Be sure to make a motivational poster of your own with the parody motivator generator.

LinkedIn

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StumbleUpon

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Twitter

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Digg

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Facebook

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Delicious

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The Internet (says it all)

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Related posts

• 10 Rules of Social Media (nowsourcing.com)
• Quasi-motivational posters (dougbelshaw.com)
• SEO Motivators (wiep.net)

Time for a fun Friday post. Digg has really been coming out with some
strange stuff recently. Last week, you probably saw the David at the
Dentist video, but you might not have seen that the Digg community burst into song off of Bukowsky‘s, “IS THIS REAL LIFE?!!?!?!” comment:

download dvd films

And then we have the Digg count error from yesterday. A story had a
Digg comment count of almost 4.3 billion Diggs and did not frontpage:

[image credit]

Looks like the bug has been fixed, and the story now is holding at 138 diggs.

You’ve got to have a good sense of humor if you want to work and play in social media. Have a great weekend, everyone!

Related posts:

• David After Dentist – Mahalo (tsurch.com)
• UK Sites Dominate Digg (blogstorm.co.uk)
• How Did We Get Zero Diggs? (holytaco.com)

Join Brian and other participants from 11:00AM til 1:00PM and discover how Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Digg can revolutionize your business’ marketing strategy. The Seminar/Luncheon costs $30 (this includes lunch and materials). If you are interested in joining Brian and the NowSourcing team, please follow the link below and reserve your slot. Seating is limited, so please RSVP.

Social Media is ALREADY Changing Your Business
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With us today is top digger and the brains behind SocialBlade.com – FirstDigg.

1 – Tell us a little bit about your background.
I’m 28 years old, currently live in New York (the state, not the city), and like long walks on the beach — wait what type of interview is this again? =]  I’ve have been working in the telecom/networking/software industries since I graduated college (go UMass!) and am originally from Massachusetts.  I like to travel and have been able to do my fair share of both business & personal travel over the course of my life so far and have met many cool people in the process.

Meeting Israeli Diggers: MediaSight, TalSiach, FirstDigg, AllINeed

Meeting NYC Diggers: numberneal, FirstDigg, gbarberi

Meeting fellow YouTubers (some famous some not so)

2 – What made you first interested in Digg?

I’ve been a Digger for almost four years now joining shortly after the site was created.  I believe I first heard about Digg from the TV show The Screen Savers when Kevin was introducing it to the world. For many years before that I had been going to Slashdot for my news and Digg looked to be an up and coming replacement for old-style media. At the beginning I still needed to visit other sources because Digg just didn’t have everything, but I loved that anyone could submit something and you had the ‘preview’ of what was going on in the upcoming section where you too could help out and pick what was good and bury what was bad.  At the beginning I did a lot of looking around in /upcoming, but after a while it got overwhelming and I stopped going there.  A little over a year ago though I decided to try my hand at submitting and I discovered a completely different side of Digg, both rewarding & challenging but above all, addicting.

3  – What inspired you to create SocialBlade?

When I first started submitting to Digg it was purely to see ‘what it would take’ to hit the front page, but after the first day of doing that I quickly became addicted. I found that I was good at it and that I could use this skill to hopefully fill in some of the missing gaps in news articles that didn’t make it to Digg.  I then started to look around to see who was most successful on the site and started studying them a bit to get tips.  One of these people with Muhammad Saleem.  What he was doing on twitter was occasionally when one of his stories hit the front page he tweeted a [Digg Threshold] message with some data on # of Diggs, etc.  I found that information very interesting, but found that there was no way to find out how many Diggs a story took to hit unless you saw it at the moment that it did hit.  Since this information wasn’t available anywhere I decided to take a crack at the Digg API and see what I could come up with, and that’s where SocialBlade came from as a permanent source of this information for everyone.

4 – Tell us about SocialBlade’s improvements over time, and plans for the future?

Since SocialBlade went live almost a year ago it has added graphs, trends, and one of its most popular features, the top user listings.  The top user listing section though I can’t take all the credit for, though I’ve done a bit of improvement to it. Christopher Finke is the original author of that but discontinued it releasing his code.  I picked it up and integrated it into SocialBlade to continue to let people see that information. As for plans for the future, I’ve have a ton of ideas just haven’t had the time to create them yet.  One of the things I had wanted to do for example was create a sort of user portal around the site where you could create an account & customize what you saw, and also get alerts when stories you are tracking/submitted go popular. Hopefully someday I’ll get the time to create that.

5 – Views on Digg criticism / bannings? Surely you have something to say, as SocialBlade has the Digg Graveyard.

Lets be honest here, some people truly do abuse the system and do, even beyond TOS violations, and do unethical things to get stories onto Digg. There are sites that sell Diggs or automatically Digg stories for you and I do believe that those type of things shouldn’t be tolerated. That being said I am against the complete all out ban on scripts and I feel that many of the bans may be unsubstantiated.

I’m a programmer and a hacker (the good definition of the word) at heart and I feel that there are so many things that scripts can do to enhance a website.  Scripts are just tools which are neither good nor bad.  With tools you can build anything from a spaceships to bombs.

Just to illustrate the point, I use a whole horde of greasemonkey scripts across the internet to to add features to sites that are missing.  For example I hate having to click on the next page button time after time on websites to continue to use the site.  I prefer to be able to just keep scrolling down and down the page and have it automatically loaded for me, and on Digg, Flickr, Twitter, and many other sites I’m able to do this with a script called AutoPagerize. Just so there is  no confusion though let me say flat out, I don’t use any scripts on Digg to automatically Digg anything or any malicious or gaming scripts so if you’re reading this Digg, don’t ban me please!

So in short, I feel that scripts themselves should not be a reason for banning, its what you do with them & what ones you use that should be looked at. Also, the bannings aren’t really helping anything anyway. It’s the fundamental way social news is built that is not working right now.  That’s what needs to be worked on further.

Lastly you asked about the Digg Graveyard. When a digger gets banned, or “buried” by the Digg staff there is no way to know unless you try to visit their profile page.  The Digg Graveyard was created as sort of a community announcement to let people know who was no longer with us, and approximately what date they were buried. Since this information was getting passed around anyway, I just figured it’d be nice to see it all in one place and have it be automatically updated.

6 – We don’t see much of you on other social networks.  Why not?

Since I am using the social news networks primarily as a reader and not a marketer or blogger Digg does a fairly good job of delivering what I need in terms of news. I did use Reddit for a little while but I found its interface to be much less manageable.  If I’m gone from Digg for a few days and want to catch up on news for example I can, just start on page one and keep going until I see something I saw before.  This isn’t, or at least wasn’t the last time I checked as feasible on sites like Reddit.

Basically though, what it comes down to is this.  Digg has a good enough interface & enough sources to deliver enough of the news to me that I don’t have the time nor feel the need to push into many other social news networks.  So when submitting, I’ve dedicated some of my free time to filling in the holes I’ve found on Digg, helping to give back to the community there.

Anyway, regarding social networks outside of social news, I have become attached to Twitter & YouTube.  Make sure you follow & subscribe to me! =] I have accounts on other sites including Facebook, and Linkedin, but those are more to keep a profile and I don’t really do much with them.  If I was to measure the amount of time I spend on different websites online, probably at least 50-75% of that time could be split between Digg & YouTube.  YouTube is my other hobby.  Ever since I got an HD camcorder a year and a half ago I’ve been making videos on my free time for there.  Nothing all that spectacular but I entered one of my videos in a contest and won a trip to Singapore from it.  Diggers may also enjoy my April Fools’ Joke from last year “YouDigg” or a video I recorded from the Digg(nation) Meetup in NY last year.

7 – What do you think the future of social media holds? Will Digg make it? How about other competition social news/networks?

I think Social Media or Social News specifically does need a bit of work, but still has the potential to succeed in the future.  If an algorithm can be created to fairly and accurately detect what you are interested in and deliver news from the entire web in a timely manner that matches those interests to you filtering out everything that isn’t interesting to you then I think social news will defiantly be a winner.  Digg currently does not meet all those criteria, but I believe is striving for that. I think we are a long way still from eliminating ‘old media’, but I think over the next ten years social media (and Digg) will evolve to deliver a much more accurate picture of what is hot news in the world & interesting to you as a reader.

Digg definitely has a big head start, but if someone else beats them to the punch on these things it’s still anyone’s game.

8 – Any advice for those that want to become “top diggers?”

Most people consider “top diggers” to be the person who has the most front page stories on Digg, and while I do agree that is part of it, to me a “top digger” has always also meant being the must successful with each submit as well.  In addition to learning the ins and outs of Digg and how the site ticks, and spending a ridiculously amount of time on the site, I really recommend thinking like an editor.  After all that’s what everyone else on the site is supposed to be doing when digging up or down your story.  The biggest thing I can say is submit only quality stories. Don’t submit things just to submit even if you know that it will do well on Digg because its the right type of a story.  That just clogs up the tubes and is effectively social media spam.  If you focus on quality you will do well, become respected, and everyone will benefit.  That’s always been my goal.

Overall Top 1000 (sorted by Popular Ratio)

Top Active (90d) (sorted by Popular Ratio)

9 – Any final words?

Thank you first for giving me this opertunity to express myself and explain to everyone a bit of what I do.  If you’d like to learn more about me follow me on my social news profile on Twitter or my alternative profile, subscribe to me on YouTube, check out my site SocialBlade and of course add me as a friend on Digg.

I have seen sites with great content and api tools get buried when digg realizes the webmaster is a digg user, even after amassing more diggs than a landscaper – hundreds of diggs, literally. Some sites will not make the front page no matter how many diggs they generate. Even if they reach what would be typically deemed as a front page threshold – e.g. 300, 400, 1000 diggs.

Do you believe that autoburies or administrative buries exist on digg.com? I want to know your opinion. Hit me on Twitter.

[Today's guest post is from Crackerpat, a former Digg user.]

January 02, 2008 I was told about a social media site known the world over as Digg.com. Filled out my information and soon had an account. I started slow but as I started submitting my Face-plant and Nut-shot videos from another website, I started to get a moderate following and the comments I was getting from other Diggers started to fuel my intensity to Digg and submit more and more. Finally got a couple of the videos to go popular and I was off and running.

I was given the opportunity to use Greasemonkey scripts. I was told that this is what a lot of people used. With not much to lose one way or the other, I went ahead and installed them. What happened next was not what I was actually ready for. I actually became addicted to Digging. People would shout to me and ask me to shout their submissions and would shout back if they went Popular. Things were great. I was getting Submissions to go Popular and a lot of my Mutual Friends were getting pops as well. The only bad thing was that a lot of my submissions were getting buried because “Face-Plants and Nut-Shots don’t belong on Digg!” Even though They were Comedy section. Digging was Great! Then it happened. Digg Dropped the Ban Hammer.

Many of my Mutual Friends were banned for using The Greasemonkey Scripts. The same ones I was using. So I decided not to use scripts any more. Started getting more new friends, My shouts became golden again. None of my submissions were getting Buried and things were looking up again and then WHAM! I was asked to Log on before I could dig the comment… That’s how I found out I was banned. Yes I sent letters claiming I wasn’t using scripts and no they wouldn’t give me my account back. I understand why. Wasn’t using scripts… after the initial banning at least.

My theory is this, I was a dead man walking after the first wave of bans over 3 weeks ago. I was a middle tier Digger that was rising fast. So why didn’t they ban me and others like me 3 weeks ago with all my other fellow Mutual Friends? Because They knew then that I/ we were going to get banned in a couple of weeks later. I believe that Digg was using myself and some others that were in the Top 300 Users. They knew if they banned a bunch 3 weeks ago that people would follow what they wanted to adhere to as a Digger. And I did, but I was already gone. They let me and others get higher up the Digg ladder. They used us for their own benefit. As an owner, I do the same to clients on a daily basis. I like to think of it as Karma and I give them their kudos for using me and others to get what they want. I would do the same if I didn’t care about the people I was Banning.

There is a second part to my theory and that is that a second set of bans would generate more new users. How? Have you noticed all the Web Articles from the first banning? They have to generate interest. Sure they ditched a lot of great diggers. What did they get in return? A spike in interest. Maybe one like they never had in a long time. That would be the reason for the second Ban Hammer being applied. If they can show to their advertisers how many new users they get on a daily basis, wouldn’t you think that it would generate more revenue?

I don’t blame the User that gave me the Greasemonkey scripts and I don’t blame Digg. And as I hear the chime of my Digg Alerter for a dead Digger going off in the background, I realize that My Greed is why I am no longer a Digger and happy about it!

With me today is a popular former Digg user, Diggboss. Thanks for joining me, Diggboss. Ok, let’s get right into it:

1. Tell us a little bit about yourself. When did you start getting into social media in the first place, and which network did you like the most from the start?

My scripts used Digg APIs. Anyone can use Digg APIs. Digg data is open under Creative Commons.

Absolutely not as I said anyone with a little knowledge of CURL or WGET can make use of the APIs and do what I did.

Digg is not FaceBook, coders please stay away from Digg. Digg does not have open policies and does not support coders. Every script is a BAD script. Digg uses its TOS to its advantage.

Haha, thats an outrageous question, nope, never.

9. So what’s next for Diggboss?

I am sure Digg would restore my account, I don’t have an alternative. I am banned.

I loved Digg and will continue to love it, my love for digg is not conditional.

The research I did on viral content sharing shows that frequent users of social web technologies like Twitter, blogs, and social news and networking sites tend to share online content with more people, more often than those that do not. This means that for marketers these users can be a powerful vector for making content go viral.

While this may sound like some what of a “duh” statement, the concept of “influencers” has been much debated recently. While there is data that individuals give more attention to content passed to them from friends as opposed to A-list bloggers, the fact still remains that there are segments of users who spread content more prolifically than the rest. And by their very nature as savvy social media users, these viewers engage in online activity that makes them easy to target.

We know that people who read Digg, Reddit, Propeller and the like tend to have higher viral reach and sharing frequency than those who do not, so make sure your content appears on these sites. The same applies to those who read blogs, and use Twitter. When it comes time to seed your content, be sure to put it in the path of these extra-contagious users.

An interesting detail of this data is that while frequent users of Facebook and web forums share content with more people and more often in some aspects, generally they’re not as virulent as the users of less-mainstream technologies (with the exception of blog readers). This may be due to the fact that users of sites like Twitter and Digg tend to be early adopters, as opposed to the less-geeky Facebook audience; which seems to indicate that geeks share more content online than non-geeks.

When I segmented these high reach and frequency users, I found that they displayed useful preference trends. When compared to average web users they share more content via IM as opposed to email or Facebook messaging, and they share more news and opinion than humor. When these users share content one-to-one with their friends, they prefer blogs and social news sites to mainstream sites, but that aversion to mainstream media disapears when they share in a one-to-many fashion (broadcast sharing like submitting to Digg, blogging and Tweeting). Again as these users are important viral seeding vectors, we should listen to their preferences and give them news or opinion with short, clean links ideal for instant messaging, and lay off the “funny” email chain letters.

This is a small part of the large data presented in the full report I did on the results of my survey, if you want to know more, be sure to read the rest of my viral content sharing report.

Dan Zarrella is a social and viral marketing scientist, you can read his blog here or follow him on Twitter here.

Everyone thinks their dad is weird. But I, on the other hand, know my dad is totally crazy. He does this thing called “Social Media” or whatever. I can’t even count the times that he’s tried to explain it to me. Don’t get me wrong, I mean my dad is amazingly cool. All the ridiculously hilarious (and usually meaningless) videos on YouTube that have come out within the last 30 seconds, he knows about and feels necessary to show me and tell me about it.

Back to this Social Media (or whatever) I’ve started to understand. Started. It’s a bit hard to grasp at first, that’s why I’m stuck writing about how I absolutely know nothing about anything, I mean writing about what my dad does and how he knows everything about everything. So all the time, I hear my dad talking about this thing called “Plurk” and “Mixx” and “Digg” and whenever he brings these things up, I suggest making a parody of them called “Crapp“. But that never really works out.

Basically what I know about his job is that he talks to a lot of people all over the world, makes websites cool and popular (relatively speaking) and gets paid for it. Seriously. I suppose their might be more to it, but with my youthful ignorance, I see this job as a cakewalk!

And so, one day, I decided I wanted to help…boy was that a good idea. Right now he’s clickin’ and clackin’ around on his laptop, no doubt reading over my shoulder in the office. And I’m just silently frustrated, wondering why my dad couldn’t have a scuba diving equipment store, or drive a boat or at least own NASA. But, no, he does the boring job. Which really isn’t so boring once you think about it.

This guest post comes from Mark Seall – Mark is the founding writer at TalkClimateChange and is also a regular contributor at ProBlogger. You can find Mark’s full Bio on his personal blog at marksblog.org.

Until recently, I have to admit to being very skeptical of the long term value of social media. My own experience has been relatively poor in that social media has provided me with few long term readers, which has lead me to discount its value, and largely ignore its potential. I said as much in a recent post on ProBlogger, at which point Brian Wallace took me to task and encouraged me to update my thinking.

My discussion with Brian made me realize that my current position on social media is in fact the complete opposite of the longer term thinking that I usually try to promote. In the long game, social media does indeed offer significant value through allowing smaller blogs to be noticed, enabling the cream of the blogosphere to rise to the top more quickly, and effectively democratising the media industry by allowing readers to determine what gets attention based on merit, instead of allowing editors to decide this for them.

Social media will undoubtedly change things for everybody, from bloggers at the lower end of the media food chain to the global news corporations at the top. Like good politicians, bloggers need to master the process of building a following and becoming nominated to stand in the daily social media elections (my own best performance has been a miserable 50 diggs, and about 15 stumbles – pretty poor), but what are the further implications of the social media phenomenon? Knowing that this revolution is coming, which strategies can be employed to fully exploit the opportunities that social media presents beyond simply becoming a top social media community member?

Right now I have a few emergent and ill-defined thoughts, and even fewer answers. I would like to use this post to share my musings and start a discussion before pretending to come up with some smart ideas of my own..

How will social media continue to be influenced?

I believe that blogs will represent a crucial media battleground in the coming years. Large media firms are beginning to exploit blogs as a cheap way to produce insightful content and win back readers who are being drawn in large numbers to savvy and entrepreneurial bloggers who are becoming increasingly organized, professional and consolidated. Social media will certainly play an important part in this battle, as large media seeks to influence by weight and small media seeks to influence by guile.

Will large media firms begin to exploit social media, or will they continue to rely on the strength of their existing brands? What are the wider implications for the blogosphere if large media firms truly engage in this market? To what extent will the media merge and differentiate?

What about the wider influence of social media on the landscape of content produced?

Democracy is not without its share of problems. Winston Churchill once declared that “Democracy is the worst form of government, except all of the others have been tried.” Elaborating on these thoughts he later said “The strongest argument against democracy is a five minute discussion with the average voter”. Reading some of the comments on Digg one can derive some sympathy for that position!

As social media begins to evolve and increase its influence, will the resulting media democracy have a dramatic influence on the content created in the first place? Will editors begin to focus on stories that will bring in votes rather than on quality content? Will quality become less important or more important – or will it simply be defined by what is ‘diggable’?

With this in mind, if you were building a new blog enterprise today, what style of content would you go for? How much would social media influence your content and how central would it be to your overall content strategy? Are blogs which do not appeal to social media still viable?

Will branding continue to play an important role?

Good brands provide a promise which acts as a useful tool for consumers during the selection process. People go to CNN.com or news.BBC.com today because they know what to expect and what they are going to get. However, branding may begin to influence reader behaviour in other ways. Firstly, the rise of new media brands such as Digg will enable the media democracy and become an important and trusted news source, potentially relegating other brands to the position of content provider instead of content portal. Secondly, branding is likely to play some role in the social media voting process. Will voters vote purely on merit, or will they be more inclined to vote for sources they know? Will existing brands be able to use their brand power to leverage social media, or will we see a truly democratic democracy?

Will brand building remain important, or will the value of existing brands be stripped away by the new democratic process? Will social media truly level the playing field, or just partially redistribute it?

What impact will social media have on entrance barriers to the media world?

Before the advent of the Internet, getting published was a big deal. Before the advent of the blogosphere, getting noticed was a big deal. Today, with the right techniques and an interesting message it’s relatively easy to build a following, and by exploiting social media it’s possible to reach a very wide audience very quickly . As social media takes off and enters the mainstream, will it become easier or harder to enter the game?

Will individuals once again become lost in a sea of content as everybody fights over the same space within social media, or will new content creators be able to succeed purely on merit? Will the world of media see evolution or revolution?

These are questions which promise to occupy my mind for a good while. I’ll be back shortly with another post as my thoughts crystallize, but in the meantime I would love to hear your views.