘go 20^th century' on another product, the Amazon Kindle.

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Earlier today news leaked out that the comment management system Disqus (background here) has enabled video commenting on sites that use the service through a partnership with Seesmic. Basically this means that people can post video comments in addition to regular old text comments in response to articles, blog posts, etc. You can see it in action here. Seesmic had previously released a plugin that enables video commenting on Wordpress blogs, and plans to release a plugin for Typepad and Movable Type as well.

When I first saw video commenting on blogs “in the wild” a few months back, I thought it was a novel idea . At this point though, I find them mostly annoying for a few reasons:

• When I’m using the web, I’m not always in a position where I can watch a video.  Sometimes I’m listening to music.  Sometimes I’m in a public place.  Sometimes I’m on a mobile phone. If part of the conversation is taking place via video, I will often miss it.  Many others will as well.
• It is much quicker for me to read a comment than to watch it.
• The use of video in commenting is usually unnecessary - in most cases the same point could be made just as well through text commenting.
• Video comments disrupt the flow of text comments.

Beyond the initial gee whiz moment, I don’t see how the value video commenting provides the end user in most cases. For me, the rise of video commenting is largely a case of people using video for using video’s sake.

If video commenting takes off and becomes ubiquitous in the coming years, I think the best practice will be to separate video comments from regular text ones, as YouTube does with video responses. This will allow people to have the latest toy on their site without disrupting the experience of people just interested in text comments.

After the debacle that was my use of Twitter to predict the outcome of American Idol, I decided to attempt redemption in the form of another online tool.  After doing some research, I realized that many fans of reality television were using grids made on Wikipedia to calculate statistics used for elimination predictions.  Statistics can be created for any show that uses a high-low-win system or a straight callout order system.  Donning my nerd cap, I delved into the world of reality television and Wikipedia articles to see if I could discover their true usability.

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Todd gave me a beta invite to the new bookmarking site Mento this morning.  He really likes it, and thinks that it is del.icio.us on steroids.  I agree.

More or less the sites are very similar in their core functionality — to bookmark sites with the potential to categorize and share them.  However, Mento has added a few bells and whistles.

While del.icio.us is much more spartan in its design (which isn't necessarily bad –compare Google to Yahoo!), Mento has a lot more graphics and more friendly user interface.  I personally don't mind a spartan site, but Mento is refreshing.  For those who are new to the bookmarking game, they probably would find Mento easier to use.

Another cool bell and whistle that Mento has added is the ability to get a customized screen shot (whole or partial) of a web page that one is bookmarking.  I must admit that this is way cool.  A picture is worth a thousand words, and bookmarking sites aren't made for tomes about links.  Further, it is easy to do.  The tool pops up in one's browser, and the instructions are very clear what to do.

Mento is also gracious enough to understand that we weren't born for the sole purpose of using it.  That's why it allows users to export links from it to other bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, and tumblr.  That's pretty generous.  Of course, can or will also export links to sites like Facebook, which makes perfect sense since bookmarking is a complementary activity to social networking.

If that's not good enough, Mento also enables you to filter the links that your connections can send you or that you'll see as you peruse their bookmarks.  For instance, if Todd tags something "battlestargalactica," I can choose not to see these links.  No offence meant, but I'm a Star Trek guy.  Likewise you can make sure that pages from a certain site are included in what you see.  That's pretty nifty.   

The site is still in beta — thus, a work-in-progress.  But it seems cool to me.  If you would like an invite to test the site, either leave a comment below or send us a direct message through The Bivings Group's Twitter page.

I posted a link on our Twitter account a few days back about Jim Brady from the Washington Post’s call for commenters on newspaper websites to post using their real names.  In doing away with anonymous commenting, he is hoping to improve the generally low level of discourse you find on many media sites.  Here is his justification:

I think part of the problem is that people aren’t held accountable on the Web.  People say things online they would never say when disagreeing with someone at the dinner table. I think heated debate is fine, but when there are (flame wars), many people won’t take part for fear they will be attacked and bashed over the head with the (Internet-equivalent) of a steel pipe.

I have mixed feelings about this.  On the one hand, I think there is a tradition of respecting anonymity on the Internet that has value, and I am generally opposed to putting up barriers that hinder discussion.  On the other hand, the comment sections on many newspaper website are completely broken and I think Brady’s solution would probably work.

Anyway, the whole issue got me thinking about steps I think media companies should take to improve their comments sections, short of requiring people to post using their real names.  Below are my ideas based on my experience in trying to manage active comments areas for a variety of clients (we don’t have a comment problem on our own site so we haven’t taken a lot of these steps here):

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If you own a computer and have a disposable income, chances are good that you have bought something via Amazon.com, a well-known site dedicated to being the Internet's largest store.  The site boasts many features, including discount prices, lists of recommendations for frequent users, and intuitive search features.  A past blog post on The Bivings Report highlights one of Amazon's recent user-friendly upgrades.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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