The Bivings Report is built in Wordpress, which comes with a robust commenting system out of the box. Due to this, I’ve very rarely looked at third party commenting systems like Haloscan. I haven’t really had a comment problem so there was no need to experiment with these third party tools.

But I recently set up a personal blog on Tumblr, which does not have commenting built in due to its reliance on reblogging instead (which is cool). I wanted people to be able to comment on my blog so I spent the ten minutes it takes to integrate Tumblr with the third-party tool Disqus. (Check out Fred Wilson (A VC) or Dave Winer’s blog for good examples of the tool in action).

Here is a quick breakdown of what I see as the pros and cons of Disqus after playing with it for a few months: (more…)

Version 6 of the open source Content Management System, Drupal, was released last week. We are really excited about this release, as we specialize in Drupal and have been playing with the beta releases of this version for many months now. Version 6 represents a significant step forward for Drupal. You can see a breakdown of all the new features here.

Since The Bivings Group builds a lot of websites that feature multiple languages, we are particularly excited by advances in Drupal’s language support. In previous versions of Drupal, to run websites in multiple languages you pretty much had to hack into the Drupal code and make it work using duct tape. It wasn’t pretty. Drupal 6 is the first release to natively handle multiple languages. The new release allows for:

• On the fly creation of multiple versions of the site in different language, including custom URLs.
• The ability for site visitors to set language preferences themselves, so they can control what language the site is in when visiting.
• Support for both left to right and right to left languages out of the box.
• Most importantly, the ability to manage pieces of content in multiple languages.

This last point is particularly important. Below is a quick breakdown of how this works with screenshots taking from a video demo by birdmanx35.

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In the past we have praised those like Adrian Holovaty who use databases for news reporting.  Holovaty left his job at The Washington Post several months ago to work on a hyperlocal site called EveryBlock. 

It launched several days ago with database driven hyperlocal news and information reporting for Chicago, New York City, and San Francisco.  To report information about specific neighborhoods it culls data from other sources and presents it in a logical manner. 

For instance, it pulls pictures from flickr with geographical tagging and groups them by neighborhood.  Check out photos from Tribeca in New York.  In addition to photos it pulls data from sites like Yelp for restaurant reviews and local government sites for restaurant violation information.  Other information includes: crime reports, graffiti, lost and found listings, and news articles. 

You can see a screen shot below of a business review from Yelp on a map in New York.

Also, for those who use craigslist to find those missed connections (someone whom you saw on the train and are attracted to but didn't have a chance to even talk to), EveryBlock even collects this data and presents it in list or map form. 

The genius of the site is not that it collects this data, but it organizes it in a way that people should find useful.  People can search for multiple items by neighborhood for all this information in one place instead of having to visit multiple sites.  This is much more exciting and user friendly than your typical database.

Here at The Bivings Group we're fans of Adrian Holovaty; he has developed fascinating on-line database news features for news sites like for The Washington Post.  Today, upon recieving a grant from the Knight Foundation that he'll use to develop an innovative site at EveryBlock that will make local news more useful.  He's leaving the Post to pursue this venture.

Another Knight Foundation receipent is (more…)

I’ve been telling anyone that would listen that someone should comb through the FEC reports and figure out how much Presidential campaigns paid their web vendors during the first quarter. I did this because I wanted to know and was too lazy to do it myself.

Shira Toeplitz from Hotline dove in and wrote the story. She did an awesome job.

While interesting, as a campaign web vendor myself I find the data difficult to interpret because it is hard to know what the fees are really for. Here are some things to consider (FEC experts please correct mistakes): (more…)

The other day I stumbled across a YouTube video of pioneering journalists/programmer Adrian Holovaty playing the MacGyver theme song on guitar. (The video is on the YouTube homepage and has been viewed 750,000+ times). Seeing the video prompted me to head over to his site for the first time in awhile.

For the uninitiated, Holovaty developed the Django web framework while working at the Lawrence Journal-World, built an innovative online database of crime patterns in Chicago and currently works as editor of editorial innovations at Washingtonpost-Newsweek Interactive. He has a skill set that is unique for the journalism profession (how many journalists do you know that have written a web framework?).

Rifling through his site, Holovaty has done some awesome work at the Post. (more…)

According to Wikipedia, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a tool that “enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do.” It enables companies and individuals to posts tasks and set an amount they are willing to pay for the tasks completion. Qualified users can then scan these tasks and complete them at their leisure to stave off boredom or to make a little money.

The tasks can be manually posted by individual. Say if you want to pay someone to write a blog post or translate a document for you on a one off basis. Or you can tap into Mechanical Turk’s API and automatically have your computer program interact with MTurk. This allows companies to efficiently send requests to Mechanical Turk and fetch the data back. Companies are using MTurk in this way for tasks like the creation of transcripts of speeches and podcasts. You can see some success story here.

Ajit and I have been playing with Mechanical Turk a bit the last few days as we are thinking of tapping into it for one of our projects using the MTurk API. I think there is a lot of potential here.

In reviewing the interface I noticed a lot of people asking folks to write blog posts. Out of curiosity, I decided to use the service to pay three people $1 each to write a review of the Washington Post’s recent foray into video journalism, On Being.

Below are the three reviews so you can judge the quality yourself.

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This is one of those weeks where I've got more material than time.  So here are some quick thoughts on some things that have been floating around my browser this week.

(1) A new startup launched this week called Grand Central.  According to Life Hacker, Grand Central "lets you consolidate all of your phone numbers into one number, meaning someone can call you on your GrandCentral phone number and all of your phones (cell phone, work phone, home phone) will ring."  That's just sort of the starting point with this service too.  Sounds awesome.  Looking forward to giving it a try. 

(2) There is an interesting post on Forever Geek that debunks the Myspace claim to have 100 million users.  It puts the number of actual users at around 43 million.  Not sure about the methodology, but there is no doubt in my mind that that 100 million number is bogus.

(3) Saw an interesting post entitled 10 Things that will Make or Break Your Website.  Best advice comes in the first bullet: "EASY is the most important feature of any website, web app, or program."

(4) The Wall Street Journal published a fascinating article on the email overload problem that afflicts most of us.  Great read for anyone that feels like a slave to their inbox most days. 

(5) Michael Kinsley wrote a great article for Time Magazine this week called Do Newspapers Have a Future?  Money quote: "Newspapers on paper are on the way out. Whether newspaper companies are on the way out too depends."  IMO, the key to survival is figuring out how to use the Internet properly.  We'll continue to beat that particular drum. 

(6) Mark Warner got a lot of attention for appearing in Second Life a few months back.  We wrote about it.  The appearance was short and he didn't take any quesitons from the audience, saying he would come back for a full townhall in late September/early October.  Did they ever schedule this?  I haven't heard a peep about it since the initial burst of coverage.

If you have a thing for cool graphs and trivial information, you might want to check out IVillage's Baby Name Voyager.  This Java-enhanced graph displays alphabetically the 1,000 most popular names for Americans since the 1880s.  Any name that ever made into the top 1,000 is on this list, and you can see in what year the name was most popular, as well as each name's highest rank.  

Take a look at this screenshot.

Each "stripe" on the graph represents one name.  The thickness of the stripe indicates the name's popularity, and the color of the stripe indicates not only whether the name is for boys or girls, but also the name's popularity in 2005. As you scroll over each stripe on the graph, all the corresponding name is highlighted with a text box showing the name's popularity in a certain decade. (more…)

We’re looking for programmers to help with the development of ImpactWatch, Graphhopper and our other internal products.  Job description is below.  If you are interested send an email with your resume to jobs@bivings.com. 

Don’t usually post jobs to our blog, but we figured why not.

————————————

PHP Programmer

Washington, DC-based Internet communications firm seeking experienced and skilled PHP/MySQL programmers for development of company’s suite of web-based products.

Minimum 3 years of PHP web development experience. Strong knowledge of relational databases and database design required. Knowledge of PERL, JavaScript, AJAX, and/or SQL a plus. Undergraduate degree required, preferably in computer science.

No overseas inquiries. Compensation commensurate with skills and experience.

www.bivings.com

For those of you interested in the whole "Did Lieberman's Website Get Hacked" mystery, TPMuckraker.com has a pretty geeky article about the hosting setup of Lieberman's host provider and another where they interview Lieberman's techies about the situation.  TBG was interviewed in the one about Lieberman's technical setup  (thanks to our developers for helping me pull together answers). 

I hope they find whoever did this (assuming they got hacked) and punish them appropriately.  No place for this sort of nonsense.

To follow up on Todd’s post below, I went to Google Finance and typed in HP, looking for the stock activity and news for the Hewlett-Packard Company. Look what I got.

1. Stock graph is for the contract oil driller Helmerich & Payne, but the news items on the right are about Hewlett-Packard (HP). And some of the stock data points (captial letters) correspond to Google HP articles. Obviously bogus.

2. I made the mistake of thinking HP was the stock symbol for Hewlett-Packard. It’s HPQ. Google made the mistake of thinking the abbreviation, HP, was the oil drilling company (which it could be).

3. And to add to the silliness even further, Todd’s blog post made it to the #2 spot on the Google Finance page for Toyota (see bottom right.)

4. Getting names right is very hard. Aliases, abbreviations, mispelling, etc. In this connected world, shared vocabularies, meaning and context really do matter. Otherwise there’s all sorts of nonsense, as displayed on Google Finance.

Once again, Microsoft delays the shipping date for Windows Vista. Is anyone even paying attention? A quick poke through the first few features mentioned on the marketing site is underwhelming. The interface has some nice visual effects, but it isn’t fundamentally different from what we’ve seen over the last decade.

An article in the Washington Post mentions the delay, as well as the opportunity for Apple to gain market share with their new Intel based machines. What the article doesn’t mention is the underlying trend that people are moving towards the web as their platform. Operating systems are becoming less important.

For instance, websites like Writely allow you do about 70-80% of what you can do in Microsoft Word from any computer. You can be using Windows, MacOS, Linux, or any operating system that can support a web browser capable of displaying the Writely interface. Suddenly, not only is the operating system inconsequential, but the device you use is as well.

This is a boon for programmers writing business software. Conceivably, web based interfaces allow us to write applications that can be quickly adapted for new gadgets. We don’t have to change programming tools or environments every time something new surfaces, allowing us to hone our skills for the web platform and to reuse software in many different places.

Earlier this year, The Bivings Group went looking for a better internal management tool. Spreadsheets, email and a tired and clunky intranet weren’t working. Weekly staff meetings were basically recitals of what got done the prior week and what was on the plate for the coming week. We wanted a way to focus instead on bigger things, to talk about what was new, and how we could have more fun.

We found one. It’s called a wiki, and is the same piece of software that drives the free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Wiki is short for the Hawaiian “wiki-wiki” meaning “quick.” We downloaded the free software, installed it one of servers, and a small group got it up and running. You do have to learn a bit of wiki-ese, and get used to a few idiosyncrasies, but it’s a pretty powerful and easy-to-use way to add and edit content collectively.

We now use it to set priorities, keep track of every project, and even do some software bug tracking. Now everyone knows what everyone else is doing, and what the firm as a whole is up to.

Staff meeting are still too long, but not half as boring, at least most of the time. We even use it to manage our large client relationships and have promoted the use of wikis with partners.

There’s been a lot of internal talk here at The Bivings Group regarding the use of Ajax and the idea of Web 2.0, the second generation of web applications.

I came across a great article and subsequent conversation on the use of new web technologies and web interface design in general. It talks about how there is still a lot of improvement to be made in terms of web application interface design (as opposed to website interface design) and how new technology has rarely contributed to that. Here is an excerpt that talks about how the real reason Google Maps has the success it has is not because of its use of Ajax, but because of the developers’ focus on application usability:

“Google Maps took off like a rocket, because their competitors, despite having five, six (or more) years lead on them, had wretched interfaces. [...] Google cleans up because they find a market where the current market leaders have a great idea, maybe even great technology, but provide a lousy user experience.”

Basically Google is one of the few companies that develop web applications that have learned how to selectively harness old and new web technology to its full potential.

As a science, web application usability is still very much in its infancy. Successful web application developers should be focusing their time and energy on application design much more than on applying new web application technologies. The net end result is a much better and well thought out product.

Technorati Tags: Technology Development Web 2.0 Usability Web