Greg Hartnett

So I finally broke down and joined Facebook (link to my profile). I had held off for some time because I just didn’t see any value for me in the platform. But after hearing about it month after month, the curiosity finally got the better of me.

Overall, I think it’s a pretty interesting concept. Staying in touch with friends, helping to plan an event, birthday reminders - all good stuff. I’ve even seen some colleagues make use of it from a business standpoint. In a nutshell, I think Facebook has a promising future, and could prove to be a next-gen search alternative (social graphing is way cool).

However, I’m taking a stand against all the bullshit that goes with the site. What’s the deal with the sheep throwing and gift giving? They’re fake gifts people. Zombie bites? Puhleeze. Pretend drinks? How about inviting me to have a real drink? Probably much better bang for your buck there…

This morning, I had a business associate “poke” me. Somebody I don’t know very well outside of a business relationship. WTF? So now am I supposed to “poke” him back? And then what? He pokes me again, or steps it up to start throwing things at me?  Shouldn’t we be working?

Call me weird, but I think it’s all a little, I don’t know, lame.  Maybe I’m a bit stuffy, but I have better things to do with my time than screw around with idiotic things on Facebook.

So feel free to friend me.  Invite me to your groups.  Let me know about any causes you are interested in.  Hell, even write on my wall and engage me.  Just keep your sheep and your pokes to yourself.

For the past 14 months I have been using Comcast for my internet, cable and phone connectivity. Their pricing is good, their service reliable, and they were able to set me up quicker than anybody else (next day install when I called).

Two weeks ago some sales reps from SureWest came by to tell me that they were going to be installing a new fiber optic line in my neighborhood. With promises of lightning internet speed and better TV reception (for HDTV) I was sold.

The contracted technician came by on Wednesday for a three hour install process (I needed him to go into the attic for additional lines), and after a quick call to tech support I was up and running. Running FAST:

Those numbers are pretty impressive - 18+MB on the download and over 27 MB on the upload.

How fast are you surfing?

• SureWest speed test
• Speakeasy speed test
• Speedtest.net

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.

Is there an archive of SERPs from Yahoo, Google, and MSN?

Our travel stuff has owned some pretty competitive keyword phrases for years, and I need to be able to show somebody that I have a long history of having top positions across the big three. Is there anywhere that I can point somebody to check on search queries from present and past?

For instance, I would want to tell them to look at a query on “widgets” in Google from six months ago, 12 months ago, 24 months ago, 36, etc…

I’d hate to have to dispel the impression that we are some Johnny-come-lately that recently got lucky.

Yes? No? Sometimes?

Unfortunately, for reasons unbeknownst to both myself and my host (MidPhase) my blog went down last week. I got the standard Wordpress error screen that I couldn’t establish a connection to the database. I have gotten these many times in the past, and I figured that the problem would correct itself in a matter of minutes (or hours at the long end). After 36 hours of no change, I decided to escalate the issue and contact MidPhase technical support.

After just a few minutes on hold, a representative submitted a ticket to the tech department, and assured me that my issues would be addressed post haste. After a handful of hours, I was disappointed to see that the issue remained unresolved. Another phone call to MidPhase tech support brought me the same results, and further assurances.

A weekend trip to San Francisco with the family pulled me away from the computer, but I was unpleasantly surprised to see on Sunday that the damn blog was still down (now bringing up a blank page at the index). When I finally returned home, I was able to check my email and found that MidPhase felt it was a plugin that was keeping things from getting cleared up.

After deactivating each of the plugins and resetting my blog to the default WP template, I was delighted to see that I could at least access the blog. Regrettably, all data between late January and early March had been lost. On the bright side, I have been very neglectful in maintaining my blog, so I only lost a couple of posts.

Lesson learned: make frequent backups of your data. There are lots of ways to do it, and it’s pretty simple. If I was a real blogger, this could have been catastrophic.  There are perks to obscurity

If you haven’t yet figured out a plan to tap into the traffic at StumbleUpon, I would suggest you do so - pronto. I think I read recently that their userbase is approximately 2.5 million people. That’s a lot of eyeballs, and some of them could be yours.

I have been a fan of StumbleUpon for awhile now. As a user, I like how they feed me sites that are of interest to me - and should a site pop up that I don’t like, I can voice my opinion about it with a simple thumbs down. As an online marketer, I love the traffic they send me. In my presentation at PubCon Vegas in November, I recommended that users try the advertising option at StumbleUpon. It’s a great way to send cheap traffic to your site. One of the audience members took my advice, and seems to have had a very positive experience - read all about it here (great job Everett!).

Yesterday, the folks at StumbleUpon rocked my world, sending me almost 6000 unique visitors. For free! That’s right, I didn’t add an extra zero in there - six thousand visitors from StumbleUpon in one day. And today is shaping up to be another banner day - as of this writing, they have sent me over a thousand uniques, and the day is just starting. I have included a snapshot of my top referrers from yesterday for all of you Doubting Thomases:

So head on over to StumbleUpon, download the toolbar, and get started. Start by stumbling around a bit to get a feel for it. Once you are feeling comfortable, recommend your own site, and let your fellow stumblers know that you did. Once you receive a handful of thumbs up votes, your site will get thrown into rotation. If you get more positive feedback, they’ll display you more often. Then the fun begins…

I have to admit it, I am a fan of Alexa. I know it has some flaws, and that it disproportionately skews results towards webmaster-related sites, and that it’s not the best way to gauge the value of a text link ad, and a host of other complaints from the peanut gallery. But I like the numbers, and the cool little graphs. Huh huh… Just another stat for me to check. Another metric to judge the current temperature of the pool.

I remember stumbling across Alexadex a while back, and while the game caught me as quaint, I didn’t bother. A few months ago, I happened across it again, and decided to give it a shot. In a nutshell, is a pretend stock market where you buy and sell shares of websites, based upon the site’s “reach per million users”. That number is a rough guesstimate (this is where the controversy over Alexa begins) of how many people per million visit the site on a daily basis. Yahoo, Alexa’s number one site forever and ever, has a reach that hovers near 300,000. Which means that for every one million people online, almost 300,000 of them visit Yahoo - impressive. On the flip side of that example, my humble blog, typically meanders in the 12-15 area (sometimes single digits). Not nearly as impressive.

You start off with $10,000 (all Monopoly money) and are free to purchase any available shares of any domain of your choice. I typically buy and sell botw.org - it’s easy for me to judge a “fair” price. Most recently, I “purchased” some shares of jimboykin.com, after I noticed a dip in his number. It has since bounced back, and I am up more than 30% on the position. Go Jim go!

I know it’s all some geeky little computer game, but since I check the numbers anyway… And while the Alexadex may share some similarities with a typical stock market, at least when these numbers get manipulated I don’t risk my mortgage payments.

If you want to sign up for a free account, feel free to sign up through this link. They credit me with $1,000 Monopoly money for each person that signs up.

The digital camera I had been using for the last couple of years has all but forsaken me. The batteries won’t stay in properly, and I have trouble getting the lens to fully close. We decided it was time to relegate that camera to kid friendly status, and go out to buy a new one for the adults.

After reading some good reviews - here, here, and here - I decided that the Canon Powershot S3 IS would do the trick. I picked it up at the local Best Buy for $399 - a hundred dollars cheaper than it was advertised just a couple of months ago. With a $25 rebate, I save a few bucks more.

Thus far, I am pleased with the purchase. If you are using Mac OS X, I would recommend not installing the included software as the install is a bit cumbersome, and sets itself as the default. The whole program makes getting to your iPhoto a PITA. I wound up downloading the software, and promptly placing it in the trash. Save yourself the time.

The shooting speed is very quick - one of the best in a comparison done on the CNET review. It’s a bit too large to fit into clothing, so I may still have to pick up a pocket sized camera for traveling. I broke it in with some new pictures, and plan on experimenting much more in the near future. Look out Ansel Adams.

I have thoroughly enjoyed the transition of switching from a Windows environment. I have grown into an Apple enthusiast and evangelist. The OS is more intuitive, less prone to crashes (never), better looking, and just more fun to use. I don’t know if I’ll ever go back to a Windows machine.

However, I am less than thrilled with the contact management solutions I have come across thus far. I started off using Mac Mail, iCal, and Address Book, but didn’t like having to flip between the apps to manage each. I was looking for an all-in-one application.

I had purposely held off on using the Entourage application. I had never liked MSFT Outlook when I used Windows, and was reluctant to try a MSFT offering on my clean Mac. But, I had already installed Word and Excel, so I figured I’d give it a shot. While Entourage has it’s perks (I really like the Project Management feature), overall the entire application is clunky and unresponsive. It is the only application on my PowerBook that I have to wait for. After downloading mail, I have to wait 30 seconds before I can click anything in the mail. Completely unacceptable.

So now I am looking for an alternative. I have looked around a bit, but haven’t yet found what I am looking for. Basically, Outlook for a Mac that doesn’t suck. So not the real Outlook, which does suck, but something that has email, address book, and calendar functionality. Otherwise, it’s back to Mac defaults, because I give up on MSFT.

PS - I am also looking for a new web based calendar, so compatability would be nice.

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.