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Archive for the 'Web 2.0' Category

Twitter Fight: Netroots Nation vs. Right Online

Published by William Beutler on July 21, 2008 in Internet conferences, Leftosphere vs. Rightosphere, Metapost, Netroots, Social Networking, Trend Tool, Twitter and Web 2.0. 4 Comments

This past weekend, Austin hosted two conferences devoted to political blogging: the widely covered and heavily-attended liberal Netroots Nation (née Yearly Kos) and the brand new and under-the-radar conservative Right Online (at which I spoke on Friday).

Both conferences designated hashtags for attendees to use when tweeting their experiences and expoundances. For the Twitter illiterate, a hashtag is a short code word following a pound sign — #hashtag, for example — included in the 140-character message for the purposes of associating that particular tweet with a subject others are using the same hashtag to write about. For the conferences just concluded, the hashtags were #nn08 and #rton08.

Like we always do about this time, here’s a chart comparing their use over the past weekend. This time, we’re using Twist by Flaptor:

Twitter hashtags #nn08 and #rton08 via Twist by Flaptor.

According to the historically-fortunate assigned colors, of course. Also, it’s worth knowing that Netroots Nation ran July 17 to 20, while Right Online was only July 18 to 19. Taking that into consideration, the difference in activity is not especially surprising, considering this was Netroots Nation’s fourth year while being the first Right Online to date.

But the trend lines are still interesting, and I think we can tease out a few observations:

  • Friday late night through Saturday morning was the second-highest period of activity for #nn08 and the lowest for #rton08, at a total number of zero. Perchance the left went out partying while the right went to bed? This can’t be right. In fact, I know it’s not — for example, here’s E.M. Zanotti directing Friday night’s right-of-center bar traffic.
  • A similar thing happens 24 hours later, on Sunday morning, giving the impression that the entire Twittering contingent of each conference slept in with a hangover. While I am sure this was true for many, it’s flatly impossible that nobody tweeted during the late evening and early morning hours. So, I’ve sent an e-mail to the folks at Flaptor, and if I hear anything back, I’ll let you know.
  • Right Online activity is also likely underreported due to some confusion over which hashtag to use, although this probably doesn’t affect the overall trends greatly. Also worth mentioning, Twist doesn’t allow searching for symbols, so my real search terms were “nn08″ and “rton08″ — meaning even if some forgot the hash mark, as most assuredly happened, they’re included here.
  • It’s also possibly notable that #nn08 activity fell off severely on the last day. Is this evidence that four days is just too long for any convention? Or is it lower because people were busy leaving? I’m guessing it’s some of both. [Update: From the comments, it turns out the fourth day agenda included few events, compared to dozens on other days.]
  • Considering the reported attendance of each, the numbers don’t look so bad for #rton08. Local media reports put Netroots Nation at approximately 2,000, which apparently does not include reporters. Meanwhile, I’ve heard 500 showed up for Right Online, and based on the crowds I saw on Friday afternoon, this is plausible. However, with the exception of that curious Fri.-Sat. reporting period, #nn08 at most only quadrupled #rton08. At other times, it only doubled. Not quite a rallying cheer for Right Online, but that may be one to grow on.

See anything else worth mentioning? Feel free to add them in the comments.

P.S. FWIW, I believe I’m the first, as far as Google is aware, to use the word “expoundances.” Or should it be -ences? Again, your commentary is welcome.

Portrait of the Smear Artists as an Old Boys’ Club

Published by William Beutler on July 3, 2008 in #pdf2008, Barack Obama, Charts and Graphs, Online Campaigns, Tech Blogosphere, Urban Legends, Web 2.0, Website Design, White House '08 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

Example of Obama’s Fight the Smears pageIt’s been a few weeks since Barack Obama’s presidential campaign unveiled its much-discussed Fight the Smears microsite. It’s certainly a daring move, and probably the right one. Although a cardinal rule of politics has long been “don’t repeat the charges against you,” there does reach a point where that no longer holds. John Kerry learned this the hard way, and Obama should get credit for adjusting accordingly.

One aspect I haven’t seen discussed in any great detail is the second page of the website, “Behind the Smears”. It’s not easily found — although it occupies the somewhat prominent last spot in the list of links at left, it’s also buried at the bottom of the page, below the main content and just above the site disclaimers.

The main content of said page is a chart showing the relationships between the accusers, and it looks like this:

Network of Obama “smears”

It’s pretty neat, but it’s also under-designed. After all, it seems to claim that the 1992 Clinton campaign itself is is smearing him, when all it means is that… actually, I’m not sure what it’s saying. What’s more, the lines are too light and don’t convey any specific information about how they are connected. There are a few small revisions which would make it more intuitive: a dotted line for lesser connections, or bigger names for those with more influence.

Relationship mapping is becoming a bigger deal in the blogosphere as more rigorous and even scholarly studies are done about the connections between blogs and attempts are made to quantify the influence one has upon another. This is driven in part by curiosity and in part by my own industry, where marketers are desperate to accurately quantify their impact. One example comes from Linkfluence, as demoed at Personal Democracy Forum this year:

Political blog map via Linkfluence

But how useful is this information? It’s nice to see a representation of the political ’sphere at the macro level. Some insights can certainly be derived therefrom, but it leaves a lot unsaid. For example, it doesn’t necessarily help me to know that one site has linked to another. I need to know why. I need to be able to drill down, and find out how they are arranged by a common link or keyword.

Don’t get me wrong, though: I’m all for pretty pictures.

And while the Obama campaign chart isn’t all that pretty and ultimately not that informative, it’s nevertheless a step in the right direction. The more and better tools a campaign can give to its online supporters, the more investment (in time as well as money) they are likely to make in turn.

Cerf’s Up: When Bipartisanship Really Isn’t

Published by William Beutler on June 30, 2008 in #pdf2008, Blog Consultants, Blog Fights, Democrats, Fundraising, Google, Hillary Clinton, Lobbying, Tech Blogosphere, Virginia Politics, Web 2.0 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

At last week’s Personal Democracy Forum, one of the events I missed was the launch of a coalition called InternetforEveryone.org. I’m skeptical of the organization, and while I admit I’m not really sure what it’s all about, therein lies part of my skepticism. It’s very easy to agree that Internet access should be as widely available as possible. However, the policy details are not so easily agreed upon. But as a market-oriented thinker, I’m inclined to agree with Erick Erickson that this is in fact a bad idea.

Supporters at the press conference included Stanford professor Larry Lessig, former FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, environmental activist Van Jones, a venture capitalist from the firm which first funded Twitter, Google’s chief evangelist Vint Cerf and Josh Silver from Free Press. That’s the same Josh Silver I criticized back in May for claiming the only real news was his kind of news.

Also on the panel: Republican consultant David All, whom I count as a friend and whose work on Slatecard I admire but with whom I disagree on some matters of policy and partisanship. I’m not the first to note the incongruity of this panel; if you happened to check out the comments at All’s TechRepublican starting this weekend, Mike Turk initiated a very interesting debate with All on the merits of the group continuing through today.

David has called Internet for Everyone a “bipartisan” organization, which Turk has also called into question. All’s claim seems very hard to justify, based on the names above. For one thing, the only other reference to Internet for Everyone as “bi-partisan” comes from Brian Reich at Fast Company — who is, coincidentally, a former Gore campaign aide. Meanwhile Tim Karr of Free Press didn’t bother to include the word “bipartisan” in his announcement at Huffington Post.

But I was reminded of a tweet from @DavidAll the evening the conference ended:

David All tweet about Vint Cerf as a Republican

And in a post on Saturday, All did concede that the bipartisanship of the group was tenuous:

As one of the only Republicans in the coalition (Vint Cerf of Google is a registered Republican), I believe it’s crucial for Republicans to embrace a national broadband strategy.

Curious about Vint Cerf’s Republican bona fides, I decided to punch his name into OpenSecrets.org. For the sake of column width, I’ve removed his employers (principally MCI, MCI Worldcom, Worldcom and Google). Here’s what I found:

Vint Cerf’s political donations, via OpenSecrets.org

Finally! Proof that Vint Cerf is a Republican. Well, maybe he was once a Republican. And so, David’s claim that the Internet was Republican from the beginning has a fighting chance. But Cerf is clearly not a Republican now, in fact he has been quite an active Democrat since approximately the Reagan administration.

There are certainly times when cross-ideological partnerships are a good idea, such as when Redstate’s Mike Krempasky, Adam Bonin and Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos came together to fend off campaign finance restrictions on bloggers. But it concerns me that David All — one of the C&E-recognized rising stars of GOP Washington — is giving ideological cover to an organization which is not just non-conservative and not just un-conservative, but whose basic idea treats limited government and market-based solutions as beneath discussion.

P.S. I hope this doesn’t dissuade him from watching the rest of The Wire.

Digg Buries Daily Kos

Published by William Beutler on June 19, 2008 in Barack Obama, Daily Kos, Environment, Netroots, Public policy, Site Traffic, Social Networking, Trend Tool, Web 2.0, White House '08 and William Beutler. 1 Comment

This submission to Digg from Daily Kos “went popular” today, which is to say it made the front page:

Digg Buries Daily Kos

So it wasn’t “buried” per se, in that the story has not (as of about 8:00 p.m. Thursday) been demoted from the front page, and almost surely will not be. Last I checked, it was #10 out of 10 in all categories. The article submitted was a user diary by someone calling themselves environmentalist (like e.e. cummings or k.d. lang), cross-posted from the long-running mid-tier leftroots blog Unbossed.

The first Digg commenter said:

It’s a scam engineered by big oil interests to dupe the $4 per gallon weary public. Drilling/plundering our coasts for about 19 billion barrels of oil is akin to placing a Band-Aid on the hemorrhaging wound that is our oil-dependent, wasteful lifestyle.

The comment received +31 “diggs”, that is to say a net total of 31 votes in agreement. So far so good. But out of the ~430 comments added to this story, the top-rated comments fell somewhere between ~+150 and ~+50 diggs. Here is the first sentence of each, in descending order.

+151 diggs:

I hate to play devil’s advocate but here I go. (personal note: I am not a Republican)

+107:

Buried for being misleading bullshit.

+68:

If we began drilling offshore, oil prices would actually fall, because speculators trading in oil futures would bet on prices to be lower in the future.

+66:

Both candidates are forwarding two different ideas, but they are by no means mutually exclusive.

+59:

I should have guessed this was daily Kos bullshit.

+51:

Thanks, DailyKos, for continuing to put forth the stupidest ideas on the internet.

Anyone who follows the two websites knows that Digg and Daily Kos are both very pro-Obama. But apparently they are not pro-Obama in quite the same way. Better yet, Ron Paul’s volunteer army of paranoids seems to wandered off somewhere else.

As for the title and the caveat above, well, that’s not the only way Digg can bury Daily Kos:

Automatic For the Tweeters

Published by William Beutler on May 18, 2008 in Twitter, Web 2.0 and William Beutler. 9 Comments

Two of the first blogs I started reading were Glenn Reynolds’ Instapundit and Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, but thanks to changing schedules and subject matter, my readership of each has waned and waxed a few times over. Seven years and counting is a long while to read any one blogger; I can only imagine what it’s like to be writing the same blog for such a period of time.

Now in the past couple weeks, twinned discoveries have made it easier for me to follow what each writes. As you may have already guessed, the answer was Twitter feeds (click through for the Twitter accounts themselves):

Instapundit on Twitter

And:

Andrew Sullivan on Twitter

Both are straight-up repurposing of each blog’s RSS feed routed through Twitterfeed.com. I contacted both to find out if they had personally created them; Reynolds responded that he hadn’t. The brevity of his response led me to believe that it didn’t seem to bother him, and that he if he did tweet, he’d have characters to spare.

In the time since, I’ve been looking around for other examples of popular blogs with automated Twitter feeds. The list was not a long one — I found @dailykos, @thinkprogress, @newsbusters and @crooksandliars. (Feel free to list more in the comments.)

This also gave me an idea: Why not create such Twitter accounts for a few political blogs that myself and others might want to follow? So I have; all are brand new and as of this writing none have updated. I may have the feed configured incorrectly, but then it’s also Sunday evening. If it still isn’t updating correctly tomorrow, I’ll get in and fix them. If you’re from one of the blogs below and you’d prefer this account not exist or you’d prefer to take control of it yourself, just let me know. In the meantime, click through the screen shots below to see (and follow) the accounts for yourself:

Power Line:

Power Line on Twitter

ABC News Political Radar:

Political Radar on Twitter

Hot Air:

Hot Air on Twitter

TPM Muckraker:

TPM Muckraker on Twitter

Update: Yep, they’re all working.

Could Twitter Ads Help Stop Twitter Spam?

Published by William Beutler on May 6, 2008 in Advertising, Spam, Tech Blogosphere, Twitter, Web 2.0 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

Twitter spam is back on my mind as I think about this morning’s TechCrunch report that Robert Scoble, the #5 most-followed Twitter user, has started tweeting paid advertisements. TechCrunch is shocked, shocked! to find out there’s advertising happening on Twitter, and alludes to speculation that Twitter’s founders will renege on a longstanding promise never to put ads on the Twitter website.

Some of this is driven by the fact that Twitter.jp, the Japanese-language counterpart, launched with advertising last month. Why ads on the Japanese version, but not the English? The conventional wisdom is that it’s harder to put advertising on the site later. That may be true, but of course, we already know that advertising happens on Twitter: many if not most of the accounts listed on TwitterBlacklist.com are primarily commercial in nature.

Which leads me to wonder, could Twitter ads be a partial solution to the problem of Twitter spam? After all, what these people are trying to do is reach many more people than their actual level of notability would attract. In lieu of other options, they’ve followed many more accounts than they could actually read, often using a bot to follow accounts automatically. How many of them would be willing to pay a small amount to place advertisements in the blank space underneath users’ left-hand sidebar? My guess is quite a few. In fact, so would quite a few others not presently engaging in spam-related activity.

One requirement for these ads could be that they must link to a Twitter account, which could then link out to where ever the advertiser wished. According to Valleywag, Twitter.jp ads do this, and it sounds to me like a fine way to keep the advertising conversational, like Twitter is meant to be. You know what isn’t conversational? A self-help guru whose promotions-only account follows 18,265 others with only 472 reciprocal followers.

Twitter advertising of this type would create an alternative to annoying other users with unwanted follower notifications while putting Twitter’s parent company Obvious on the slow road to profitability. Biz, Ev and Jack say they’ve been looking for a business model. Why not this one?

That’s What FriendFeeds Are For

Published by William Beutler on April 22, 2008 in Barack Obama, Fred Thompson, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Online Campaigns, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Web video, White House '08 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

As I am frequently given to blogging about the first thing I see in my e-mail box each morning, and commenting on the extremely limited tools on John McCain’s campaign website, here the twain meet. This morning I woke up to find John McCain, or someone using his name, had subscribed to my FriendFeed account:

John McCain joins FriendFeed

FriendFeed is one of the more recent Web 2.0 services on the scene, and some believe it could be the latest next big thing.
Considering the McCain campaign’s sometimes uneven online strategy, this is a step in the right direction. It’s better to send your campaign out into the places where people are than to expect them to come to you, anyway. So, I subscribed in return:

Subscribing to John McCain’s FriendFeed

And it’s the campaign, all right — the favorited video indeed shows up on the official McCain YouTube channel as the most recently favorited video.

Better still, the favorited video was uploaded by McCain Girls, the parodic creation of left-leaning humor website 23/6. Sure, the joke may be on McCain, but the McCain campaign is willing to laugh along with the joke. The video favorited is of McCain literally laughing along with it.

Obama, of course, is on FriendFeed as well. He also has more online content piped through it: Digg, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. McCain’s camp only lists the official blog’s RSS feed and YouTube account.

I know that’s not all they’re doing. McCain is on LinkedIn; earlier this month the campaign made clever use of the surprisingly resilient socnet, asking a question of the site’s memebers and receiving more than 3,000 responses.

John McCain on LinkedIn

I’m a bit surprised that McCain’s camp appears not to be using Flickr. Surely someone is taking pictures; during the Fred Thompson campaign we kept the Flickr account updated constantly with photographs taken by Thompson family friend Jim Rydell. (We released all photos under a Creative Commons license, thus providing quality photos of Thompson that supporters could use.)

McCain doesn’t appear to be using Twitter at either likely account (here or here), though supporters are giving the campaign a presence (here and here) on the increasingly zeitgeisty socnet.
McCain’s camp did create an account on Digg, but they haven’t used the account since late last year.

Maybe all of this is not crucial, but the more social networks a campaign uses, the likelier it is they will reach people they would not have otherwise. Democrats will do all they can to portray McCain as old and out of touch, so presenting him well him to the young and with-it denizens of these online communities should take on added importance. Meanwhile, fundraising seems to be improving a bit, so maybe Pat Hynes will get a few extra hands to take care of these things.

No Follow

Published by William Beutler on April 4, 2008 in E-mail, Spam, Twitter, Web 2.0 and William Beutler. Closed

Not to turn this into The Twitter Spam Post (besides, that’s Stop Twitter Spam) but I believe I’ve just discovered a new spammer technique.

At 3:42 a.m. last night, I received a notification that a Twitter user going by the name Cardiophile was following me. Twitter Spammer: CardiophileBut when I checked out the account this morning, the sidebar looked as it does in the graphic to the right of these words. For readers who don’t know me, I am not one of the 5 accounts being followed.

So, mark this as the logical next step in the growing sophistication of Twitter spammers. Aware that they’re being identified by the obvious disparity in their following/follower counts, they’re now following an account just long enough — seconds, maybe — to send a notification e-mail and then unfollowing, so there isn’t the dead giveaway. I caught on, but then there are 350-some Twitter users who followed it anyway.

Earlier this week, a Twitter friend suggested that I simply uncheck the e-mail notification option. True, this would keep me from being annoyed. But there are two problem here. First, I would prefer to avoid changing my behavior because of spammers. But more practically, I wouldn’t know about followers I do care anbout and would want to follow back. Follow me?

Update: Stop Twitter Spam has also noticed this new technique, and has posted on the same subject.

Twitter Spam Gets Political

Published by William Beutler on April 1, 2008 in Hillary Clinton, Spam, Tech Blogosphere, Twitter, Web 2.0, White House '08 and William Beutler. 6 Comments

Last week, Mashable’s Adam Ostrow asked whether Twitter was facing a spam problem. I said it already does. Ostrow pointed to a Twitter account that seemed to be following far more people than anyone could know, and for purely promotional purposes.

As of today, that account follows (i.e. has friended) 13,000+ Twitterinos, only to tweet links to images of ho-hum abstract artwork. Amazingly, more than 800 people are still following this account. Shortly before reading his post, I found a teenager in Norway who seemed to be doing something similar. While he may in fact be using the service genuinely, he too was following thousands before he’d posted a single tweet. Today he’s following some 3,700+ others, but hasn’t updated for two days, when he was:

watching random crap on youtube :) — Flyaxe on Twitter

Now Twitter spam has taken a turn for the political. On Sunday, CQ’s Eric Pfeiffer told me that his account (which he updates only sporadically) had recently been followed by a horde of obviously fake accounts named for a current or former presidential candidate, plus a number. Most of the notification e-mails he had already deleted, but the others he forwarded to me. They are… interesting. For example, here’s the latest tweet from ChrisDodd53:

Twitter spammer rips off techPresident Daily Digest

I think we can safely assume there are not 52 other Chris Dodds on Twitter. But did you recognize the content of that tweet? I sure did: it was scraped from today’s techPresident Daily Digest. And this pattern is repeated across all the examples of spam accounts he sent my way.

Herewith, a list of these accounts, and a link to the blog whence its latest tweet was scraped:

You know, if these were simply attached to RSS feeds and genuine aggregators of political news, I wouldn’t mind so much. Yes, the aggressive, untargeted following is certainly annoying. But these accounts do not drive traffic to the sites where the words originated. This also makes the creator’s intent all the more inscrutable; they aren’t saying anything, they aren’t promoting anything, and they aren’t updated by hand. The only thing it’s good for, maybe, is souring users on Twitter. But I don’t believe Pownce or Google/Jaiku are really that underhanded. So I remain mystified.

Whatever the cause, this must stop. And it can. Unlike e-mail, which is traded from network to network across yon Internets around the globe, Twitter is administered entirely by Obvious, LLC. They have the same control over the Twitter network as Facebook has over its pages, and it’s within their power to stop it. I’ve previously suggested capping the number of users you can follow, relative to the number of users who are following you. Nothing too restrictive, but something flexible to keep Twitter accounts honest. Jack? Biz? Ev? Little help over here?

In the meantime, there is is already a website carrying the banner against this annoying menace. That’s Stop Twitter Spam, which is currently tracking complaints about spam on Twitter, including my post from last week. The site only barely gets into solutions, and mostly serves to highlight the problem. Most interesting of all is the Twitter Spammer List.

This list includes most of the candidate-based accounts I’ve noted here, and some others I hadn’t. It also mentions the examples from last week, but separates them into two apparent categories of problem Twitter accounts: outright spam and overactive followers. It also notes the number of follows vs. the number of followers and shows the difference as a ratio. The greatest disparity is HillaryClinton5. When the list was last updated, the account followed 2905 others, yet only 25 others followed “her” back. It’s not that HillaryClinton5 has friended the most people — that’s probably the design/art company mentioned above — but that she has the fewest followers. These numbers are a few days out of date, but still give a useful snapshot of the problem.

I’ll admit, I’m a bit nostalgic for the days when Brian Shaler was just following everybody in sight, like it was a game. But then, Shaler is an honest Twitterino. And almost everyone he follows also follows him back.

Twitter Already Has a Spam Problem

Published by William Beutler on March 25, 2008 in Facebook, Spam, Tech Blogosphere, Twitter, Web 2.0 and William Beutler. 4 Comments

Yesterday, Adam Ostrow at Mashable asked, “Is Twitter About to Have a Big Spam Problem?” Well, I wouldn’t yet call it “big,” but the problem is already here. Ostrow wrote:

[L]ately, I’ve been getting an influx of new followers that resemble this character to the right – someone who is following thousands of people, with only a couple hundred following back. In this case, the new follower seems to be a web design studio in Beverly Hills. While I can’t prove it, I have a feeling that this person used a bot to automatically follow me (and a lot of other people) in an effort to take advantage of the fact that a lot of people will simply return the follow – in turn giving this person a new platform to pump their marketing message.

Sidebar to Flyaxe, a suspicious account on TwitterI knew the account he spoke of; I am one of those also being followed by the “Tripix Designs” Twitter account he mentioned. Like Ostrow, I’ve been followed by a handful of these accounts. Aside from inflating my follower count, I didn’t consider it a problem. But this morning I’m convinced.

At right is the sidebar for “Flyaxe” — a Twitter account that added me sometime last night. That’s what it looked like at about 6:30 this morning, Eastern time. Just a couple hours later, Flyaxe is following more than twice as many. Unlike Tripix, it hasn’t even updated once, so it isn’t clearly promotional. Flyaxe appears to be a “19 year-old dude from norway,” as the matching, recent and similarly empty Digg account shows. At least Tripix was honest about its intentions; Flyaxe could be a Trojan horse for just about anything.

The only solution is for Obvious (the under-funded Twitter-makers) to impose restrictions on Twitter accounts. Facebook imposes all kinds of restrictions on its users, and the result is a better experience — at least for those of us who prefer it to MySpace. So let’s say, you cannot follow more than 75% of those following you. Add more followers, and you can follow more people. But we know already that Twitter doesn’t scale well, so anybody following 6,000 people is doing something other than keeping tabs on that many friends. If you want a macro view of Twitter, Twitter tracking exists and so does Tweetscan. The Twitter API and the myriad tools built using it obviate the need to create one account following thousands of other accounts.

Unless, of course, you’re trying to promote something. However, as I’ve written before, Twitter is not especially useful for broad marketing. Thanks to tracking, one could hand-build a targeted list that could be worthwhile for the marketer and the marketed-to. Flyaxe, on the other hand, is wasting my time and his.