Recently, I was considering trading in my broken iPod for another type of MP3 player…that is; until I ran across an article from Wired stating that I'd better hold on to at least one Apple product.

According to InStat, by 2012, 40% of all music purchased is going to come from digital music downloads.  Most impressively, the vast majority of those downloads come from Apple iTunes.  Almost 30% of the computers in the world have the download software, according to Digital Music News.

I personally buy nearly all of my music through iTunes.  For me, it seems easy, safe, and quick.  I like the fact that I can purchase a single song from an album, and the fact that an entire album on iTunes is typically less expensive than a CD.  Do I hate the fact that Apple controls yet another aspect of the computer market? Yes.  Will that hatred stop me from downloading the latest free single of the week? No.

It will be interesting to see if these predictions from InStat and Wired are correct.  I would like to also predict that by 2012, Apple will have released another five ‘upgrades' to the design of the iPod.

If you've got a computer, you know what YouTube is.  In fact, most people, including myself, have uploaded videos to YouTube at one point or another until our accounts have inevitably been suspended.  It's the circle of life on the Internet, and I am very pleased with it.  Without YouTube after all, I would be unable to watch my guilty pleasure, America's Next Top Model.

What's the bad news about YouTube?  Well, the videos that are uploaded are typically of lesser quality.  In fact, the most common complaint that you will see on the video comment sections is about the quality.  In reply, most users will explain that "something" happened to their video during the upload process.  There is a hack to be able to view high quality version of videos, but soon, that hack will hopefully be rendered useless.

YouTube has finally announced all users have the option of watching some videos in higher quality. A blog post on their site claims they're slowly integrating this new feature, and videos uploaded in the proper format will be the first to be available in high quality. The rest of the library will soon follow, with any luck.

Simply go into your user account and select the option: "always show me higher quality when available." High speed Internet is going to work best, because otherwise the videos may suffer from lag time.  Nobody likes lag time.

I have been waiting for this feature for a long time.  Finally, my prayers have been answered, and I will soon be able to watch YouTubeHD.  There are enough capital letters in that word to make anyone excited.

One trend to watch this year is the boom in well produced, niche video blogs.  The children of Rocketboom. 

My favorite example is Wallstrip, a daily video blog that takes an in depth look at a hot stock each day from a sort of layman’s perspective.  Using humor, they try to explain in real world terms why a stock is doing so well.

I think it is terrific.

To give you a taste, following is a recent show in which a bunch of venture capitalists race to see who is the most proficient on a Blackberry.  Most of the shows are a bit more informational than this one, but it gives you a taste of Wallstrip’s tone. 

On a side note, I think it is just a matter of time before someone does this for the political scene in DC. I’m looking forward to it and I hope it is as good as Wallstrip.

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.

Mark Glaser of the PBS blog MediaShift gave our newspaper study a nice shoutout today.  Here's an excerpt from the article he wrote about us:

"Though newspaper websites have been around for a decade, they’ve often been slow to innovate, and have been mainly used for “shovelware” — repurposing the same print stories online. But now, times are changing, and newspapers are perking up and realizing they’re going to have to do more online if they want to compete with the TV network and cable news sites, international newspaper sites, and aggregators such as Yahoo and Google."

I really like Mark's "shovelware" terminology.  Despite newspapers' use of Web 2.0 and their innovations, much of the online content is similar to that of the print content.  Thereis even one newspaper, the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, whose website is based on an electronic copy of the print newspaper. 

So thanks again to Mark for the great article!

After finishing our study of America's top 100 newspapers and their use of the Web, I took a closer at the top 20 most circulated papers and tried to pick a few favorites. To be honest, this was a difficult task. Most newspaper websites are adequate and have similar formats. The differences lie in content, ease of navigation, and Web offerings.

For example, the website template used by the Philadelphia Enquirer was also used by the Miami Herald, the Kansas City Star, The San Jose Mercury News, and several others. There were a handful of other templates that several newspapers used, including that used by the NJ Star Ledger and the Michigan Grand Rapids Press. This template was quite common among the top 100 US papers.

To find the overall best Web experience, go to the New York Times website (#3 on our list of most-circulated papers). It's easy to navigate, and interactive features such as blogs and podcasts are extremely easy to find. They also have a wide selection of podcasts to choose from. However, that experience does not come without a price. Users have to register to read New York Times articles online. While basic registration is free, it does not let readers to view all the site's content. In order to gain access to everything the site has to offer, users have to sign up for Times Select for $50/year. Because of this, I couldn't pick the NYT website as my winner.

Maybe I'm biased because I live in Washington DC, but my vote for the best newspaper website goes to the Washington Post. They have informative content, a network of blogs, several podcasts, and another feature that I didn't notice on many other newspaper site. Next to every article there is a box labeled "Who's Blogging?", with Technorati links to the most popular bloggers who blogged about that particular Washington Post article. After the Post's debacle with comments earlier this year, this seems like a good way to encourage interactivity on the site without leaving the site open to comments that need to be moderated.

For the best blog network, check out the Boston Globe. They have the largest selection of blogs out of the top 100 newspapers hands down. They have a series of 28 reporter blogs, including several different news blogs, an individual blog for every area sports team, arts and entertainment, job openings, and others. In addition to Globe reporter blogs, they also offer a long list of other popular Boston-area blogs. Definitely worth a peek.

If forums/message boards is more your speed, you definitely need to visit the NJ Star Ledger's website. Kind of a dark horse at #17 on our list of 100 papers, this paper's overall website is nothing out of the ordinary. But, it has a massive series of forums that covers everything from high school sports to local news to, believe it or not, pets. I read some recent posts on a few of the forums, all of which seem popular, and the discussions got pretty heated…especially for high school sports.

For podcasts, check out the Arizona Republic. They have 21 podcasts listed on their site, which was the most that I noticed next to the New York Times.

I also found it noteworthy that the otherwise popular New York Daily News and New York Post (#6 and #7 on our list of 100 papers, respectively) seemed to be sub-par in their Web offerings. Neither site has any Web features to speak of, and their vertical, oversized picture strategy doesn't translate well to the Web. It was interesting to see how the same features that make these papers so popular in print are the same features that made them seem tabloid-y and cheesy on the Web.

The best video blog I’ve seen is The Show, which is produced every weekday by Ze Frank, a designer/performance artist who gained Internet fame a few years back with the Flash piece, How to Dance Properly. The Show is a weird blend of news commentary, personal observations and bathroom humor. I think it’s pretty fantastic and hilarious.

The Show also has some lessons to teach in how to use technology to build a community of users:

• A few episodes of The Show have been written entirely by viewers using a wiki, and then faithfully performed by Ze.
• Ze plays an ongoing chess match with viewers during his shows. Viewers use a wiki to discuss and reach consensus on their next move in the match.
• Ze launched an earth sandwich challenge and an ugly MySpace design contest to encourage participation by viewers (not going to try to explain here).

Anyway, The Show is worth checking out and is a great example of the kind of cool things people are doing with video blogs these days.

For the tens of people that are interested, we put together a podcast about the findings of our recent campaign study. In the podcast, Ajit Verghese interviews myself and Erin Teeling (who actually wrote the thing) about how 2006 Senate campaigns are using the Internet. We talk about which sites are good/bad, how candidates are using blogs and podcasts and what we expect to see from political campaigns in the future, among other things. Give it a listen if you’re interested or just a glutton for punishment.

 

 Campaign Study [27:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Yesterday, the Herald Tribune out of Florida published an article on the use of blogs and podcasts by FL gubernatorial candidates. I was interviewed for the piece and it includes a mention of our study on the use of the Internet by 2006 Senate candidates.

Not being from Florida, I haven’t looked at any of the gubernatorial websites from down there specifically. But the story identifies an amusing tendency by folks to congratulate themselves for blogging or producing podcasts. Folks seem to think they’ve accomplished something simply by going through the simple process of setting up a blog. I understand the compulsion.

But it’s important to know that anyone can have a blog or record a podcast. Just like anyone can buy a guitar or a set of drums. The real question to ask is can they actually play the damn thing?

In response to my post on politicians that podcast, a member of Congressman Jack Kingston (R-GA) staff left a comment pointing me to a blog entry on their site about new media tactics used by Republican House members. It sort of got me thinking: which politicians are most embracing Web 2.0? So, conducting no new research and working entirely from memory, here are the winners:

On the Republican side of the aisle, I think the winner is pretty clearly Rep. Kingston. The Kingston blog got a lot of attention for live blogging during the gunfire scare on the Hill a few weeks back. And here’s their own description about what they are up to:

“For our part, we have a true, interactive blog, and we also guest blog at RedState.com and PeachPundit. We also have a hidden video page for insiders, a podcast called the JackCast, and a flickr account for you to see and share multiple pics.”

I chose Rep. Kingston mostly because his blog reads like it’s written by real, living, breathing human beings and actually encourages discussion on issues.

On the Democrat side, I’d have to go with Utah Senate candidate Pete Ashdown. Not only does Ashdown blog and podcast himself, he actually took the time to personally comment on our blog here. Ashdown also has a wiki that he uses to collect feedback on issues and campaign tactics from supporters.

Lastly, Ashdown has posted a MySpace profile that he presumably uses to help him connect with young voters. Ashdown has clearly embraced the social spirit of Web 2.0.

Let me know if you think I’m neglecting somebody.

I was putting together a presentation today and as part of it I did a little research into politicians that podcast. What I found was semi-interesting (at least to me).

Here’s a quick list of the politicians that made the iTunes list of its 100 most popular politically-oriented podcasts:

(3) Senator Barack Obama (D-IL)
(14) General Wes Clark (D-??)
(30) Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI)
(33) Newt Gingrich (R-GA)
(51) Mark Warner (D-VA)
(59) Senator John Edwards (D-NC)
(62) Congressman Harold Ford Jr (D-TN)
(82) Congressman John Dingall (D-MI)
(86) Dick DeVos (R-MI)
(87) Senator Jon Cornyn (R-TX)
(94) Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY)
(97) Senator Bill Frist (R-TN)

Of these twelve politicians, seven (Clark, Feingold, Gingrich, Warner, Edwards, Clinton, Frist) have been mentioned as potential 2008 Presidential candidates. In addition, two (Ford, DeVos) are running for statewide office in their home states for the first time in 2006. Presumably the other three (Obama, Dingall, Cornyn) are either just really into podcasting or gearing up for future battles.

The most recent estimates I’ve seen show that only 1% of online households regularly listen to podcasts. And a study we performed recently found that 5% of 2006 Senate candidates are maintaining podcasts on their campaign websites.

But potential 2008 Presidential candidates seem to be diving in head first. Why? I’d guess that the 2008 hopefuls are podcasting in an effort to speak to the most active members of their Party: the bloggers who are obsessed enough to listen to this stuff. This is sign number 1,129 that the fight for the hearts and minds of political bloggers in 2008 is already on.