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. 

I’m pretty sure John Edwards was the first politican to start a Twitter account.  But as far as I know the UK’s Alan Johnson is the first to actually integrate a Twitter account into a campaign website.  A nice job by Johnson’s communications director Stuart Bruce.

My post about the use of Digg by Ron Paul activists attracted a strong response from Ron Paul supporters.  In comments on Digg and to my post, many folks acknowledged that they signed up for Digg specifically to submit and digg stories about Ron Paul. 

This was already pretty obvious.  If you click through on the profile of many users you'll see that all activity centers around Ron Paul.  Other users inject Paul-related content into unrelated discussion threads.  These folks are pretty clearly using Digg specifically to promote Ron Paul.

I don't think there is anything innately wrong with that.  But I don't think it is going to be effective in the long run and may in fact be counterproductive. (more…)

Update: This article was submitted to Digg by someone I don’t know and was starting to gain a bit of traction (28 votes and 15 comments as of this writing). However, the story has been prematurely removed from the upcoming queue for the US Elections 2008 section. Digg has confirmed that the story was removed because it was buried. Why was it buried? I can think of two possible reasons: (1) the story was lame or (2) because Paul supporters didn’t like the content of the piece and buried it. Decide for yourself what happened.

Digg launched a section around a month ago on the 2008 US elections.  I've been a semi-active participant in the section, digging stories in the upcoming area and occasionally submitting stuff there. 

The strangest thing about the section is the prevalence of information about obscure Republican/Libertarian Presidential candidate Ron Paul. 

A quick review of the Upcoming section shows that around 20% of articles are about Ron Paul.  And just about every one of these Paul-oriented stories attracts at least ten diggs.  This is extremely unusual, as the vast majority of stories submitted to Digg only attract between one and five diggs. (more…)

John Edwards just started Twittering  a few weeks ago.  In that short time, he has already accumulated 1,261 followers and 1,341 friends.  Not bad.  Based on the Twitterholic leaderboard, John Edwards is probably one of the top five most popular people on all of Twitter in terms of friends/followers (although he is not yet on that list).

Undoubtedly part of his popularity is due to the curiosity of having a Presidential candidate on Twitter.  But I actually think the structure of Twitter works well for campaigns.

As Brad Levinson notes, Twitter feels a bit narcissistic self indulgent.  Do people really need to get these constant updates about my whereabouts every few minutes?  Nope.  Most normal people will play with it for a few weeks, realize no one cares about their cat and that they are writing for an audience of one, get bored and move on to other things. 

But Twitter is perfect for folks with a bit of name recognition who can build a list of followers and have a desire to live in the public eye (it is actually amazing to me that people have the time/energy to update 20+ times a day).  That's why the hype is largely being driven by prominent bloggers and Internet famous types who can pull an audience. 

The dirty little secret here is that Twitter is actually a bit of a top down system.  Regular blogging allows for trackbacks and commenting which flatten things a bit.  With Twitter these sort of connections are possible but are opt in.  While many (like Scoble) are using Twitter to make connections and have conversations, it can just as easily be used as a sort of newfangled version of direct mail. 

The excellent Pro Blogger has a post up asking reader's to list their top 5 blogging tools.  I started to write my list in the comments, but I figured I'd kill two birds with one stone and make it a full blog post.

So here are my top 5 blogging tools:

(1) Wordpress

Wordpress is the best blogging platform for my money because it is easy to use, full featured and completely open source (free!).  Make sure to install Akismet to help with comment spam and WP-Cache to help deal with the Slashdot/Digg/Fark affect.  Do those two things and you are golden.

(2) Windows Live Writer

Even in the latest version of Wordpress, it is annoying/difficult to write longer posts within the online HTML editor.  Windows Live Writer is a good piece of blog editing software you install locally to write and manage your blog posts.  It allows you to post your blog entries without ever logging in to the Wordpress interface.  Full review here.

(3) Feedburner

We are currently hosting our RSS feed on Feedburner, and also use it for stats tracking and management of our email alerts.  By hosting our RSS on Feedburner, we are able to measure how many subscribers we have and also add goodies to our feed (Digg buttons, number of comments, etc.). 

(4) Clicky

Clicky is a great tool for tracking blog statistics.  A full review is here.  I've also heard that Statcounter and Mint are excellent but haven't tried them out yet. 

(5) MyBlogLog

We have just been using this for a month or so and I continue to think the blog-based social networking tool is a great way to build a community around your blog.  Full review is here.

What are your favorite tools?

We’ve had a bumpy history with blog statistics programs here at The Bivings Report. Services we like keep getting shut down.

Here is a quick summary:

1. Industry leader Measure Map got bought by Google a year ago and since then has closed registrations for new users. I’ve been on the waiting list for over a year now with no luck.
2. The excellent (though buggy) Blogbeat was bought by Feedburner around six months ago and was simplified to the point where it is no longer useful except for the most basic analytics.
3. The excellent Performancing blog stats programs shut down in December for some unknown reason.
4. I’m not a fan of SiteMeter, MyBlogLog or Google Analytics for blog tracking.

So I was shocked and happy to come across a new service called Clicky the other day. It is the best blog stats program I’ve used. Clicky has all the basics like site visitors, page views, incoming/outgoing links, and search keywords.

It also has a bunch of goodies like RSS feeds of your stats, a Spy section that lets you watch your users come in real time and a Google Map that show the location of your fifty most recent visitors (screenshot above right).

You can check out a demo on the Clicky website. If you are a blogger, I’d give it a whirl.

Fuzzy Zoeller is suing Wikipedia.

Well, at least, he wishes he could.

The Associated Press reported yesterday that Fuzzy Zoeller is suing a Florida-based consulting company for vandalizing his Wikipedia profile.  The paragraph in question has since been removed from both Wikipedia and Answers.com (which draws lots of its info from Wikipedia articles), but according to the Smoking Gun, the entry included false information about Zoeller abusing alcohol and drugs as well as physically abusing his family.

Zoeller, known for his slightly unorthodox temperament on the golf course, is known for being a jokester.  Example: check out these comments in a 2001 interview with Golf Digest:

Did any fellow competitor ever ask you to tone down the joking around? I've heard some guys say that you were a little difficult to play with.
Don't care. Tell them to speed up. Get ahead of me.

Some guys don't like the crowd getting into it, saying it affects their play.
Tell them to go look in the mirror. I don't hit their shots for them. Like firing caddies out here–caddies never hit a shot out here; what are you firing the caddie for? I haven't had a caddie in 27 years who ever hit a shot for me. I know they'd like to, but it's never happened.

You used to joke that your prescription for the bad back was "vodka and Advil."
You gotta tell 'em something. I do take a lot of Advil. But only when I'm on the road. When I'm home, I'm off.

Is vodka still your drink?
I'll even drink a few beers now and then. But then I might go home and not have anything for two or three weeks, a month.

A lot of the great characters in golf history–Hagen, Demaret–enjoyed their beverages.
That was a little before my time. Back then that was how all the guys played; they carried flasks in their bags. There's nothing wrong with that.

It's changed a lot over the years.
Yeah, but what else did you have to do back then? Think about it.

Now there's the fitness kick on tour.
The last five years, everybody feels that they gotta look their best out there.

Has that hit you yet?
Look at me! [Laughs.] I tell you, every time I get the idea of working out, I have to sit down until the thought leaves. I don't want to go out there and sweat. [Laughs.] Seriously, if I had a good spine, I'd probably do it. But I have no spine.

Even though Zoeller often made jokes like this in the past, there is a huge difference between joking around about vodka and advil and publishing malicious and damaging remarks about someone's character in a public environment.  Zoeller claims that the comments made about him on Wikipedia caused him "mental anguish" and "loss of income".

This brings me back to my original purpose in writing this post.  What kind of protection do people have against slander and defamation on sites like Wikipedia?  Not much.  In its disclaimers, Wikipedia clearly does not take any responsibility for the content that appears in the open-source encyclopedia.  It seems like the site is invincible: since most articles are written/edited by individuals not associated with the website, the encyclopedia is not necessarily responsible for the information that is published on its pages. As Fuzzy Zoeller discovered, you can't sue Wikipedia!

Wikipedia Disclaimer:

None of the contributors, sponsors, administrators, or anyone else connected with Wikipedia in any way whatsoever can be responsible for the appearance of any inaccurate or libelous information or for your use of the information contained in or linked from these web pages.

Since Zoeller and his lawyers can't touch the website legally, the pro golfer has approached the source of the comments.  By identifying the IP address of the original "vandalism", it was discovered the the comments came from a computer at Josef Silny & Associates, a Miami-based consulting firm.  Zoeller is suing the consulting firm in order to "put a stop to this. Otherwise, we're all just victims of the Internet vandals out there. They ought not to be able to act with impunity ."

Zoeller's defense team is right. Online users should not be able to slander whoever and whatever they want on the Web with no recourse for punishment.  But should Zoeller be able to sue an entire company for something that most likely only involved one employee in non-business-related activity?  I'm not sure.  In addition, Should people like Zoeller be so concerned with false information appearing on a site that everyone knows provides unreliable information in the first place?  I'm not sure about that either.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said in response to this event, "We try to police [Wikipedia entries] pretty closely, but people do misbehave on the Internet."

I think that situations like the "Zoeller Incident" speak to the structure of Wikipedia.  While having an open-source encyclopedia is in theory a great (if not utopian) idea, I think that the site needs a better system of identifying individual editors.  That way, individuals could be held responsible if they purposely publish false or damaging information to the encyclopedia, possibly discouraging the publishing of malicious or false content to begin with. 

Also, should people be able to sue Wikipedia?  It seems strange to me that just because of a few disclaimers, the site is free of any responsibility of the material that shows up online.  If a Wikipedia article is the source of a reputation-killing piece of false information, should the site's owners have to take some responsibility?  I think to some degree, they should.

I'd be really interested to see what other people have to say about this, so please feel free to chime in with your opinions.

Jose Antonio Vargas from the Washington Post has a good article today about massive network of supporters that is developing on Facebook around Barack Obama's Presidential candidacy.  Of course, I'm biased here, as The Bivings Group is quoted in the piece.

Here is what we/I had to say:

"The key point here is that the support for Obama on these social-networking sites is not being driven by the campaign itself. It is something spontaneous as opposed to something the campaign itself is orchestrating. This shows a real enthusiasm for Obama's candidacy among young people that you aren't seeing for any other candidates at this point."

I think Joe Trippi, formerly of the Howard Dean campaign, also makes a great point:

"It took our campaign six months to get 139,000 people on an e-mail list," Trippi said. "It took one Facebook group, what, barely a month to get 200,000? That's astronomical."

Yup.  List building is a slow and painful process.  That Facebook network is worth a small forture to the Obama campaign.

The full article is worth reading.

The buzz about Yahoo! Pipes is through the roof – as of writing number 6 on Technorati’s top searches list. This confirms what a lot of us here have been saying all along: people want to look at web content in a completely customized way and on the platform of their choice be it Netvibes (we're big fans), Windows Live, Newsgator or whatever. Yahoo! Pipes provides an assortment of interesting tools that allow people to manipulate of web content feeds to their liking, something I think is an increasingly clear a sign of things to come.

I’ve played around with Yahoo! Pipes a little over the last few days. One of the easy things you can do with it is to create a single RSS feed made up of multiple RSS feeds and filter the results based on keywords.

For those interested in receiving a single RSS feed with, say, news about a specific political candidate from multiple websites, Yahoo! Pipes makes this fairly easy to do. The alternative would be having to scour several RSS feeds looking for the nuggets you are interested in. I talked about an alternative method of doing this a few months ago, but Yahoo! Pipes makes this process a lot easier to manage.

Yahoo! Pipes has a lot of work to do in making the tool more user friendly and less buggy, but it’s a great start. In its current form it’s going to turn most users off of using it as you need to be pretty comfortable with basic programming logic to get started. It also lacks any sort of tutorial that makes things harder still, although it does provide a few usage examples.

Here’s an example of a feed I created using Yahoo! Pipes that pulls in news containing the keywords "Obama", "McCain", "Clinton", and "Giuliani" from Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Houston Chronicle, Reuters and Associated Press.

You can explore the actual Pipe I created to make that feed. If you've got some other interesting ideas on content filtering/customization or applications of how to use Yahoo! Pipes to customize web content feeds let us know in a comment!

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.

(more…)

MyBlogLog is a tool that allows for social networking around blogs.  Basically, bloggers and blog readers sign up for a MyBlogLog account and upload a picture, claim their blog and create a profile. 

If you run a blog, you can insert the MyBlogLog widget (see right) on your site and you can see a list of your recent visitors.  MyBlogLog allows users to form relationship with other readers and also to join a blog's community.

It is sort of hard to explain but I think the basic concept is pretty compelling. 

We just added this to our site.  You can join our embryonic community here and you can connect with me personally here. 

On the positive side, I think the idea of social networking around the blogs you visit is compelling.  I read a good number of blogs, so being able to connect with people who read the blogs I love makes a lot of sense to me.

On the negative side, the widget has been criticized for slowing down sites.  Also, the concept is slightly creepy.  I personally enjoy being able to browse anonymously sometimes and don't always want my face popping up on the blog I'm visiting.  There are ways for users to control when their pictures shows up, but the whole thing gives me a bit of pause.

Anyway, we'll see how it goes.

I was quoted yesterday in an article about the 2008 Presidential websites that ran in the New York Daily News. 

The article takes the position that the websites of the main Democrat contenders are ahead of those of the Republican top guns.  To this point, I'm quoted as saying:

"The Democrats have come out full force," said Todd Zeigler, vice president of the Bivings Group, an Internet communications firm. "Rudy Giuliani and John McCain have placeholder sites so far."

I think this is pretty much a statement of fact.  But it really doesn't mean much this early in the game.  Lets see where folks are in three months before passing judgement.

The other point I tried to make that didn't make it into the story is that how candidates are using the Internet is only part of the picture.  The other, more interesting, story that needs to be told is how regular people are using the Internet to change politics and politicians.