Our post a few weeks back about when to use Drupal and Wordpress generated a pretty good discussion in the comments and on other websites. Below are the best questions/comments and our responses.

(1) Amnon - Drupal Israel: “Did you notice any performance difference between the systems?”

Considering the functionality both of them possess and what both the platforms are trying to accomplish, we have found Wordpress is more resource intensive then Drupal. By default, Wordpress makes a ton of database queries and has no built-in caching. Drupal has caching out of the box. Poorly optimized Wordpress sites have actually become a sort of running joke on Digg, where Wordpress site after site that appears on the Digg homepage goes down within a few minutes due to overwhelmed database servers. However, those with a bit of experience can run Wordpress efficiently by using the WP-Cache plug-in and by optimizing your hosting set up. In addition, the brand new Wordpress 2.3 release supposedly includes some serious speed improvements. We are testing the new release now.

In addition, when implementing both Wordpress and Drupal you should be conservative in the plug-ins you use, as they can cause performance problems. This has been less of an issue for us in Drupal, mostly because Drupal has most of the functionality we need out of the box and we haven’t had to install a ton of plug-ins. (more…)

Google Maps has always been pretty easy to use to embed maps in your website. The tool has featured an open API since the beginning, which made it easy for folks with a fairly advanced understanding of the web to post maps on their site. But it still wasn’t dead simple

This all changed in April when Google launched My Maps, which allows users to create maps from a simple web-based interface that they can then embed into their own website using an iframe. My Maps made using Google Maps as simple as inserting YouTube code in a blog post. It even allows you to draw line between points on the map and insert HTML code in the little address pop up thing. You can view a sample map below that highlights the location of our office here.

I’ve personally been using this tool a lot in my work. For simple maps, this tool can save you a lot of time. Check it out if you haven’t already. (more…)

This week alone four co-workers/clients/friends have asked me how they can save videos off of YouTube to their local computer.  I’ve tried doing this a million different ways over the years and have settled on a pretty simple solution: I use Keepvid to do it. 

Keepvid allows you to grab a source FLV file from most video sharing sites (YouTube, Blip.tv, etc.) simply by copying the URL of the video you want into the site.  Keepvid then spits back a link to the source file, you right click and save as and you are on your way.  The only complication is that you have to change the extension of the file you save from “.html” to “.flv” after saving.  Works like charm, although I’ve mostly used it for YouTube videos.

My previous method was to use the Video Downloader extension in Firefox.  I found it to be somewhat buggy and annoying to use.  Keepvid is much simpler. 

If you are interested in diving into this topic in more depth, you should check out CNet’s breakdown of the different ways to save videos.

In my article last week on Wordpress vs Drupal, I gave some examples of sites built using those tools. Frankly, most of the examples I gave were sites we’d worked on. I figured I’d loop back and give examples of some exceptional sites I’ve come across (and didn’t work on) using each toolset. The goal is to show just how far you can push things using Drupal and Wordpress.

Drupal

(1) New York Observer

A full on newspaper website built using Drupal. (more…)

At this point, nearly all of the websites we build at The Bivings Group are either in Wordpress or Drupal. Sure, we build custom applications on occasion and sometimes do Flash work that really doesn’t fit in a Content Management System. But mostly we use Wordpress and Drupal.

Both are fantastic open source blogging platforms/content management systems with robust user communities. Both systems have their strengths and weaknesses. They are great alternatives to closed, paid platforms and much more cost effective than custom builds. As a web development shop, using Drupal and/or Wordpress allows us to focus our energies on design and strategy as opposed to reinventing the content management wheel.

After implementing a variety sites using both Wordpress and Drupal over the years, we’ve sort of developed our own unwritten rules as to when to use each platform.

Single Person / Group Blog (Use Wordpress)

If you are building a straight on single person or group blog, I think Wordpress is the way to go. It has all the base functionality you need built in and a robust set of plug-ins if you need to add on. The admin interface is dead simple - anyone with basic computer knowledge can master it in a few minutes. The install of the software is also simple and the templating system is not difficult to master.

Anything you want to do in Wordpress, you can also do in Drupal. But Drupal is more complicated from a design/install perspective, and has tons of features you’d end up turning off/not using for something simple like this.

A good example of a blog like built using Wordpress is our modest blog, The Bivings Report.

Blog Community (Use Drupal)

At a certain point your simple blog sort of crosses a line and becomes a blog community. Here are the things I look for:

• In some cases you are going to want people to navigate directly to an authors blog instead of the main page of the overall blog.
• Your blog has 10+ authors.
• There is the possibility that your commenters may themselves become contributors.

You can accomplish these goals by extending Wordpress. You can also use Wordpress Mu, which a community-version of Wordpress that we don’t think is quite ready for prime time. However, these kinds of sites are pretty much the reason Drupal exists. All the community-based features you need are available right away upon setup with little tinkering required.

A good example of a blog community is TechPresident, which we had nothing to do with building.

Blog Driven Website (Use Wordpress)

With its pages section and various plugins, Wordpress can be used as a full on Content Management System for blog-based websites. Lots of companies (including us) long ago abandoned the old fashioned press release and use blogs as their primary content delivery mechanism. Assuming your overall templating system on the site is pretty straight forward and you don’t have hundreds of pages, Wordpress works perfectly well for these types of sites.

Once again, Drupal can accomplish the same thing but it is a little more complicated to deal with and the admin interface is a little more complicated. It is sort of like driving a Ferrari in bumper to bumper traffic - you will get from point A to point B but you’d ultimately be better off weaving through traffic on a motorcycle.

The Washington Area Women’s Foundation is a good example of a Wordpress-based site that we built. In addition to having all the content editable through Wordpress, we also built a few databases as custom plug-ins.

Full Featured Website (Use Drupal)

At certain points, a site simply becomes too big for it to be sufficiently managed using Wordpress. If you find yourself bumping against any of the following scenarios, you should probably be using Drupal:

• If you have multiple dynamic content types (press releases, news articles, blog posts, etc.). Drupal is great at allowing you to create this stuff on the fly, with Wordpress you are hacking things together.
• If your site has more than a two template design structure (homepage and second levels).
• If you have numerous content blocks on the homepage or in sidebars that you will be editing frequently. Drupal’s block system is great at this kind of stuff.
• If you are trying to start small and expect your site to add tons of features/content moving forward.

We built a site for Monsanto Spain that uses Drupal as a full on Content Management System. This is a good example of this kind of website.

Last week I wrote a post mentioning that I thought coverage of the 2008 Presidential election would lead news organization to push the envelop in terms of innovation in online coverage. Cyberjournalist has the scoop on just such an innovation from the Washington Post and Daylife - Issue Tracker.

Issues Tracker allows you to select Presidential candidates to get an idea of the amount of press coverage they attract around issues such as abortion, immigration and education. Visitors can also select an issue to view how the candidates compare in terms of the volume of press coverage. I find this tool particular interesting since as it is similar to tools we have on our ImpactWatch media monitoring platform.

A couple of things that I think are significant about Issues Tracker:

• The tool aggregates stories from all across the web. Newspapers have traditionally been reluctant to link to competitors, i.e. other news outlets. It is nice to see the Post recognizes that this is an archaic way of thinking.
• The piece functions as a widget that you can insert in your website (see below). Very cool, although they might want to offer a less full featured version - that is a huge chunk of code to include on your site in any sort of permanent way.

Marketing and grassroots activity on social media sites like Facebook is a burgeoning field.  More and more people are recognizing the power and the variety of ways an organization can harness or benefit (or suffer, for that matter) from social media action.

The news today provides an example about why this trend is important.  According to The New York Times, Time Warner is closing its new economy magazine Business 2.0. 

What I find most interesting in the article is that it states: "A report in The New York Times in July that Time Inc. executives were considering closing the magazine mobilized some support among readers, who started a group on the social networking Web site Facebook."

The Huffington Post's media page linked to an Adage article with the headline: "Facebook Group Not Enough To Save 'Business 2.0'."  While this headline is true, it is very imprtant to note that one of the most read newspapers in the country, the Times, mentioned the Facebook group supporting the magazine.

The moral of the story is that the mainstream media organizations pay attention to social media — particularly the larger and better known sites.  Creative efforts, embarked by organizations or their supporters and detractors, may get significant media attention.  Therefore, it is important for organizations to pay attention to this part of the web as well. 

By now everyone on the planet has heard of Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC), which aims to “provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves” by providing children in developing countries worldwide with a laptop. This ambitious venture has produced an inexpensive and extremely durable machine which will be sold to governments around the world and distributed to impoverished children. The laptop, called the XO, is currently in its final beta phase and is being prepped for mass production. What you may not know, however, is that the XO is not the only inexpensive computer being produced for this purpose. There is competition. Intel has been selling its version of the “cheap laptop” since March for $225. The company recently joined OLPC in an effort to maximize the benefits of this laptop development around the world. Vice President and director of corporate affairs at Intel Will Swope stated,

“Our role here is one of how do we have the biggest impact on education and on children around the world?” he said. The chipmaker has spent more than $1 billion in education initiatives since its founding, and over the last five to six years has been investing annually around $100 million on such projects. “How could we make that more impactful and reach more children?” Swope asked. The answer, he said, was to join OLPC.

Despite its collaboration with OLPC, Intel will continue producing and selling its Classmate PC to governments, leaving it up to countries to decide which laptop, the XO or the Classmate, will best suit its children. While the general concepts of the laptops overlap, variations in design, structure and applications make each laptop best suited for different environments.

(more…)

The New York Times launched a Netvibes/My Yahoo style Ajax start page on their site called My Times a few days back.  These start pages allow users to create a custom home page that features only the information they are interested in.  In the case of My Times, users can select from a bevy of Times-related content and add RSS feeds from external blogs as well.

The reaction from the tech community has basically been a giant yawn.  Dave Winer sees it as an opportunity missed.  Techdirt reacts with derision.  Everyone seems to be noticing that these kind of start pages have been around since the mid-90s.  Nothing to see here.  Move along.

They are right.  My Times is inferior to start pages like Netvibes and Pageflakes that have tons of widgets and can be customized in pretty much limitless ways.  But I’m pretty sure the folks behind My Times would answer by saying that they aren’t trying to compete with My Yahoo or Netvibes or whoever.  I doubt the Times staff expect folks without an intense, pre-existing relationship with the Times website to sign up specifically to use their start page.  My Times is intended as a value added feature for their loyal website readers - a way to get them to spend more time on the site.  My Times accomplishes that goal very well I think. 

When the CIA began advertising and recruiting via the social network facebook, I kind of laughed since someone working in the clandestine services should keep information safe and not freely divulge it.  However, the whole point of social networking sites is to share information with your "closest friends."

Interesting, the Financial Times reports today that the intelligence community within the United States government sees more use to social networking sites than just recruitment.  As the government is trying to improve inter-agency communication that plagued it before the 9/11 attacks, the paper reports that, "Thomas Fingar, the deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, believes the common workspace – a kind of 'MySpace for analysts' – will generate better analysis by breaking down firewalls across the traditionally stove-piped intelligence community." 

According to this article, the government expects to deploy the social network – named "A-Space" – to all of its intelligence agencies by December.  This is a rather interesting development in the world of social networking sites; it's a bummer that most of us can't observe how it functions. 

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

At first it was the Red Coats, then The Beatles, and now BBC employees are the British Invasion.  This time they're invading one of America's most popular web sites.

As of this posting, the British Broadcasting Corporation facebook network has 14,726 members.  For an imperfect comparison's sake, I've checked the CNN network, and it only has a 311 members while the Turner Broadcasting (CNN's group in the AOL TimeWarner empire) network has 1,843 members.

Back on June 6th, Richard Sambrook, the social media savvy and friendly Director of BBC Global News, wrote on his personal blog SacredFacts that "[t]here are over 10,000 members of the BBC group (for which you have to have a bbc email) alone. That's about half the entire organsiation."  The BBC has invaded facebook!

Today I had lunch with a friend who works for the organization and asked him if there is some directive from management to join.  He said that there wasn't and reckons membership went viral as people kept inviting their colleagues to join.  However, people have joined; how many actively use it is another question.

For awhile some regular facebook denizens created groups for specific programs, but now a few BBC employees are creating groups around programs and other features so that they can use the site for more than personal reasons.  For instance, the domestic BBC Two news magazine show Newsnight and the BBC Mundo ¿Hablas español? blog created official groups to connect with their audiences; the prior has asked its group members for story ideas with an invitation in the title, "Get Yourself on Newsnight!"  Further, the new iPlayer — which is in beta — now has an application on the social networking site that allows users to rate and share their favorite BBC programs.

While there is no directive to join or use the site, my friend also told me that he plans to use it to promote his program soon.  Hopefully, the site will help the show connect with its audience better and perhaps use its audience to promote it to their friends.

Of course, only programs and BBC features that lend themselves well to social media — based upon format and audience demographics – will benefit from facebook, but it seems that many Beeb employees are keen to try.

At the very least, as Sambrook wrote in his facebook post, "it's fun. If you havn't [sic] jumped yet with facebook, twitter or any of the others, come on in, the water's fine."

Ben Hammersley's coverage of the recent elections in Turkey isn't the only time that BBC News is using social media to report a story. 

Currently, José Baig and Carlos Ceresole are traveling across the southern USA without uttering a word in English.  ¿Hablas español? is their project to see what's it like to use only Spanish in the country.  Beyond a BBC hosted blog, they're using other social media tools like facebook, flickr, and Skype to connect with their audience.  So far, 325 people have joined their facebook group.

These projects should prove interesting.  Using these social media forums probably doesn't cost the BBC more than it is already spending to gather information.  While money isn't the issue — especially since the Beeb is generously funded in part by the British people, distributing content via social media is risky for a mainstream news organization, but the BBC has the enough good reputation to experiment. 

Our recent newspaper study dealt exclusively with the features present on newspaper websites. We didn’t look critically at the design of these sites. The adoption of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) makes it possible for web developers to create rich designs while keeping the file size of pages to a minimum.

In looking at newspaper websites, it becomes clear pretty quickly that their homepages are bloated. They try to stick as much data as possible on the homepage (including ads).

Given that, we decided to look at the file sizes of the homepages of the top 10 newspapers, and how much of that file size is devoted to advertising. Note that file size does not always equate to load times. Other factors such as the number of database calls and the quality of the hosting environment play big roles.

These numbers were grabbed using the Firebug Firefox extension. Sizes were recorded both with Adblock on and off, so we can get an idea of how much space is devoted to advertising. (more…)

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.