Gotcha Moments

Throughout the Personal Democracy Forum a lot of smart people were making impassioned pleas for candidates to use technology to have an open dialogue with the American people. Be real. Be authentic. Tear down the walls that have been erected between the candidates and voters.

It all sounds great....

NPR on Ron Paul

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

You can listen to the piece here.

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

How to Run an Online Community

Corporations, media organizations and even political campaigns are launching online communities left and right seeminly. Many of them are doing so without having any real knowledge of what makes a good online community go or how to manage the community if it flourishes.

Matthew Haughey from the massively successful community site Metafilter has a good post up providing some tips....

The Problem with Newsvine

I’ve always been an admirer of the concept and execution of the social news site Newsvine. I wrote about it glowingly when it first came out. Conceptually it always seemed like a good compromise between the chaos of sites like Digg and the top down nature of traditional newspaper websites....

Washington Post Launches Social Networking Component

Late last week the Washington Post launched a light social networking component called My Post. The feature allows users to create a profile that will be linked to whenever a user comments on a Post article. The profile includes personal information about the user and aggregators all of a user’s comments....