This afternoon I attended the Conservative Bloggers Briefing during which The Heritage Foundation's President Ed Feulner discussed the current state of conservatism. 

I expected to hear that Feulner is optimistic, but I was pleasantly surprised to listen to him extol the importance of new and social media.  He spoke about how often he hears congressmen and women mention that they were thrilled to receive a flood of e-mails urging them to vote one way or another on a piece of legislation and ignore the potential to use those e-mail addresses to promote action and improve constituent relationships.  Obama's use of e-mail and text messaging was an example of he would like to see more conservatives harness grassroot action.

However, Feulner seems to do more than merely talk the talk when it comes to social media.  He did attend a luncheon for bloggers and new media strategists that was broadcast on The Heritage Foundation's BlogTalkRadio channel today.  He has a Facebook profile as well.  Further, at the end after speaking with someone, he yelled across the room to Rob Bluey, who runs the Bloggers Briefings for Heritage, something to the effect of: "Rob, can I Twitter, too?"  

It is interesting to see the attitude change among conservatives towards social media; it was a lot different a year and a half ago when I moved to the DC area a year and half ago.  Of course, this is helpful for the conservatives to answer the left's strong use of the Internet, but using social media also boosts transparency in politics.  That's why I'm excited to see more politicos — of all ideological positions — embrace social media.

Though I was not in attendance at this year' Web 2.0 Summit in sunny San Francisco, most of the content is available online for anybody to check out (I love how efficiently information disseminates when you put on a convention chock full of web 2.0 nuts). Featuring some highly influential speakers including Al Gore, Mark Zuckerberg, and Arianna Huffington, this year's theme was "Web Meets World" — most of the speakers' presentations at least loosely touched upon this broad and interpretive topic. I found messages presented at the summit ranging from redundant to insightful, and I would like to present some of the highlights through a series of scrutinal blog posts. Who said what and what does that mean for 2009? You can check out the content from the summit here.

First up on my lineup is Mr. Gore, a fitting highlight considering that we've decided to track his coverage in our ImpactWatch demo on renewable energy sources. Despite a fleeting accusation of claiming to have invented the internet during the 2000 election, Al Gore has indeed worked closely in developing internet technologies as an economic growth medium, a tool for information distribution, and as an educational tool. Check out this Wikipedia article that highlights some of his IT-related accomplishments to date.

In his speech, expert panel, and Q&A session Mr. Gore focused on the democratization of media, and the need to explicitly define a purpose for web 2.0 technology. "We have everything we need to save it, and in the process create millions of new jobs, reduce our national security exposure, and solve the climate crisis," Gore claims, however, "Barack Obama's election would have been impossible without the new dialogue and new ways of interacting on the Web; the only way this is going to be solved is by addressing the democracy crisis."

I'm not sure that I agree that web 2.0 is static to the point of definition. There is an incredible variety of ways to use web 2.0, for better or for worse. Is there a potential tipping point at which web 2.0 could hinder democracy? Todd Zeigler of our own Bivings Report has already examined in detail the role of web 2.0 tools in the recent election. Does web 2.0 truly make you feel more empowered, more personally involved in our democratic process? Or is it just a fancy facet of the same old ways of doing things? Your thoughts in the comments, please.

Guardian Blogs Editor Kevin Anderson dropped by our office a few weeks before the election to interview me about the role played by the Internet in the 2008 Presidential campaign for the Guardian’s Tech Weekly podcast . You can listen to the podcast here.  Andy Carvin from NPR and Garrett Graff from Washingtonian Magazine also share their thoughts.

During my bit I compared the social networking strategies of the Obama and McCain campaigns, with a focus on the internal social networks both sides built (My.BarackObama.com and McCainSpace).  My basic point is one I’ve made before on this blog:

The secret of the success of Barack Obama’s social network is that at its heart it is really a social action center.  When you login to My.BarackObama, you are pushed to make phone calls to undecided voters, knock on doors and raise money for the campaign, not to produce content.  Sure, that functionality exists on the Barack Obama website but it isn’t the main point.  The main point of My.BarackObama is to help Obama get elected.  The same cannot be said for the much more nebulous McCainSpace.

It was great talking to Kevin and I’d encourage you to give the podcast a listen.

I think the iPhone application developed by the Obama campaign was fantastic.  I’m on the record.  I’m also on the record that iPhone applications are a luxury item most organizations should skip, given the still relatively small user base of the device.

Since playing around with the tool, I’ve been privately wondering how many people downloaded and used it.  I was particularly interested in how many used the call component of the application to bug their friends and family to vote for Obama (which was really the entire point of the thing).

I played around with the tool a bit more this weekend and noticed the Call Stats option in the Call Friends area of the application.  As you’ll see on the right, it looks like 11,191 people made 41,075 calls.  Note: if I’m reading this number incorrectly, please enlighten me.

In the context of the massive scope of the Obama campaign, these numbers are miniscule.  The Obama campaign harvested over three million cell phone numbers through their VP announcement stunt and had volunteers make millions of calls by using the tools on their website.  This doesn’t even take into account Obama’s overwhelming online fundraising numbers.  It is hard to not be underwhelmed by the iPhone application numbers given the awesome success of the campaigns other efforts.

This is not to say that the Obama iPhone application wasn’t worth it for the campaign.  Tons of people undoubtedly used the application to keep in touch with the campaign and just skipped the Call Tool part.  In addition, the launch of the application also earned the campaign a lot of fawning press, congratulating Obama for being so tech savvy. But it is still hard to not reach the conclusion that the Obama iPhone application was little more than a middling success.

For organizations thinking about launching their own applications, these numbers should raise a big red flat about the ROI of these kinds to tools.  If the awesome Obama campaign can’t make an iPhone application that is a blockbuster success, what makes you think you can?  Proceed with caution.

I'll be the first to admit that when it comes to online user accounts, I am rather protective of my favorite usernames. I prefer my aliases to be free of numbers and clutter. When other people on various websites see my online identity, I want them to be in awe of the sheer minimalism and genius of the moniker I chose.

For corporations and organizations looking to control their brand's messages online, this is of greater urgency. We've already seen examples of individuals "hijacking" corporate accounts by posing as a company representative on websites like Twitter and Blogger.That's where the website Username Check  comes into play. It's a simple and novel online tool: a user inputs his or her username and the website returns a check on whether that username is registered on various popular web 2.0 sites. Thanks to this tool I was able to snag the username "eric" on a couple of websites. In the case of an organization, it could be useful checking out if there's something out there that you should be aware of.

Able to register an awe-inspiring username after checking with this tool? Let us know in the comments.

Thumbing through the October 2008 issue of PRSA's publication Tactics was a lot like opening up my RSS folders and taking a look around. Featuring an internet/web 2.0 multiple page spread, the issue covered topics ranging from maximizing the benefits of Twitter to the convenience of using FriendFeed. Most of this seemed familiar — maybe a little too familiar, as I had seen all of this content in one form or another on various blogs over the last year or so. Even their articles (the Twitter article in particular, which made use of a numbered list) read more like blog posts than articles. Well, so what?

If the editors of Tactics thought it was worth covering this on such a grandiose scale (the web 2.0 features run eight pages), it simply means that the PR industry as a whole is still learning about these new technologies and how to use them to advance their clients' desires. I mean, these articles are quite basic, and nothing I wouldn't expect most of our readers to at least be aware of — like an entire persuasive piece on why your company needs to Twitter (sound familiar?)

Seeing this spread caused me to stop and re-examine perspectives for a moment. While people 'round these parts may take these basic elements of digital PR for granted, this area of the industry is still relatively very new. Sometimes it is good to go over the fundamentals, to relearn your basics. If you have access to PRSA's trade publications, I'd check out the issue — a good introductory summary of some elementary online PR tactics — maybe show it to your boss and convince them to start a company Twitter account.

There has been some discussion of cloud computing recently as Microsoft revealed Azure, their attempt to chip away at Google's unyielding grasp on the hosted services sector. Centralized computing changes the way people compute their data, simplifying the process and reducing the need for desktop software. Is this the new model for generating revenue in an increasingly connected global marketplace?

The concept of hosted solutions has been around for quite a while. The web itself can be seen as a massive bank of hosted "solutions" from static pages to the latest database driven AJAX utility. Our own ImpactWatch is a hosted platform, as are many subscription-based offerings from access to databases to hosted MMO gaming.

I see several advantages to hosted and semi-cloud based services:

• Data in the cloud means optimized devices. With the device itself computing less and more being crunched on the central servers, devices don't have to be as powerful and will consume less power.
• $$$. With torrents, file sharing, and peer-to-peer networks in wide use, hosted solutions ensure company revenues are secure and act to protect against piracy and security threats. Hosted also means less cost than real-world deliverable goods such as installation media and unnecessary packaging, as well as a tendency to reduce administrative costs in the long run.
• Real-time updates. When your bleeding-edge code finally matures into a release worthy snippet, it feels good to show the world as soon as possible. This also applies to the whole security issue.
• Anywhere, anytime. Cloud computing means being able to access your information and GTD wherever you are, as long as there's a compatible (and connected) device in the immediate vicinity. Road warriors take note.
• An increase in compatibility. Not too long ago, the software market found itself choosing between two sides of a compatibility war, and to this day these agreements dictate much of what is available for various platforms. No longer are these clashes going to occur, as cloud computing runs as native on any OS compared to any other.

Cloud services are changing (and will continue to change) the way the internet works. As web and desktop technologies go through this awkward phase of flirtation, I eagerly await the next generation of truly integrated cloud applications. Any other obvious advantages I've left out? Or how about any glaring disadvantages to this model?

YouTube + Some Creativity + Some Courage (can) = Success

YouTube is known as the land of videos of dogs running on treadmills.  While there is certainly some substantive content on the site, there is also a lot of — shall we put this nicely — fluff.  Sometimes YouTube hits are substantive while others are mere fluff.

One of the more recent hits on the site falls into the substantive category; it is a Delta Airlines in-flight safety demonstration video.  Yes, you know those boring demonstrations at the beginning of your flight that you ignore 'cause they're boring and you hope to never have to rely upon the information they present.  Well, people are watching a safety video intently without even flying.

This is an example of how a normally staid item can turn into a viral hit.  However, your father's safety demonstration is not destined for Internet fame.  Delta had to take a less traditional approach when producing this video.  

Delta wants more passengers to pay attention to its safety videos, and that's why it added some cheeky and sassy elements to its recently debuted presentation.  For instance, while explaining that smoking is prohibited on the Delta planes, the main narrator, Kathleen Lee, waved her finger in the camera.  When I was flying home from vacation last week, I sat there and asked, "Did she just wave her finger at me?"  What a flirt!  That caught my attention (plus the fact that Lee — aka "Deltalina" for her resemblance of Angelina Jolie — is absolutely gorgeous).

What I find more interesting is not the fact that Delta lightened up this serious and important aspect of its passenger service but that the airline placed the presentation on YouTube before it even premiered on an actual flight.  This was a cheap and easy way for Delta to help accomplish its goal of promoting passenger safety.

Was posting the video on YouTube a success?  While I can't speak for the airline, I think it has achieved success.  As of this posting, this video has had more than one million views since it was posted in late February of this year (we're talking an airline safety demonstration!).  Further, CNN reported that more than 300,000 views occurred before the video's in-flight debut.  Plus this new video has garnered Delta a lot of free press and more YouTube views (see the Safety category of Delta's blog).

Thus, Delta gets a gold star for its idea of posting this video on YouTube because it was smart enough to recognize that the video had potential and had the courage to try posting it in the first place.  Delta even gets some bonus points for putting behind the scene pictures from the video's shoot on its flickr stream. 

Many product-selling websites include a lot of Web 2.0 tricks to convince the Internet surfer that the product is worth checking out.  Heck, even Cheerios has a website which includes a flashy splash intro.  Most product sites seem to be nothing more than an excuse to have a site, like a self-fulfilling prophecy of owning a company:

"Well, if we have a product, we must have a website!"

Certain consumer products have useful and inventive websites, such as this one I recently found: Acne.org.  I found this site through a linked video in YouTube.  The site contains many of these videos, which is a brilliant idea for free advertisement (click on the thumbnails for full-size pics).

The site is massive in content.  From just the home page, a viewer can tell the large amount of information conveyed throughout all of the separate pages.  The top menu bar alone contains more than twenty different sections from which to choose, all separated under broader categories.  Many of these sections include video demonstrations of the tips and tricks that the web master (and product creator) hopes to teach.  These video clips are high quality, short, well-scripted, and have reasonable volume.

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Ok. I admit it.  I never really "dugg" twitter.  While I did tweet for awhile, it was simply a different way for me to update my Facebook status.  I killed two birds (not the cute twitter bird) with one stone.  I guess that composing snappy 140-character or less haikus isn't my cup of tea, and I only drink herbal tea…

Beyond that, anyone who simply replied to me likely got ignored due to my ignorance of the rejoinder. No, I don't like desktop applications for twitter.  Half the time this ignorance was caused by twitter birds focusing on hefty the infamous whale instead of processing tweets.  Then there is the seemingly vast cottage industry of companies and products who owe their existence to twitter.  You can upload photos, shorten URLs, track your analytics, and probably submit your taxes via twitter, but nothing piqued my interest that much until now.

While checking someone's twitter feed today, I noticed links to twitter's election page at http://twurl.nl/npo6wl (shortened for mere kicks and giggles).  Through this page twitter displays tweets with specific words.  For instance, you can click on a link to see what people are tweeting about Tina Fey-impersonator Sarah Palin.  Now, I find that interesting and useful.  This service, however simple in theory, aggregates the tweets — from the serious to the snarky — in a way that enables me to quickly check the pulse of how the twitterverse feels about specific topics. 

Granted, I've seen other services that aggregate tweets around specific events and topics, but this is the first time I've seen it on twitter itself.  Hopefully, we'll see more of these useful pages instead of the birdies and the whale.

It really surprises me that more political figures and celebrities have not taken Obama's lead and created functional social networking sites that engage users and allow for not only greater transparency, but also general likeability of its moderator.  Leave it to a standup comedian to design a site capable of doing both of those things.

Aaron Karo began writing his monthly column over a decade ago, when he emailed his comedic musings (which he called ‘ruminations') to 20 or so of his closest friends.  Now, the comedian has become quite a success, boasting appearances on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, two books, and subscribers to his column from all over the world.

In August 2008, he launched a new website which aims to unite his fans (and new fans) by allowing them to submit their own ruminations.  The site is awesome in its simplicity.  After signing up for a user account and doing the generic social networking tasks (i.e. uploading a profile picture, typing in some data about yourself), you are allowed to ruminate on any topic of your choosing, trying your best to emulate the genius of the comedian. (more…)

The Bivings Gorup recently launched what is easily, as far as we are aware, one of the most advanced multilingual sites made in Drupal ever built. The International Journalists’ Network, or IJNet can be seen here: www.ijnet.org. The website, built for the non-profit organization International Center For Journalists (ICFJ), leverages Drupal’s built in multilingual capabilities together with a number of custom fixes and changes.

Key challenges included:

• Creating a flexible page layout interface that allowed site administrators to easily create and customize sections in both left and right columns, giving them new colors, any kind of custom or dynamic content, as well as being able to define their own section colors.
• Having full-featured mutilingual social elements on the site, including user profiles, inter-user messaging, user networking, user network activity feeds, user comment posting, user article posting, and many other dynamic social elements.
• Enabling users to easily view the site in right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Persian.
• Creating custom displays of the site for low resolution monitors.
• Creating a platform suitable for managing mutliple mailing lists for use with third party mail systems.
• Allowing the client to easily add new languages to the platform when desired.

The International Center For Journalists administers IJNet and creates its content in five different languages, and counting…

Take a look at the site at www.ijnet.org and let us know what you think!

As if our web developers didn't already have enough standards-fudging and code-juggling to optimize websites for every conceivable end-user browser, Google launched the public release of Google Chrome today — and I was right in line to download it. The Installation .exe file was small (a little over 400 kb), only to connect to the internet and download the entire binary. I am writing this very post using the new browser, and here are some of my initial opinions on the new kid on the block.

Upon installation, I fell in love with its menu bar. I recently purchased an Eee PC 901, which has a maximum resolution of 1024×600 — so screen real estate is of particular interest to me. The menu/navigation is a minimalist's dream: tabs at the very top, address bar, drop-down menus from within the address bar. The extra 50 or so vertical pixels it saves on my screen is quite noticeable on this netbook when compared to Mozilla Firefox.

Each tab in Google Chrome is treated as a different process (at least in Windows XP) when I open up the task manager. I am not really sure what this does in terms of efficiency, but it is a different approach than Firefox (which I have been known to inflate to nearly a gigabyte through the over-use of tabs). If you have an opinion on this technical matter, please, let us know in the comments!

The Chrome's default start page is like the desktop version of iGoogle. It will apparently track the most visited sites, and display them in page previews for easy access. I am not convinced of this yet, but it could turn out to be a great addition to a streamlined product.

I fooled around a bit on Meebo, YouTube, Wikipedia, Gmail, Flickr, and some WordPress installations, all without encountering any glaring errors or compliancy issues.*

Since the blogs and forums I frequent will be all ablaze about this over the coming months, I thought I'd get my limited initial reaction to the product out there with the promise of a full review to come. Something to add? Drop it in the comments.

*Update: The WYSIWYG editor in WordPress doesn't appear to be very compatible with Google Chrome. More comparisons and compatibility issues to come in the full review. 

A few days ago the John McCain campaign launched a new version of their social networking tool, McCainSpace.  Having written about McCainSpace critically before, I figured I’d share some quick thoughts on the tool:

(1) The new version is built using a white label social networking product called KickApps, and features your typical suite of socnet tools: user generated blogs, videos and photos, groups, user profiles, friends, etc.  Kickapps is a nice tool and McCainSpace is professionally done.  However, this is clearly an out of the box solution with generic tools that could be used to power a community of dog lovers or wine aficionados, for example.  There is really nothing about this social network that has anything to do with taking action and winning elections.

The secret of the success of Barack Obama’s social network is that at its heart it is really a social action center.  When you login to My.BarackObama, you are pushed to make phone calls to undecided voters, knock on doors and raise money for the campaign, not to produce content.  Sure, that functionality exists on the Barack Obama website but it isn’t the main point.  The main point of My.BarackObama is to help Obama get elected.  The same cannot be said for the much more nebulous McCainSpace.

Check out these screengrabs of the Obama and McCain tools to see the difference in emphasis.

(2) Even if you disagree with me and like the actual tool set of McCainSpace, I think it is too late in the game to be launching something like this.  Mike Turk summed it up pretty well during a conversation we had with Wesley Donehue on Twitter about the tool:

“Why, oh why? What possessed them to launch a new SocNet with 70 days left? No time to market and they should be beyond that stage.”

Exactly.  Communities take time to build.  This same exact tool launched a year ago might have made a real impact.  This late in the game it seems like too little too late to me.

(3) The McCain campaign’s commitment to their new toy seems pretty weak.  I found out about the new site via an email from the campaign.  However, when I go to the main website and click on the links to  McCainSpace, I’m taken to the old, extremely limited version of the tool people like William Beutler and Mike Turk have been rightly criticizing for the last year.    So there appear to be two versions of McCainSpace running concurrently.I can’t even find a link to the new McCainSpace on www.johmccain.com and there doesn’t appear to be any real integration between the new tool and the campaign website.  Given this, I think the new McCainSpace may  just be a case of the campaign throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks, as opposed to a well thought out initiative like My.BarackObama.

What do you think?

Update: Since I wrote my post, the McCain team has updated their site to integrate McCainSpace in a much more cohesive manner.

Ok, maybe I'm a bad person who relies upon stereotypes too much, but one would think a site for geeks would actually have great features since geeks are so tech savvy.  Wrong.

While browsing through the magazine rack at Borders Books earlier this summer, I came across Geek Monthly with its cover girl, Tina Fey.  Either way, I read the article about her since I like her show 30 Rock and went home to check out the magazine's site.  I was expecting a great site that was graphically designed well with bells and whistles like easy to search sections, forums, great blogs, social media features, and great content.  I expected something like the beautiful site for Backpacker Magazine (since when did backpackers know so much about designing great websites?). However, as you can see in this image, like how the current cover boy (Rainn Wilson from NBC's The Office) is dressed, the site does not look pretty.

Either way, the Geek site has a rather distracting design, no clear navigation, seemingly no access to articles from past issues or from the current issue, no community features, etc.  It does have a blog, but not a great one.  You can also see an article from the current issue, but it pops up as a jpg…  What? 

So, I'm disappointed.  Were my expectations wrong in the first place?