Greg Hartnett

The censoring of the super secret DVD hack that was published earlier in the day has gotten Digg users in an absolute uproar. In fact, the backlash has gotten so severe that the homepage of Digg is swarmed with anti-Digg censoring stories.  Snapshot here.

I wrote not too long ago that the top users have jumped ship - will this be the straw that sends the rest of the users packing?   The revolt is actually humorous - reminds me of the temper tantrums my 5 year old throws.

How do you deal with the crowd once it’s turned on you?

Also interesting to note is that the number of stories submitted by top users continues to decline.  See the Friends’ Activity in the previous screenshot.

Jumping the shark - “a metaphor that was originally used to denote the tipping point at which a TV series is deemed to have passed its peak”.

Has Digg jumped the shark? I think so, and if you’ll follow along you’ll see I’ve got some very unscientific data to bolster my argument.

When I first opened my Digg account, like every other newbie, I was alone. Not a friend on my list to help get my stories to the front page. In an effort to strengthen my profile, I befriended 170 of the top users. Not really rocket science - I just used the top Diggers list to choose from the top users (and collected a couple of hundred friends). When one of these users submits a story, I Digg it. Many of these users noticed that I was Digging their stories, and in turn befriended me.

So things steadily improved for me at Digg. Many times I’d submit a story, and in a matter of hours, it would wind up on the front page. With the votes from top users, and with a little help from my friends, I hit my stride. In fact, currently 35% of all stories I have submitted have made it to the front page - not too shabby.

In an effort to ebb the growing influx of crappy content and battle the fascination of the SEO crowd, Digg engineers made a few changes some months ago. One of the most profound, and controversial, of these changes was the removal of the top users page. With no pay for their services, top Digg users felt that the least Mr. Rose and company could do for them was to honor them with a spot in the top users wall of fame. Removing that honor may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.

When you are logged in to your Digg account, on the right hand side of the screen is a section monitoring your friends’ activity over the last 48 hours. Back in the day (uhhh six weeks ago??), the number of stories submitted by my “friends” typically hovered between the 400-500 mark. Which meant that the 170 people I had befriended had submitted approximately 500 stories or so over the last 48 hours. Now these are top Diggers we’re talking about here - people I chose as friends based solely upon their high user ranking.

Fast forward to this morning, and my account shows a total of 156 stories submitted by these same users. For the mathematically challenged amongst you, that represents a decline of almost 70%. 70 freaking percent! That’s not a minor decline - I’d even go so far as to call it a landslide. These top users have abandoned their accounts, and are now probably wasting their time online with some other web 2.0 time-suck.

So this is how I see it playing out: more and more top users will continue the exodus, which will in turn contribute to the deterioration of the quality of the content being submitted. The SEO crowd, and others trying to game Digg, will continue with their efforts, and an even greater percentage of front page stories will have gotten there through artificial means. Average users will grow tired of the spam (or perceived spam) and return less and less often. Daily visitors will diminish over time, resulting in a front page story that generates a couple of hundred visitors. At this point, the SEO crowd will realize that the ROI is no longer there, and they’ll move on to the traffic generator du jour. In their wake, they’ll leave Digg in shambles - a mere shell of the site it had once been.

In the end, Digg founders and investors will be left scratching their heads at what went wrong.  You should have nurtured your top users - not screwed them.

Courtesy of Flickr, a very cool easter egg for the holidays. Just insert the text “ho ho ho hat” or “ho ho ho beard” into a note and presto - some holiday cheer. I showed JR and he insisted on adding hats and beards to everything.

With employees scattered worldwide, staying on the same page often proves difficult. In an effort to keep all of us more in tune with each other, we have decide to implement a web-based calendar application.

After an initial search, the Google Calendar seems to be the front runner. However, I also noticed that Yahoo has it’s own offering, and there are more than a handful of applications offered for free, or sale.

I’m leaning towards recommending the Goolge service.  Anybody have any opinions?

I haven’t heard any chatter, and a few searches don’t bring up anything relevant, so this may be out of left field.  But…

Is the WordPress platform no longer displaying incoming links using Technorati?  Used to be that when I logged into my dashboard, in the right column there was an area displaying most recent links, with a “more links” that did a link: query on Technorati.  I think it was even there earlier this morning.  I noticed an error while trying to hit the link this afternoon, and the next time I logged in, it was gone.

This blog is using WP 2.0  I verified that it is not just this version by checking the BOTW Blog, which is still running on WP 1.5.2 (I don’t know why??)  So is it just a hiccup, or has there been a change?  Is it still there on any other versions?

I thought it was a great feature, and probably good for both companies - I’d be bummed to see it go.

A couple of months ago, I stumbled across some funny photos in Flickr. Some people had taken some “I crush your head” photos, and created a group - a tribute to an old Kids in the Hall skit. I got a kick out of it, saw some traffic opportunities, and took some pictures of my own (these pics have brought me over a thousand visitors, BTW).

Somebody in the group had pointed out that last week, Yahoo’s The 9 had run a spot about the Flickr group. Too funny - unfortunately none of my pics made the video spot. Aside from the fact that the name seems like a rip off of Scoble’s Channel 9, I am impressed with the offering. Though the product seems a little cheesy now (that girl reminds me too much of the ever-annoying Jillian Barberie), I admire the effort, and I think they’ll improve upon it over the months to come.

I have become more and more impressed with Yahoo over the last six months. Their bold 2.0 strategy seems to be making significant strides, and I would venture to guess they will use their recent successes as launching pads for future endeavors.

Until M$FT gets their act together (they will), it appears to be a two pony race. Yahoo and Google battling for the user experience. I find myself becoming more of a Yahoo person that a Googler. Though I believe Google’s search to be superior to Yahoo’s, I think Yahoo beats Google in almost every other contest.

So hypothetically, if you HAD TO choose one site, which would it be - Google or Yahoo?

It would appear that Sifry and company have completed the anticipated redesign of the popular blog search engine Technorati. Though they are a competitor of our blog search engine, I must admit that Technorati is definitely the market leader in technology, quality of product, and market share. They definitely know their shit, and continue to make advances in their offering.

I like the overall layout of the new site, and am digging on the new bells and whistles. While the core functionality remains the same, there are significant upgrades to services, as well as some new features. Instead of trying to go over everything here, simply take a look at the screencast they put together.

Kudos to the entire Technorati team. I look forward to trying to catch you.

Have you heard about WordCamp yet? If you use WordPress to power your blog, you may have seen mention of it on your dashboard (what an awesome feature for those guys) - there has been ongoing discussion for the last two weeks on the WP Blog. Between the off-track posts from the WP hipsters, there seems to be some useful information.

I have decided that since I am now only a couple hours away from San Francisco, I will try to make the trip down on the 5th. I love the idea of meeting some new people and finding out about all the cool shit going on at WP. I have been a huge fan of the WP platform for awhile now, and the WP community intrigues me as well. The people behind the whole project seem particularly smart and interesting, and it will be nice to put some faces with the names that have become so familiar to me.

The only wrench in the works being my pending trip to San Jose on the 7th. The SES show starts that Monday, and I was hoping to just cruise down early that morning. We have a new booth that is going to kick ass (goodbye to the bed sheet booth), and I’d like to arrive in time to help with the assembly. So, if I can figure out what to do about the time gap, and the extra days away, I will definitely make sure to attend.

If you plan on attending WordCamp, let me know. I’d love to get together and talk shop, and/or anything else that you find interesting. Additionally, if you plan on being at SES, please make sure to stop by the BOTW booth - we’ll have a cool new booth, lots of t-shirts, and discounts on all products and services. Hope to see you.

The big news throughout the social networking crowd is the launch of what some are dubbing “AOL’s Digg-killer”. While I doubt that the launch of the new Netscape will spell the demise of Digg, it is indeed an impressive entry to the social arena.

I signed up for an account and have spent a couple of hours giving it a test run this afternoon. Here are 10 impressions that I have picked up from a cursory run. In an effort to show both sides, I have chosen 5 good things, and 5 things that need further work.

The Good:

1. Lots of categories. While Digg appeals to the geek crowd, Netscape promises more diversity of content with categories including Sex, Celebrities, Money, Sports, Videos, Technology, and many more.
2. Personalization. When you are signed in, the page displays the local information based upon the zip code you provide during the sign up process. Local information includes weather, and local news.
   
3. Pictures with Stories. It’s nice to see the picture to the right of each story that makes it to the front page. Used properly, a picture is worth a thousand words.
4. Usabiity. I like the simplistic colors, the navigation, and the use of the technology. Everything comes together nicely for a good overall experience. The “Related Stories” and Tag Cloud are both nice touches.
5. Anchors. Netscape’s version of an editor, the anchor serves to keep things moving along nicely, moving stories to the front page, helping with the conversation, and fostering the community. With Anchor Chat (soming soon) users will be able to “Chat live 24/7 with Netscape anchors on the day’s top stories!”

The Bad:

1. Owned by AOL. Even though the brass brought in 2.0 poster boy Jason Calacanis to run the show, the campy smell of AOL is hard to shake, and it permeates through here as well. Case in point - the cheesy avatars.
2. Limited Commenting. Current commenting does not allow for insertion of any HTML. Additionally, you can’t reply to other’s comments, making a coherent string of commenting nearly impossible.
3. Exiting to Story. It’s a bit cumbersome to get to the site that is being discussed. There is no access from the main page - you must navigate to the story’s individual page on Netscape, and then follow one of two little links. The more prominent option leads to a horrendous framed page. They definitely need to lose this.
4. Who’s Voting? There is no way to determine who is voting for any given story. you can see what stories a user has voted on by looking at the profile, but there is no way to see all the people who voted for a particular story.
5. Us and Them. Historically, most social networking sites tend to be very clique-ey, and Netscape’s offering doesn’t promise to break the mold. Already the flame wars begin, with a divisive attitude taking hold. Hopefully they will succedd here, while so many others have failed.

See what others are saying about the New Netscape:

Jeff Beckham The New Netscape - The New Journalism?
Steve Rubel First Look: Netscape’s Hybrid Journalism Site
Silicon Valley Sleuth AOL Takes a Shot at Social News
Search Engine Journal Netscape Relaunched as AOL Digg
Mashable Netscape’s Digg Clone - Good, but Needs More Ads

Yahoo launched it’s video offering yesterday, Yahoo Video. Seems to be a similar offering to Google Video, with like features. From a quick perusal, they seem to have integrated their community a bit more, with a focus on reviews, and sharing.

I took a trial run by uploading the video of JR’s hockey fight, and had to switch computers to do so. Like most web applications, Safari compatible versions seem to roll out a few weeks after the IE and FF crowds get to play. The upload was quick enough, and unlike Google, I didn’t have to download any software to get it done. I simply logged in using my Yahoo account, and created a quick user profile. Users can add their channels, and stay up to date with other’s channels easily.

As a user, I am impressed. As a publisher, I am excited to see an additional player in the space. As a Yahoo fan, I am happy to see them take this chance, and am pleased with the product. I will be trying their embedding feature on this blog in the days to come. You can see more videos here.

Find out more:

Yahoo! Search blog
Yahoo! Video Revamped
YouTube vs. Yahoo
Usability - They Can do Better

If you happened to catch my presentation at PubCon, hopefully you were able to walk away with some useful information. For those of you that didn’t attend, or were in another session, I have provided the accompanying text below. Is is a pretty long post, so I’ll end the preface here.

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So the Big Question - How can I get the most out of the blogosphere?

My short answer to you - the more you put in, the more you’ll get out. The more active you are, and the more you contribute to the Whole, you more you will flourish. You will find a direct correlation between what you put in and what you get out.

Now, it’s not an easy undertaking, and any successful blogger will tell you that it takes a LOT of work. Probably more than they had expected.

So assuming that you have the fortitude, let’s discuss the first step in the journey - Laying Your Foundation.

Your readers are going to judge you by the quality of your writing. So… brush up on your writing skills. You don’t need to be William Shakespeare, but if you want to be taken seriously, you should have a pretty firm grasp of the language. Pay attention to grammar and spelling and don’t be afraid to use the dictionary and thesaurus. You are bound to lose credibility with consistent misspellings and other grammatical errors. Two books on writing that I have recently read, and would recommend, The Book on Writing and The Dictionary of Concise Writing.

Now for step two of laying your foundation - Optimizing for Performance

As is the case with managing any online marketing campaign, you need to optimize your blog for peak performance. Pay attention to proper title and descriptions for the blog, making sure that they will help you pull for the terms you are targeting. I would recommend that you do a URL rewrite to remove the script, and replace it with title of the post - all things being equal, it will help. Categories and archives should be created - the more the better. Both from a usability standpoint, as well as for the engines. Bill Hartzer wrote an article for Search Engine Guide last month covering blog SEO tactics - some useful nuggets in there. Mare sure that you set up your pings - Setting up your ping services is a quick and easy way to mass distribute your blog.

The Corporate Website Marketing Blog has a nice list of ping services for WP blogs, and Elliott Back has a pretty comprehensive list as well.

Now that you have your blog optimized, and ready for action, it’s time to Get on the Map.

Start by submitting to Blog directories and search engines. Yahoo and DMOZ both have blog specific categories where you can submit for free (those links will take you to the appropriate categories). BOTW has an entire directory for blogs, and there are other smaller and niche directories that you should consider as well. Top Rank Results has a great list of places to submit your blog. Make sure to head over to Technorati to claim your blog, and set up your blog to ping them each time you update. Getting your blog into Technorati is a great way to drive some initial inertia, and get on the radar - there is a good read at Technology Evangelist of some “lesser known tips” on how to optimize for Technorati.

Don’t forget to submit your RSS feeds - it is becoming more and more adopted by the general public, and will only continue to do so. There is a pretty comprehensive list of places to submit your RSS feeds at RSS Specifications.

Now that you are on the map, and you have good content that others would surely enjoy, it’s time to spread the word.

Immerse yourself in your area and read voraciously - get your feed on. Subscribe to as many feeds as you can manage. Find out what other bloggers in your area are saying. When you come across good resources blogroll them - the benefits are twofold. First, your users will benefit from, and appreciate exposure to other valuable resources. And secondly, it helps to get you in front of those bloggers. Bloggers tend to be a vain group - frequently performing ego searches, and checking their backlinks. Blogrolling them, or posting about them, is a sure way to get them to check you out. It is a nice, unobtrusive way, to show up on their radar.

I know of one instance in particular, where this strategy worked wonders. Shimon Sandler posted about a bunch of high profile bloggers, who in turn came to check out what he had said. Shimon provides some good SEO related content on his blog, so these readers tuned back in. Shimon followed up with a killer post a couple of days later on the latest Google app, got mentioned by a handful of said A-listers, and his traffic has skyrocketed. Without the quality content though, the post would have been for naught.

Another important aspect of being social is Participating in the Conversation.

Comment on other people’s blogs - that’s what the comment section is there for. By commenting on other’s people’s blogs, you are able to piggyback on their distribution. Commenting on some quality, high traffic blogs, will expose you to thousands of potential visitors daily. Now I am sure that some would disagree with this, but I will assert that nowhere else is what you say more important than in other people’s comments. A comment is typically a sentence or two, so you have a small window to grab the reader’s attention. Additionally, your comment is bound to be one of many, so you need to say something that not only contributes to the conversation, but is insightful, witty, or compelling enough to grab the reader’s interest, and prompt her to see what else you have to say. By participating in the conversation in a productive manner, you are, in essence, beckoning the reader to come to your blog.

I am not inferring that you need to agree with what the author has to say. Feel free to present a dissenting point of view - they are often the most interesting. However, keep your insults to yourself, and ensure that what you have to say propels the conversation in a constructive manner. If you don’t have something smart to say, keep your thought to yourself.

Now that you are part of the community, it’s time to tap into the power of the Community Sites.

Unless you have been living under a rock, you have undoubtedly heard of these community-driven sites. Tapping into the power of these community sites will bring your blog to the next level. Social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us are a great way for you to share your blog with others that have similar interests.

If you haven’t yet developed a strategy to exploit the traffic available at MySpace, I would highly recommend it. They are currently doing 1.5 billion pages views daily. That’s a lot of traffic - some of it could be yours. For free. Roger Monti, Martinibuster, recently wrote an excellent article on the MySpace land grab.

I had never really bought into the power of Digg, until I got dugg. It drove thousands of visitors to my blog in a matter of hours, and I didn’t even make it to the front page. While Digg tends to favor geeky, tech, or science related news, you don’t need to have a masters from MIT to write for the Digg crowd. The Wolf Howl blog has two very interesting posts on Digg - one about the Digg userbase representing the perfect storm of mavens and connectors, and another with some tips on how to write to help get your non-tech blog dugg. Another tip for Digg - there is a feature that let’s you “blog this story” onto your blog. Doing so places a link to your blog in the right hand column of the Digg story. Doing this alone will help to bring hundreds of visitors to your blog. As long as you are providing valuable content, some of those visitors will grab your feed, bookmark your blog, or make a mental note to return. Incremental steps like this over a period of time equate to thousands of visitors daily.

Next let’s discuss some multimedia - The Power of Pictures

The beauty of pictures is that they appeal to a user’s emotions. An emotion that you are trying to convey make take paragraphs of text to transmit, but can be easily captured with a snapshot. Additionally, pictures cross cultural and language barriers, exposing your content to users that may be otherwise inaccessible. Flickr is a fantastic social tool. Huh - you may be asking yourself. How can uploading some pics of my kids bring be traffic?? Flickr allows you to insert hotspots, notes, and links within your picture and descriptions of the picture. So by joining a couple of groups within Flickr that you are interested in, and making sure that you place your links into the picture or description (I recommend a note in the pic with a link, and a link in the desc) you will drive additional visitors to your site. Once you get involved with the community, you will learn how to tell which types of pictures drive eyeballs.

YouTube and Google Video take it to the next level. Nothing will attract eyeballs more than some video. With the proliferation of digital video, and the advances in technology and broadband, the current climate is a multimedia marketers dream. With some creativity, and a little bit of time you can reach tens, or hundreds of thousands of visitors. While neither of them allow for hyperlinks within the video, with a basic multimedia editor, you can enter your url or any other credits you’d like to add, directly into the video. Also, of course, include your blog url in the description. Once again, this should provide some incremental traffic, and will help to grow your userbase.

I recently had a great experience with my video camera, one that has brought me tens of thousands of visitors. I was able to take my son to hockey parctice, and capture some hilarious video of him brawling with some of the other four year olds. I brought it home, threw in some System of a Down fight music, added my url and credits at the end, and submitted the clip JR Hockey Brawl to YouTube and Google Video. Since doing so, I have attracted tens of thousands of visitors via those channels.

In closing, follow the steps I prescribed here, mix in some time and persistence, and you are bound to get heavy volume to your blog. Ensure that you are providing valuable content, and now you are not only poised to get a ton of traffic, but you have positioned yourself to retain those visitors once you reel ‘em in. And that’s really what it’s all about.

So hopefully, you have seen that if you give to the blogosphere, she will repay you, tenfold.

However….be careful what you wish for. With all that traffic comes a ton of comment spam. But that’s another conversation…

Google Video launched a new feature today, the Google Video Top 100. While I don’t normally try to report on breaking news, and I loathe the idea of regurgitating information, I will make an exception here. This instance is actually a bit self-serving.

The video of my son’s hockey fight debuted on the list at #27. When I shot it, I definitely thought it was funny. After inserting the music, I thought it was even better. I had no idea that so many people would agree. I knew something was up this morning after a pretty big spike in traffic, and upon investigation I learned that not only has the clip been added to the G Top 100, but somebody seems to have embedded the clip from YouTube, and it has been viewed a ton of times today.

The power of pictures…

What a pain in the ass trying to find a new Wordpress theme for this blog. I have known for awhile now that my current theme doesn’t function properly in IE, and it has been eating at me to get it fixed.

So I finally set some time apart this evening to find a new theme. I have run through all the resources that I can find, and still haven’t come up with something that I feel suits my needs. In my searching I did come up with more than a handful of sites that have some themes. Here are a few of the highlights:

I have narrowed down my search to a few that I think might fit the bill with a little modification. I am really looking for something very simple, with some Web 2.0 flavor. When I find a little more time, I will implement the new theme.

I love RSS. I think it is the greatest thing that has happened to the Internet since broadband. The ability to hand pick which information I want to receive in my reader is empowering, and in theory should increase efficiency. In practice, I find myself pouring through countless accounts of the same stories.

Perhaps it is due in part to the the fact that I read a lot of blogs - more than the average online user, to be sure. Probably more than most power users. I find that during my work editing the blog directory I stumble across a fair amount of stuff that interests me, leading me to subscribe to a number of feeds. Unfortunately, too much of the 482 unread posts in my NetNewsWire are talking about the same thing. And I have blogs from a wide variety of industries and topics, typically no more than a handful from the same industry. SEO blogs would be the exception to that rule, where I have always felt that the more informatrion I could get, the better.

Now I find myself in the predicament of once again having too much information to pour through on a daily basis. Worse yet, much of that information is repetitious. So, I have decided to purge my reader of the unnecessary noise. The bloggers who don’t say anything unique. Or only say something unique so infrequently that they lose me. You know what? When Matt Cutts has something to say, you don’t need to talk about it. I read his damn blog too. We all do. Or if he says something big enough, you know that threadwatch will have it - or SEW blog. So that’s it - I don’t need to hear it from you too.

b5media - the blog network started on the heels of the sale of Weblogs, Inc. b5 provides pretty good reading, and I see some BOTW alumni are currently writing there. I admire Darren Rowse, and read his stuff occasionally. With channels covering Tech, Lifestyle, Entertainment, Science, Hobbies, and Video Games, they have the breadth to write for both the eyeballs, and the money topics. However, I think unless they get some focus, they may meet an untimely end.

I know how difficult it can be to manage a network of blogs. Our foray into the blog network model turned out to be too time consuming for us to manage, and we decided to go the aggregator route with the domains instead. With so much happening in the blogosphere, it is tempting to dip your foot into multiple projects, and see which ones have legs. While we enjoyed the creativity that the blogging project provided, we decided that we would stick to what we know best - the blog directory.

But what’s the gameplan with b5? What’s the revenue model like? How many blogs do they plan on rolling out? How do they plan on scaling up? Where is their purple cow? Most importantly, what’s the exit strategy?

Though they recently announced the launch of two new sports blogs, you have to ask - who cares? Do we need two sports blogs from authors that nobody knows? While I wish them the best of luck, without shaking things up a bit I see them as also-run, at best.