The conference agenda this year looks great. It is amazing how much Micah has really grown this event with Andrew over the years.  I have been to the last three and it is good to see a heavy focus again on detailed sessions, made more possible this year since it is now two days.  

We will be taking the conference as an opportunity to pull the veil off of our new work on Managing News and show off the new clipping tools that we have built that can help out campaigns. Beta use has been great, and later next week we'll be making an announcement about a new option that will lower the barriers to entry a lot. We've gotten a bunch of requests from smaller NGOs that want to use this for just a couple key terms.

If you are going to be at PDF, you can be sure to find me at a couple key sessions.  Here are my favorite ones so far:

* Visualizing the Political Blogosphere

* Covering the "Click-ocracy": Tracking the Internet's Impact on Politics and Journalism

* Reinventing political media (the rise of semi-pro journalism?)

* Inside the Presidential Campaigns: What Worked, What Didn't Peter

* Design Principles for Online Democracy: Connecting Government and Constituents in the Internet Age

I am excited to see a lot of you folks next week!

“Even one negative consumer comment online can end up influencing many customers.”

That’s a quote from Zhou Chunlan, CEO of Daqi, a Beijing-based reputation monitoring service recently profiled in Business Week that has gone to work for several multi-national companies helping them manage their online reputations in China. One of Daqi’s key services is to help pick up potential crises before they turn into public relations disasters. In the booming Chinese economy, one person’s grumblings about customer service or a faulty product can have a huge effect on a company’s success there.

A few months ago Daqi noticed a disgruntled Toyota customer posting on Chinese product message boards about his negative experiences with the company. He had put down a deposit on a Corolla more than three months ago and was still waiting for the car to be delivered. Read more »

I heard the news this morning that Hillary Clinton was dropping out of the Democratic primary race. As soon as I could, I went to Managing News where I’m tracking news about the candidates to see what was happening.

Right away I noticed that one keyword in particular received a huge spike: the Associated Press. Here’s a screenshot showing the jump in mentions of the AP today compared to the last two weeks in the political news I’m tracking.

The AP had been mentioned in about 0.5% of the stories pulled in by Managing News over the last two weeks. Today that figure jumped over ten-fold to 5.3%.

So why was there suddenly so much traffic around the Associated Press? The AP was reporting that Clinton will concede the nomination to Obama this evening after the results come in from Montana and South Dakota, and a lot of other sources were citing them on this.

That story drew an immediate retraction from Clinton campaign spokesperson Terry McAuliffe (who, as you can see shown in blue below, saw his own bump in mentions today). Read more »

After the earthquake hit yesterday, a big red dot appeared over China on the Managing News dashboard map that dwarfed all the other dots around the globe. Next to it in the tag cloud, I saw a few new terms in red that I knew were probably related to the China story, and I started clicking to learn more. I quickly learned that Sun Weide is the Olympic spokesperson giving updates about the changes in the Olympic torch relay plans due to the earthquake, and that the construction project at the Three Gorges Dam wasn't affected. But who was Ronen Medzini, and why was "cellular telephone" showing up as a relevant term?

It turns out he is an Israeli student in the Chengdu area who sent a text message to the AP after the earthquake: "Traffic jams, no running water, power outs, everyone sitting in the streets, patients evacuated from hospitals sitting outside and waiting."

Read more »

A couple weeks ago Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch had a post on social information overload that we really liked - Web 3.0 Will Be About Reducing the Noise - and Twhirl Isn't Helping. The key part: "I need less data, not more data. I need to know what is important, and I don’t have time to sift through thousands of Tweets and Friendfeed messages and blog posts and emails and IMs a day to find the five things that I really need to know."

The issue Erick gets at in his post doesn't have any respect for the kind of media though. With the advent of what seems like a dozen new "web 2.0" social apps every day (I get more beta invites than I know what to do with), the social web that was supposed to help solve some issues with information overload (benefits of trusted relationships, etc.) is now going the way of mainstream media. Too much information and what happens? Erick says in his post he's "increasingly ignoring" it. Read more »

Yesterday Alex Steed posted a great article about a discussion he and Eric had earlier this week about online strategy, aggregation, and Managing News. One area they talked about was the impact listening in - and acting on - online chatter is having on companies. They also hit on some interesting points on how listening to what others are saying online creates a more holistic overall online approach, which in the end of the day, leads to better strategy and outreach.

You can read the whole article here.