One day, in a fury of inspiration, I created Bivings Buzzword Bingo, which is displayed below:

Descriptions of each word and more information after the jump:

Happy Hour - The reason to work hard on Fridays!  One of our favorites is Bourbon's on Wisconsin Ave.

Flat pages - We are in the process of creating these for IW Basic.

Blog - What you are reading, of course!

Dev Meeting - Occurs at least once a week

Branding - We are currently going through an extensive branding process, which includes the debut of a new ImpactWatch logo very soon.

Twitter - You can follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/bivings

Houston - Our internal program for handling administration daily tasks and such

Rater - A person who provides the human sentiment analysis that sets IW apart from the rest!

Schedule - Which we are on…all the time…I promise…

Web 2.0 - Everyone's favorite vague, but awesome, term

Conference Call - The beauty of working on the Internet is that we can have clients all over the world.

Server - Anupam's babies

ImpactWatch - Our pride and joy

Basic - We are excited to be rolling out this new level of IW soon; read about it more here!

Time Sheet - Gotta fill these out, gotta keep track

New Media - My personal favorite thing to talk about

"No worries" - Starting with Steve, this has become our unofficial catchphrase for ending conversations

Client - the most important person to us

Swag - We recently introduced some new swag ideas at the Personal Democracy Forum; you can look at some pictures of them by clicking here.

Google - It's getting hard to live without it.  Read some of our feelings on Google here, here, and here.

Vetting - I'm still not sure exactly what this means, but Todd says it without moderation.

Drupal - I'm pretty sure Eric worships Drupal at this point.

Programming - It's what we do (half of us anyway).

Intern - Our current summer interns are Eric, Samantha, Nate, and John, and I don't know what we'd do without them!

PDF - stands for both the Personal Democracy Forum and the file attachment; it's a very convenient BINGO word.

NOTE: We tried playing this once during a Dev Meeting, and we came up with a Bingo so quickly that our grandparents would be jealous!

Pros

1. Tabs! I am a sucker for tabs. They are easy to organize and keep content from becoming cluttered. My biggest complaint when the Facebook team released the API was that too many people's profiles were becoming littered with third-party applications. These apps were visually detracting, and had nothing to do with what I found Facebook to be most useful for (keeping in touch with acquaintences). With the new redesign, one can stick all their scrabble-playing-super-wall-poking ugliness on its own tab and I'll never have to go near it.
2. More intuitive photo platform. I didn't post a screenshot of my photos tab, but it is a far more intuitive way to access other users' photographs. It borrows heavily from the minimalistic UI of picasa, and now I don't have to go searching through a user's profile for a link to find their albums.
3. Better use of horizontal space. Facebook finally spread its wings a bit. The redesign makes a much better use of horizontal space, and avoids feeling clausterphobic by combining this new feature with the tabs, mentioned above. The wider limit also allows third-party developers much more freedom when it comes to mapping the UI of their applications, so I expect to see better things than graffiti and super wall.
4. Improved 'friends' module. With the redesign, the friends module was improved. Now you have a choice as to how many thumbnail pictures to display, as well as designating which ones (there were some third-party applications to have "favorite friends" displayed on the previous facebook design, does anybody know what they were called?) if you would rather permanently display your best friends.
5. Smart use of AJAX. The AJAX on the new design is both aesthetically pleasing and purpose-driven. The way I like it to be.

Cons

1. Advertisements in my face. I remember when Facebook had no ads. Then it had text-based ads. Later, they adopted vertical banners. Now, they've put those vertical banners front and center. With the decreased clutter on the pages (which is a good thing!), it leaves the advertisements to stick out like a sore thumb. With the previous design, I found I could largely ignore advertisements if I just pretended they were another annoying application.
2. More clicks. My preference for tabs aside, the prosecution points out that there is something to be said about having all "crucial" profile information contained on one page. When I need to know if the young lady in my rhetoric and composition class has awful taste in music or not, I have an additional click to consider. Multiply this by lots of young ladies and you're talking about a serious time investment.

Overall, I'm pleased with the new Facebook design. I think it's a step in the right direction, which is a personal first. This new implementation puts the criticisms of previous redesigns into perspective. I'm sure the previous flaws helped shape the success of this release. Anything to add?

Catch some pictures of the redesign after the break.

Here's what my profile looks like:

Wall Tab (thanks to J.W. for the censor-rific wall posts)

Info Tab

P.S. If you haven't gotten the notice to switch to the new Facebook redesign, you can access it at http://www.new.facebook.com/ (don't forget the "www").

• A Different Monthly Archive Script - Manages date-based archives.

• Akismet - Filters possible spam comments.

• Captcha From ProtectWebForm - Helps protect against computer-generated comments.

• Category Cloud - Displays a category cloud, using bigger font and different colors for important categories. Based on Weighted Categories.

• cforms - Allows you to create custom forms on your Wordpress blog.

• Chunk Urls - Shortens URLs in comments so that they won't break the site.

• Comment Timeout - Automatically closes comments on blog entries after a user-configurable period of time. It has options which allow you to keep the discussion open for longer on older posts which have had recent comments accepted, or to place a fixed limit on the total number of comments in the discussion.

• EditorMonkey - Turns the normal WordPress textarea into a WYSIWYG editor using TinyMCE or FCKeditor. Also integrates spell checking into the editor interface using the FCK Speller Pages plugin and ieSpell.

• Google XML Sitemap - Automatically creates a search engine friendly sitemap for your blog.

• podPress - Allows integration of Podcasts.

• Popularity Contest - Enables ranking of posts by popularity; using the behavior of visitors to determine each post's popularity.

• Redirect Old Slugs - Permits changing of posts slugs without breaking the old ones.

• SEO Title Tag - Search engine optimizes blog posts by allowing the creation of a customized title tag for any post or page.

• ShareThis - Lets visitors share a post or page with others.

• Simple Trackback Validation - Eliminates spam trackbacks by checking the IP address of the sender and by checking the linked webpage for a link back to the blog.

• TypePad AntiSpam - Checks comments against the TypePad AntiSpam web service to see if they look like spam or not.

• WordPress Mobile Edition - Shows a mobile view of the post or page if the visitor is on a known mobile device.

• wp-cache - Cache module that configures and manages the system.

• wp-notable - Adds social bookmark links to each blog entry.

• WP-Polls - Adds customizable polls to posts and pages.

• WP-Polls Widget - Displays single or multiple polls from the WP-Polls plugin.

During the webinar Cox discussed the concept of selective attraction.  This is basically a smarty pants way of describing the importance of attracting the trade show attendees who are the most interested and in most need of the product that an exhibit is pitching.  These people are much more likely to purchase the product or service than other attendees, and devoting time to someone who isn't interested is a waste of time when a potential client is left alone.

This makes sense since, considering our recent experience, not everyone who is attending a politics and technology conference is interested and/or in need of a media monitoring program.  For instance, I met plenty of great folks at our ImpactWatch booth, but some didn't need what we offer.  However, I hope we attracted the people who were interested in our product.

So how am I going to tie trade show exhibit metrics and search engine optimization together?

Well, selective attraction is also an important concept in SEO.  For example, we may optimize the ImpactWatch site to rank high for searches for a general keyword like "news," but a very small portion of these searchers are interested in a media monitoring product.  Perhaps they simply want to know how the stock market is doing or what Punxsutawney Phil did on Groundhog Day, not reputation management. 

Thus, it sometimes is wasteful to invest in ranking well for a general keyword.  That's why the long tail of search is an important factor to consider.  Although focusing on appropriate long tail keywords may attract fewer site visitors, if a greater portion of site visitors is coming from a more niche term are likely to convert from a visitor to a customer, that is a better practice — especially since it is probably less competitive to rank well for a niche term.  

To learn more read our SEO Basics white paper; we discuss selective attraction in the keyword section.

The list of Wii additions is getting quite long, with the Wii Zapper, Sport Set, Wii Wheel, and numerous third-party additions all being part of the growing family.  That family will soon welcome two new members: the WiiSpeak and the Wii MotionPlus.

The WiiSpeak is Nintendo's attempt to cash in on a market that they often neglect-the online player market.  Quizzically, the WiiSpeak is not a headset, but rather something that you plug in and sit anywhere you'd like in the room.  Personally, I would think that this would hinder its use, because it would pick up every voice in the room.  Realistically, however, how many people are in a room full of people when they decide to play an online game that requires speech?  With a room full of friends, I'd be more likely to just play with them as opposed to online.  In this regard, the WiiSpeak may actually be a great thing for online play: a microphone that doesn't require you to wear a funny-looking headset.

The Wii MotionPlus is the bigger deal this season, as it could change the entire face of the Wii platform.  According to early reviews, the MotionPlus plugs into the end of the Wiimote and greatly increases the level of sensitivity in your hand motions.  In a clever move by Nintendo, the MotionPlus is going to be packaged with Wii Sports Resort, the sequel to the most widely sold Wii game of all time (below is a screen shot taken from Wired Online).

While technology-wise, this is a great step forward for the Wii, I motion that perhaps the step isn't one that needed to be taken, just yet.  Third-party developers already have enough struggles creating game that take full advantage of the motion sensor controls, so I doubt they will be more successful in creating games that have to incorporate even more sensitivity.

This move is also another step in the line of ‘Wiiditions' that my wallet could do without, but you have already heard me gripe about that.  I wonder if most Wii games will eventually require this MotionPlus device, or if all of them will contain some sort of disclaimer that "This game would be way more fun if you bought a MotionPlus!"

Overall, it's great that the Nintendo developments continue to find new ways for people to enjoy their Wii consoles, but I'd prefer if the company simply put out additional great games instead of new attachments that I have to buy.

[This post would be way more fun if you bought the TBGBlogdiggity attachment]

(1) Wordpress now tracks your revision history, so you can now revert to old versions of your posts should you desire.  This will come in handy.

(2) You can now add captions easily to your images in Wordpress.  This feature is already present on the Wordpress-driven CNN Political Ticker (see image on right for sample). 

(3) Wordpress now allows you to preview your themes before publishing them to your blog.  At The Bivings Group, we have dev sites for all our client work so the lack of a theme preview has never been an issues.  However, being able to preview your design changes before making them live is huge for people running personal blogs who don’t have the benefit of a development environment.

(4) Wordpress has launched a posting bookmarklet, which allows users to post to their blog directly from their browser.  Basically, now as you browse the Internet you will be able to click on a Press This link in your bookmark area to quickly post a video, photo, snippet of text, etc. to your blog.  So, according to the Wordpress blog, “if you click “Press This” from a Youtube page it’ll magically extract the video embed code, and if you do it from a Flickr page it’ll make it easy for you to put the image in your post.”

I’ve used Tumblr for my personal blog for a long time, mostly posting quick links, quotes, pictures and videos.  Frankly, the Tumblr bookmarklet, which is a clear inspiration for the Wordpress version, is the only reason I’ve been able to keep up a personal blog.  It basically takes the static out of posting - essentially allowing you to read and post in one motion.  While the idea is clearly borrowed from others, this is a great new feature for Wordpress.

Below is a screenshot of the Wordpress bookmarklet.

Anyway, this seems like a great release.  Check out the Wordpress announcement post to learn more.

Below is a video providing an overview of new features.

Welcome to the most grassroots-driven platform development effort in the history of American politics!

The Republican Party is seeking your input as we develop the policies and principles upon which we should stand for the next four years. On this website, you can share your thoughts, participate in polls, and communicate directly with the policymakers who will be shaping the party’s agenda. All comments and feedback will be reviewed and taken into full consideration as we prepare for our convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

We hope that this process will guarantee the greatest amount of public input into any platform in American history!

Based on those words, I hoped to see something truly powerful and transparent like Dell IdeaStorm or MyStarbucks Idea, which are truly open platforms where users can submit, vote on and discuss ideas on how the respective companies can better serve their customers.  Both Dell and Starbucks have given customers tools they can use to actually organize against the companies if they choose.

The GOP Platform website is much more limited than the Dell and Starbucks tools.  Users can submit and browse ideas, but there is no way to promote an idea or to really have a discussion around it.  Also, according to David, the RNC appears to be reviewing ideas before making them viewable to the public.  So basically all you can do it submit an idea and review the ideas of others that have been vetted by the RNC.  So controls have been put in place to prevent things from getting out of hand.

My issue here is really with the packaging.  Like the DNC’s McCainpedia, GOP Platform promises one thing and delivers another.  It is sort of lame to hype something with the vague promise of openness and then neuter it so that the grassroots can’t truly share their thoughts in an open way.  If you don’t want to be truly transparent, don’t launch tools that hint that you are.  It is disingenuous.

To me GOP Platform seems like an effort to replicate the magic of the truly open My.BarackObama.com, while removing the risk of something like the FISA uprising happening.  You can’t have it both ways.

Update: The RNC wrote to David All regarding moderation.  They say the moderation policy is “only to prevent liberal bloggers from taking over the site.”

Also, Nancy Scola from TechPresident likes GOP Platform site a lot more than I did, calling it “mediated crowdsourcing.”  Also, the DNC plans to launch a similar website.

Google Labs announced this on their blog:

"[...] excited to announce today's release of Lively by Google - a 3D virtual experience that is the newest addition to Google Labs.

The Lively team wants to help people experience another dimension of the web. We hope you will use the product to express yourself with and without words, and to do this in the places you already visit on the web."

When I came to, I thought it had just been a horrifying nightmare. But there it was, still on my screen: Google released their own browser-residing version of Second Life. Reluctantly, I installed the plugin enabling me to take part in the "3D virtual experience". Toying around with it for a bit, I created the Bivings Lounge. After the break is my list of why Google Lively is unsuitable for just about anything beyond making a cool-looking-bear-pirate avatar.

•  The approach of the platform does not take itself seriously. This includes the user interface design aesthetic, the cartoony selection of avatars, and a soundtrack that makes me think I'm stuck in a pop anime. I have come to expect a Google product to be more about productivity, synonymous with their branding — help me get things done, faster and smarter — Lively by Google falls quite short.
• There isn't enough to do. There's nothing that this platform really offers me that I couldn't already do through email, messaging programs/SMS, or social networking websites. If I wanted to increase my personal connection to someone online, I'd start video conferencing.
• The platform is not as lightweight as it seems. Shoving something into a browser via plugin isn't always the way to go, and it doesn't always mean it's going to be lightweight. While it does allow the embedding of these rooms in any webpage (arguably the strongest offering of this entire product), the rooms take a long time to fully connect to (and sometimes time out completely).
• The controls are awkward. Moving your avatar, furniture, and other elements on Lively isn't as easy as one might think, and for something that feels like a videogame, lacks decent keyboard functionality. It combines the awkward interface of click-to-move with the neck craning camera angles of an uncompensated third person viewpoint.
• Limited Compatibility. Currently, there is no Mac compatibility, and the only browsers supported are IE and Firefox. Non-mainstream users (read: people who are generally interested in Google Labs releases) will have to sit this one out.
• Chatting is dead. In this era of IM and social networking, it seems that Google Labs did not receive the memo that chat communities seem to be on their way out. I'm well aware that IRC survives to this day, but then again, IRC has an actual use.

All in all, I'm not impressed with this release by Google Labs. I'd prefer that they stick to their branding and release tools most people actually have a use for.

From the article, the reader can discern three important ‘take-away notes' on creating a useful giveaway:

Make it personal

ValueClick made and delivered cupcakes to several important business relations to emphasize their company's birthday.  Not only was it a great conversation starter, but who doesn't love free food at the workplace?  It was easy to remember who gave the item and why they did so.

Make it keep people involved

Rove Mobile handed out keys at one trade show, several of which could be used to open a safe and receive a cash check at the end of the show.  This ingeniously kept people coming back to the booth, opening up more channels of conversation and small talk.

Make it creative

We all have a desk full of companies' pencils, pens, and notepads, but what about picture frames, yo-yos, and thumbtacks?  Creativity doesn't have to be expensive, and it easily separates your company from the pack.

Swag can also be used for employees just as well as it can be used for potential clients.  I love Earthlink's idea of giving new employees a bag full of Earthlink tools and clothing.  In that very same year, they experienced a 50% lower turnover rate with their new employees.  Employees cherish a friendly and team-oriented atmosphere at work, which I am certain the swag helped foster.

Why do I bring this up?  Well, recently five employees from The Bivings Group went to the Personal Democracy Forum to represent and promote ImpactWatch.  You can read our impressions of PDF here, here, here, here, and here.  Beforehand, we bounced around ideas for new swag that we could use to make an impression on the crowd.  We were talking politicians and journalists here, people who have seen enough swag in their lifetime to probably build a house out of personalized pencils.

I'm pretty proud of the items that we ended up using.  The first was a stressball connected to a springy line, which made it a hybrid between a stressball and a yo-yo.  Not only was it a good conversation starter, but it put a smile on my face to see journalists playing with them during the speeches.  Secondly, knowing that we had lots of computer people in our midst, we gave out keyboard brushes with the ImpactWatch logo on them.  Finally, the PDF had its own versions of swag bags to give away, so we created a carbineer/highlighter combo to stick in those.  They were all a big hit, and we definitely got the ImpactWatch name out to many new people.

Today his Twitter account included messages about what Culberson says are efforts by Democrats to censor the content he sends out from the Floor.

Here is his first tweet on the topic:

I just learned the Dems are trying to censor Congressmen’s ability to use Twitter Qik YouTube Utterz etc - outrageous and I will fight them <link>

This was followed a short while later with this clarification:

They want to require prior approval of all posts to any public social media/internet/www site by any member of Congress!!! <link>

This afternoon, Culberson’s staff put out a statement on their website protesting the proposed action. Culberson’s release provides the following explanation:

Millions of Americans today utilize free, unregulated and uncensored websites like YouTube on a daily basis to not only obtain information from their elected leaders about what’s going on in their government, but to also give feedback and easily share that information with others. The advent of new media technology has empowered American citizens with real-time information about the policy debates and actions being undertaken by Congress. This has increasingly forced Congress to become more transparent and made it easier for American citizens to hold their elected leaders accountable.

The Committee on House Administration is considering a new rule that could bring this trend to a screeching halt. The Committee is considering the adoption of new rules that would require outside websites such as YouTube to comply with House regulations before Members of Congress could post videos on them. Under the proposal, the House Administration Committee would develop a list of “approved” websites, and Members of Congress could post content only such websites.

If the proposed rule is adopted, the free flow of information over the Internet between Americans and their representatives will be significantly curtailed. Americans who currently use free websites like YouTube to obtain uncensored daily information about congressional policy debates will instead be forced to go to websites “approved” by the House Administration Committee in order to continue getting such information. This would amount to new government censorship of the Internet, by a panel of federal officials that is neither neutral nor independent.

I did a few searches trying to find more information on what is happening exactly, but so far the only info I’ve found is from Culberson himself.  This story will be interesting to follow.  If you find more information please post it in the comments and I’ll update the story.

Update: Here is a link to the proposal Culberson says will cause him to have his tweets reviewed prior to being posted.  The proposal sounds fairly innocuous to me, but I don’t have a deep enough understanding of the law to know the true ramifications of what is being proposed.

Update 2: Techdirt has a post up that claims Culberson is misrepresenting what the proposal will actually do in an effort to score some partisan points against the Democrats.  Earlier in the day before Culberson’s Twitter mobilization efforts, David All weighed in against the proposal on TechRepublican while Soren Dayton wrote a post critical of the proposal on The Next Right.

Update 3: Mashable has a post up on the topic as well.