Webware

A new report from global public relations firm Weber Shandwick has found that when it comes to Fortune 100 companies, they just don't get Twitter...not yet anyway.

According to the study (PDF), which looked at how the world's 100 top companies used Twitter between late August and early September, the companies have a grand total of 540 Twitter accounts owned by just 73 companies; 27 firms don't participate in the microblogging tool/social network. Some 76 percent of those 540 accounts weren't "updated often" and 52 percent were not actively engaged, as measured by the accounts' use of hash tags, links, references, and retweets.

Weber Shandwick contends that in order for a company to be successful on Twitter, it needs to engage users through five basic activities: listening to followers, participating in conversations, updating accounts frequently, replying to questions, and retweeting useful messages. The PR firm says that if companies perform those activities, they will have a large number of followers. But its research found that 50 percent of Fortune 100 Twitter accounts had fewer than 500 followers.

And companies that had active Twitter accounts weren't making their tweets appealing to followers, the firm found. Fifty-three percent of the accounts did not "display personality, tone, or voice" in their messages. Only one-third of all the researched accounts featured personality "in addition to names and/or photos of those who posted tweets." Seventy-six percent of accounts surveyed posted 500 or fewer tweets on the account. As Weber Shandwick points out, the more tweets of value, the more likely the brand will engage customers.

Big companies aren't doing enough on Twitter.

(Credit: Weber Shandwick)

In the end, Weber Shandwick was concerned about company use (or lack of use) of the Twitter. The organization wrote that "for the majority of Fortune 100 companies, Twitter remains a missed opportunity." The firm said "many of their Twitter accounts, examined by Weber Shandwick, did not appear to listen to or engage with their readers, instead offering a one-way broadcast of press releases, company blog posts, and event information."

Weber Shandwick also offered a word of caution. The firm said that "the number of active Twitter users in the United states already exceeds 20 million and can be expected to continue to grow. This is a massive human database to tap; companies that understand the value of Twitter can benefit from its potential as a viable engagement platform."

A fake report on CNN's iReport site alleged that AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson had been found dead.

(Credit: iReport, screengrab from Business Insider)

Reports began to surface Sunday charging that AT&T had blocked broadband access to parts of the notorious (and powerful) Internet forum site 4chan, which the telecom company confirmed on Monday. Late in the evening, a fake story surfaced on CNN's iReport citizen journalism site alleging that AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson had been "found dead in his multimillion dollar beachfront mansion" after a cocaine overdose.

Suffice it to say that the two events are likely connected. Access to 4chan has since been restored for AT&T broadband customers.

For those who stepped in late: 4chan is sort of like the Internet's equivalent of a league of pirates, den of thieves, or whatever other sort of anarchic analogy you prefer. Decentralized and relying on anonymity, the participants issue large-scale pranks both online and offline, from teaming up with video site eBaumsWorld to launch the "Porn Day" campaign on YouTube to spamming Twitter's trending topics.

The fake iReport disappeared from CNN quickly, perhaps because it read that Stephenson was found "delirious" when "a friend called 911 after a night of what he called, 'male dancers everywhere and the best blow west of the Mississippi.'"

Last October, iReport was the victim of a prank in which a more believable user-submitted story reported that Apple CEO Steve Jobs--who has a well-publicized history of health problems--had suffered a heart attack. It wasn't true, but it was online long enough that Apple's stock took a dip.

AT&T spokesman Michael Coe told CNET News in an e-mailed statement that a denial-of-service attack was what stemmed the temporary block of 4chan traffic and that it has since been restored. "Beginning Friday, an AT&T customer was impacted by a denial-of-service attack stemming from IP addresses connected to img.4chan.org," Coe wrote. "To prevent this attack from disrupting service for the impacted AT&T customer, and to prevent the attack from spreading to impact our other customers, AT&T temporarily blocked access to the IP addresses in question for our customers. This action was in no way related to the content at img.4chan.org; our focus was on protecting our customers from malicious traffic."

"Overnight Sunday, after we determined the denial-of-service threat no longer existed, AT&T removed the block on the IP addresses in question," the AT&T statement continued. "We will continue to monitor for denial-of-service activity and any malicious traffic to protect our customers."

This post was updated at 9:25 a.m. PT.

Perhaps it's a sign of an economy on the brink: I'm getting pitches for sites about crime. This week I heard from reps of both CrimeReports.com and CriminalSearches.com. Together, their services will help you find crime and criminals, let you look for police records on anyone, and illustrate how pervasive crime is in every community in the U.S.

All these crime reporting services take their data from public sources. It's tax dollars, after all, that fund police departments and the courts. The trick is in the packaging. CrimeReports does a nice job of placing criminal activity icons on a Google Map. The main business of the company that makes it, Public Engines, is the repackaging of information for municipalities themselves, which can then use it internally to look for patterns, or put the maps on their own Web sites. The CrimeReports.com site lets users get the data directly, and it's nicely laid out and easy to use. I found the data on the site up-to-date as well.

There is the neighborhood (CrimeReports.com).

Another good source for crime maps, in a limited selection of cities: Everyblock (review).

CriminalSearches, a product from PeopleFinders, lets you find criminals to go with your crimes. Enter in a name, and it will tell you if the person has a criminal record. That's potentially useful if you're hiring people for a business or for domestic services like child care. The details you get back from a search hit are sparse, though. Like PeopleFinders, CriminalSearches makes its money by selling you the full report. Or, if there's someone you want to keep an eye out for, you can sign up for a free alert service that will tell you all the criminal activity of a person in the public databases. Be aware that the site does return traffic violations from some states (I found a family member's record for driving without a seatbelt), so a positive hit in the database certainly does not indicate criminality.

Here's a person you might not want to hire for a retail job (result page from CriminalSearches.com).

The site will also show you a map of registered sex offenders in your neighborhood. If you want the full details on one, again, you'll have to pay the service for the full report. But the free results will probably give more information than you wanted.

The real question these sites raise for me is this: What do you do with this data? Now that I can see that my neighborhood is a magnet for car break-ins and that burglaries are not uncommon, will I change my behavior? Not much. Living in the city means being careful no matter how safe a street appears on the surface. Likewise, I see that there are registered sex offenders within a few blocks. Should I avoid walking down that block with my son? I don't think so. If I were moving, or hiring a babysitter I would, of course, find these services more useful--although even in combination they don't tell what's going to happen with people or places in the future.

But it is sure entertaining to see if your boss, friends, and co-workers have records.

As we wrote on Monday, CNN's citizen journalism pet project iReport was due to get a site of its own. Today the service finally went live as iReport.com, and is already filling up with user content both old and new.

iReport's site has a lot in common with YouTube, showing off a grouping editor-selected videos (and photos) on the top of the page alongside a queue of the latest news content that's been uploaded by users. Each iReport user gets their own page with a listing of their uploaded photos and videos. Similar to Current, content is marked to show if it's been featured on CNN's televised or Web news reporting. adding incentive for others to click on it.

In addition to hosting any news story videos uploaded by users, iReport dishes out assignments to fledgling videographers and photo journalists. On top of the list is the 2008 Presidential elections, alongside weather reports, the ever popular "offbeat images", as well as "stories from Second Life," Linden Lab's MMORPG. Users can upload up to 10 videos and videos at a time, with each one taking up to 100MB in size.

Interestingly enough, the videos on iReport.com cannot be embedded on third party sites, although there are links to share it on five major social bookmarking and news services. Users also have the option of making the file downloadable, letting others grab it to play on their PCs or portable media devices. Syndication (albeit direct) is the name of the game.

In the future the service plans to increase the ties between stories, as well as where users are reporting from by integrating world maps. Already there is a "more on this story" feature that groups together content by assignment. The service also employs tags and a "newsiest" feature which "combines freshness, popularity, activity, and ratings" in an algorithm not unlike the ones found on social news sites like Digg and Reddit.

More screenshots after the break.

CNN's iReport site features playable Web videos and pictures submitted by users. Media that has been chosen to show up on CNN.com or CNN TV programming gets its own 'On CNN' badge seen in the top left of the player.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

CNN is close to expanding its "iReport" user-generated reporting initiative into a separate Web site, MediaWeek wrote Monday.

The new site, to be hosted at iReport.com, will be a repository for user-submitted news content--video, audio, and photos. Visitors can navigate through categories of news (like sports, weather, and politics), rate content, and embed it elsewhere on the Web. Contributors will be able to create profiles, and regulars can build up individual followings. As for filtering, the new site will be moderated once content has already been posted to the site; this is a change from CNN's current strategy with iReport, in which only select contributions are posted to CNN's Web site. This obviously means that the news runs the risk of inaccuracies and pranksters, but one could assume that moderation as well as community interaction could keep the fake-news factor to a minimum.

Right now, hubs for "citizen journalism" on the Web include well-backed companies like Current Media, which recently filed for an IPO, as well as start-ups of varying size like NowPublic and GroundReport.

CNN first launched the iReport project in August 2006, and since then has received over 100,000 photo and video submissions, according to MediaWeek. In October, the Time Warner-owned news brand established a presence for the initiative in virtual world Second Life.

Stephen Colbert

(Credit: Comedy Central)

Update at 7:19 a.m. PDT: Facebook comment added.

Stephen Colbert should consider naming Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as his running mate* in his quasi-legitimate presidential campaign; the social-networking site has been the political satirist's prime rallying grounds.

Sometime on Thursday night, a Facebook fan group for Colbert's campaign met its membership goal of 1 million Facebook members--and the group was founded just over a week ago.

The group, "1,000,000 Strong for Stephen T Colbert" (the "T" stands for Tyrone, for the record) was started by a Facebook user shortly after The Colbert Report host announced that he was going to enter the presidential primary in his home state of South Carolina as a "favorite son." It's a take-off on the "1,000,000 Strong for Barack Obama" Facebook group, which has yet to crack 400,000 members after nine months. The equivalent Colbert group took just over a week to hit a million.

"Colbert-Zuckerberg '08" does have a nice ring to it.

Several blogs have asserted that this is the fastest-growing group in Facebook's history. I find that very easy to believe, but there is no official confirmation: Facebook says it neither tabulates how fast groups grow nor offers a central list of the biggest groups on the site. (Facebook execs presumably have other things on their mind, like this whole "Microsoft thing.")

On the more serious side of things, the light-hearted enthusiasm over Colbert's "presidential campaign" could be a sign that young American voters are getting sick of Election 2008's career politicians have already been plastered all over the media. The really scary part: there's still over a year to go in this race.

Meanwhile, Editor and Publisher reports that not only will the mayor of Columbia, S.C., declare this coming Sunday "Stephen Colbert Day" when the "favorite son" comes for a visit, but that polling firm Rasmussen has actually bothered to include Colbert in a telephone survey that pitted him against Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republican hopeful Rudy Giuliani.

Nation, these are frightening times we live in.

*Yes, yes, I know that it probably breaks election law for the 23-year-old Zuckerberg to appear on a campaign ticket, and I also know that he's probably too busy taking over the world to bother with politics.

This one's kind of a bitter irony. We've all been reading over and over about how traditional news outlets are turning to the Web in order to boost readership and advertising revenue in the face of a well-documented decline in print media (Wired magazine has a feature in this month's issue about newspaper chain Gannett's attempt to modernize). But in this case, it's the other way around: The Associated Press, according to a report on Friday evening, has announced that it's axing its youth-oriented, blog- and video-heavy ASAP news portal because it proved to be a failed experiment.

The two-year-old ASAP, which was created as an alternative news hub for the generation of young professionals who typically don't turn on a TV news show unless Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert is involved, will go under on October 31. Director Kathleen Carroll said in a memo that it simply wasn't profitable enough.

A look at what's on ASAP's front page. Not nearly enough on 'the news.'

(Credit: The Associated Press)

This is really too bad, in my opinion, because the AP had a great chance to show that it's possible for an established and reputable name in reporting to create a separate property geared toward the YouTube crowd. Unfortunately, it fell short in a few ways--ASAP offers up traditional AP news stories mixed with podcasts, video footage, map mashups, and blog commentary, but most of it isn't integrated as seamlessly as it could be. There's no central video player, for example.

Also, you have to do some clicking to find what you want to. Top billing is currently given to a feature on The Simpsons, a story and accompanying video about "office casual" fashion, and a link to ASAP's main news blog. Headlines, meanwhile, are kept in small print under verticals like News, Entertainment, and Sports; there's a ticker of AP stories at the top. It just isn't an adequate presentation of what's important--stratifying headlines by freshness and relevance is something that I think the Huffington Post does very well, for example.

The unappealing structure might've been behind ASAP's demise, or perhaps it was a matter of publicity: I'd never even heard of the project until I was at a party thrown by some New York-area media entrepreneurs and there happened to be an ASAP videoblogger walking around.

There's some cool content on ASAP, so enjoy it while it lasts--and stay tuned for more developments in the ongoing evolution of "next-generation news."

Google Analytics relaunched today, adding several new visualization tools and ways to share data with others. The tool gives Web site owners a free and relatively easy system to keep track of how people are accessing content on their site, including ways to track which content is getting the most views, how much time each user is spending on the site, and the number of visits by time of day. There's also a handy map overlay which will show you where your users are, right down to the city they live in.

No it's not an episode of Jericho, it's site usage by geography.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

One of the updated features is the Analytics dashboard, which is now completely customizable and has simplified data. Users can relocate, add, and remove the various data widgets, in a similar fashion to that of iGoogle. Also new is the option to e-mail or export reports as PDFs, which can now be scheduled to be sent out automatically every day, week, month or quarter using a built-in calendar. Previously you were only able to export it as a non-human-friendly XML file.

The service is mainly an extension of Google's AdWords program, which lets site owners purchase words that link to various parts of their site via contextual ads that show up on Google or partnered search engine results. But even if you're not interested in making money it's a free Analytics solution that requires no software, just a line of code on any page you want to keep track of. If you're a WordPress user, there's even a plug-in to automatically add it to your site. Blogger users are also able to add it by tweaking their blog template.

There's more information about the update on the Google Analytics Blog post. For more screenshots of the new dashboard, keep reading.

This is Google Analytic's new dashboard. Each stat box is its own widget, and can be moved around or closed ad-hoc.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Porsche P9611: Guinea pig

(Credit: Porsche Design Group)

We've often thought that real-time traffic reports was an obvious use of interactive technologies, but for some reason they're still not universal. (These thoughts typically come to us while stuck on a freeway, which is often.) But a German GPS software company called Navigon says it will "radically change" this sluggish pace of development with a free service that will be offered with GPS services right out of the box, according to Twice.

The company, which is working with ClearChannel's Real Time Traffic, has made a deal with the Porsche Design Group as the first brand to include the service with its Porsche P9611 navigation device. Navigon is also offering Zagat Survey restaurant guide information along with traffic reports, in case you need to change your reservations at the last-minute because of traffic jams.

This service sounds great, but we just hope that ClearChannel's information is more current than the local radio reports we typically hear. Maybe it's just us, but those dispatches almost always seem to report accidents and jams that have long been cleared. It's all academic anyway, at least for now, until Navigon's service gets into other gadgets: The Porsche P9611 is selling for $899. So the definition of "free" is, to say the least, a fluid one.