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.

Recently, we launched a blog network for Georgetown Preparatory School's Summer ESL Program .  The purpose of this project was to give the Georgetown Prep teachers a new way to communicate with their students, and to give the students a new way to practice their English language skills. Also, we wanted to give our staff an opportunity to experiment with WordPress Mu (pronounced "mew"), the multi-user blog program.  Just launched on Monday, the students at teachers over at GPrep are already starting to get the hang of things, with three of the seven classes at this year's summer camp taking advantage of the blog.  The best example is Mr. Scronce's blog.  This teacher gives his students a daily topic to write about, related to class discussions or readings.  Currently, the students are reading and discussing the book Kaffir Boy, so they wrote some blog entries about their initial reactions to the book.  The teacher made grammatical corrections using different text colors in each student's blog entry.

For the Georgetown Prep blog network, we set up each class has its own blog, with the teachers registered as "editors" and the students registered as "authors".  These blogs are linked together using blogrolls on the domain gprepblogs.bivings.com.  We tried to keep the site as simple as possible, and did little customized work (we tweaked the colors and header of a WordPress theme but did little else). 

For individual users, WordPress Mu seems to be working great.  Thus far, the teachers and students have had no problems accessing and contributing to their blogs.  I think this speaks to the ease with which WordPress functions: few or none of the people from this group have a lot of experience with computers or technology, and they are able to successfully contribute to an online discussion.

However, from an administrative perspective, things get a bit confusing.  I have a significant amount of experience with the administrative tools within WordPress, so I took on the task of setting up all of the users in the GPrep blog network.  In all, there are 8 blogs, consisting of a total of 8 teachers (editors) and about 90 students (authors).  Since we wanted to simplify the process for the teachers and students using the site, we set up their user accounts ahead of time, using a variation of my personal email address.  This way, all the users had to do was login and start writing.  For me, however, things were a bit more difficult.

Although there is a "site admin" portion of WordPress Mu which gives administrators access to all the backends of all the blogs in the network, the process for signing up new users is a bit clumsy.  First, they have to be registered with the main site.  Then, they have to be added to the blog to which they will be contributing.  So basically, as I was setting up this blog network, I had to add each user to the system twice.  This was annoying.  I suppose this process is easier for individuals who want to register themselves with a WordPress Mu site, but unfortunately we didn't have the luxury of letting people register themselves.

The site navigation is also a bit clumsy from the backend.  It's a little difficult to switch between blogs if you are managing several at the same time.  Once you enter the backend of a blog, there is no way to return to the backend of the main administration panel or to the panels of other blogs without first returning to the live site or typing in the wp-admin URL. 

It was also annoying that I had to manually enter the blogroll 9 times (once on each teacher blog and once on the main site).  I was really hoping that because these blogs were all created under the same umbrella that there would be an automatic way to link them together and aggregate their content.  While our main developer did find eventually find a plugin that publishes the most recent post from each blog on the front page, we didn't find any other way to aggregate the rest of the content, categories, comments, or authors.  This was our developer's major complaint.  Apparently, while most regular WordPress plugins work with the individual blogs in the network, there aren't many effective tools for aggregating information on the site.  For example, with the GPrep blog network, we wanted the main blog to act as an aggregator for all of the content on each of the individual teacher blogs, rather than as a blog itself.  We found this really difficult to do, mostly for a lack of plugins.  While WordPress Mu probably works great for someone who has many blogs or for groups of individual bloggers, it doesn't work all that well for "networks" of blogs, where all the content is aggregated under one main umbrella.  Our developer noted that WordPress Mu seems a bit incomplete and that for our purposes, Drupal would have been a better choice.

I don't dobut that WordPress Mu is a powerful tool for managing many individual blogs from one place or grouping blogs together through one site.  However, for developing a network of blogs that share content, WordPress Mu gets a bit tricky and is need of some additional features.

Our blog has run off Wordpress for awhile now and for the most part we’ve been pretty free of comment and trackback spam. The Akismet plugin combined with some manual intervention on occasion has usually been all that was needed to keep our comments area relatively clean. Akismet has blocked 300,000 spam comments since we started using it.

The last few months, however, our spam problem has been getting progressively worse and we’re all spending more time than we want to manually deleting comments that make it through. We’ve installed two additional plugins to try to address the problem.

(1) Comment Timeout

In our case, most of the comment spam has been on posts buried deep in our archives. This plugin automatically closes comments on posts after 180 days of active commenting.

(2) Protect Web Form

We installed this plugin that makes users enter an annoying little code when posting a comment. This helps prevent the bots from automatically posting comments. I hate these things and we may take it off and hope the Comment Timeout works by itself.

Since making these changes, we haven’t gotten any spam comments at all. So mission accomplished. But in the process we’ve also ended the conversation on our older posts and made it a little harder for people to post comments.

Anybody else have any better ideas for how to deal with comment/trackback spam?

Today Cyberjournalist points to a feature on the Washington Post website called Local Explorer. Cyberjournalist summarizes:

You can map information on recent area home sales, crime incidents, schools, fire and police stations, restaurants, bars, hospitals, movie theaters and more. Local Explorer also has facts and figures, local news, classifieds and upcoming events that will help take users further inside area communities.

This is one of the better Google Maps mashups I’ve seen. If you don’t live in the DC area, click here to see the results for zip code 20007 (our office zip).

I was writing a post about Project’s Agape’s new Facebook application that allows people to raise money for causes directly on Facebook (through the new Facebook Platform). Unfortunately, the application is still really buggy so I was unable to get the data I needed for the post. So while I was messing around in Facebook I decided to write a quick post about what the Barack Obama team is doing with their custom Facebook application.

After you install the application, an Obama video and a few recent headlines appear as part of your Facebook profile. See below.

(more…)

One of the greatest fears that companies or organizations have about starting an on-line community is the troll — a commenter who seems content to spew garbage and threaten unspeakable action against anyone for anything.  They quickly turn a fecund forum into a locale of bile.  No fair!

There are a many ways one can deal with these unscrupulous people, and I read about a technique – disemvowelling – in a great article about maintaining a healthy community  by Cory Doctorow at Information Week.  This is not new, but it deserves a mention every once in a while.

Basically, disemvowelling is stripping words of their vowels, and that forces people to carefully read to decipher what is written.  As the disemvowelling Wikipedia entry states (as of this posting):

When used by a forum moderator, the net effect is to mark the original text as deprecated, while at the same time not suppressing freedom of speech; after disemvowelling text is still legible, but only through significant cognitive effort, and disemvowelled text has the advantage that it will not cause offence to anyone who does not stop and invest that effort in reconstructing their message.

At first moderators did this by hand, but soon programmers helped by developing applications that do this automatically. 

Give Doctorow's article a read; he has more advice.  Or should I type, "Gv Dctrw's rtcl rd; h hs mr dvc"?

The Bivings Group was recently interviewed by NPR’s All Things Considered for a piece about the online success of Republican/Libertarian Presidential candidate Ron Paul. Micah Sifry from the Personal Democracy Forum was also interviewed.

You can listen to the piece here.

In the interview, Robert Smith asked me if I thought all of the Paul-related activity would have a real impact on the election. Can Paul become the next Howard Dean?

I said no. Paul isn’t going to become a viable candidate and I don’t think the online movement being built around Paul’s candidacy will come close to reaching the scale the Dean movement achieved.

Regardless, I think all the noise being created has had the desired effect. It is exposing more people to Ron Paul, which is all his supporters can really hope for. As I told Robert, one of the reasons Paul supporters are turning to Digg and online polls is that they feel they aren’t getting enough attention from the mainstream media. So the fact that NPR and other media outlets are doing stories on Ron Paul’s online success is the ultimate validation of what they are doing online.

I was on Capitol Hill Monday morning attending the "Ready-Made Constituent Relationships: A Look at How Technology Empowers and Enables Effective Constituent Relationship Management" presentation hosted by George Washington University's Institute for Politics & The Internet (IPDI).

While the presentation covered a broad range of constituent services, the main focus was e-mail, which is a more efficient medium of communication than snail mail. The panelists emphasized that a constituent that sends an e-mail uses virtually immediate communication, but most of the time a staff will respond weeks later, if at all, using a regular letter.  Why can't a constituent get a reply much sooner?  One of the answers is interesting.  There is a strong aversion to responding to constituent e-mail with e-mail from Capitol Hill. (more…)

Here is my personal list of the best/most useful Wordpress plugins I’ve come across during my two plus years using the platform.

(10) Google Site Map Generator

This plugin automatically creates a Google-friendly sitemap, making it easier for Google to find your content. SEO folks say this stuff helps.

(9) WP-Cache

This plugin creates static versions of your Wordpress posts and pages, dramatically decreasing the server load require to deliver content. You must have this installed to prevent failure if you get Dugg or Slashdotted.

(8) PodPress

This is great for podcasting. All you do it upload your mp3 and this plugin automatically embeds the audio file in a cool Flash player and gives users the option to download the file as well. (more…)

My Stuff is a new ImpactWatch™ feature that enables individual users to save stories in the system that are pertinent to them.  To do this each story is listed with an icon that saves the item in a place where they collect articles.  Further, it uses AJAX so that saving items is a smooth process that doesn't involve multiple web pages.

Visit the ImpactWatch™ site to learn more about the program.  We also offer a free demo that features analysis of media coverage about the launch of the Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3 and provide case studies about how ImpactWatch can help any organization manage its public relations.

Click on the picture for a video demo of My Stuff.