Getting punished never feels good, regardless of your age.

Years ago I was banned from Digg when I created a second account to praise my submissions. Not realizing that I was violating the TOS of the site, I was quickly ‘banned,’ my primary e-mail address unable to access Digg to this day.

Then came the Pay Per Post debacle. Sure I made some cash, but my blog tumbled from a Google PageRank of 5 to 1. And I don’t care what people say, it does make a difference. To date, I have yet to climb back to 5, even with traffic growth and good linkability.

The latest technology spanking came courtesy of Twitter. After underutilizing the service for quite some time, I went on a following blitz. Unbeknownst to me, there is a follow limit of 2,000 currently in place.

All of these situations could have been avoided had I done due diligence. Whether or not you agree with these policies, one thing is clear: I need to start reading the fine print!

I’m a big believer that early adopters of new technology get the worm, so I’m quick to pull the trigger. But I’m starting to think it makes more sense to do your research, have a plan to leverage the medium and let others act as guinea pigs.

What do you think?

If you’re looking for me, I’ll be in the corner with my dunce cap on.

Should you go wide appeal or focus on a niche? This is a question that haunts many a startup, and as usual a lot will factor into the decision … read more

Digg has raised $28.7 million in Series C funding, which means bigger offices, a bunch of new job openings, and a more aggressive expansion. The latter will include international support, since almost half of Digg’s user hail from outside the US. This means localized versions, starting to appear in early 2009. My guess is that German, Spanish, and French versions are prioritized, for obvious reasons.

Om Malik reports a rumor that founder Kevin Rose got a chance to cash in, and took it:

The rumor I heard is that Digg founder Kevin Rose got to a sell a nice chunk of his shares in the company, a trend that has become quite fashionable among the Web 2.0 set. Several founders have taken money off the table as their companies wait for a bigger payday.

Good for Rose, of course, an probably not something to be upset about. I’d be more worried about the fact that 1% of the users generates 32% of the visits (stats from GigaOM). What happens if/when they get bored with Digg? That Facebook partnership might be crucial, but it might also prove just how hard it is to move from the tech savvy crowd, to the mainstream. And the former usually abandon ship when the latter gets in on the action. Digg is in for a bumpy ride.

For most bloggers, finding story ideas is one of the hardest parts of maintaining a blog and it is something that becomes increasingly important important, though much more difficult, the more topical your site is.

Fortunately, the Web provides many great ways to keep on top of what is going on in your field, if you know how to use the tools that are available.

For me, the trick has never been to find the one best way to get new story ideas, but to but open up a wide variety of communication lines. Though my system is not perfect and I continue to miss stories from time to time, I also have a backlog of about three weeks forth of topics in my notebook.

That is because finding story ideas, for most niches, is fairly simple. It is just a matter of knowing where to look. read more

Digg is rolling out their Digg Dialogg service, which basically is a Q&A with select people, where the questions are submitted by the Digg users, and then dugg up or down, with the winning ones behind actually asked. It is Digg for questions to a specific person, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at the moment. Kevin Rose explains:

The concept is simple – we identify a featured guest that you will be able to submit questions to (text or video) which the Digg community Diggs up or down. We’ll pose the top questions to the guest during a live interview. Featured guests will represent thought leaders and tastemakers across diverse topics including technology luminaries, environmentalists, entrepreneurs, musicians and filmmakers.

The Digg Dialogg is part of Digg’s coverage of the US presidential election, and a partnership with CNN’s iReport. It is likely that Digg Dialogg will stick around after the election is over as well.

“I’d rather have a blog in front of me than a frontal loblogomy.” - who knows? (Aaron?)

What’s blogging without a little ambivalence?

Without further ado, we present to you the 7 most frustrating “Would you rather?” questions, blogging style.

1. Would you rather the worst blog post you’ve ever written stay on the front page of Digg for a week or the best blog post you’ve ever written get zero Diggs?

There’s no such thing as a dumb WYR question. Right? read more

While my blogs have experienced some community link love, I’ve never been fortunate enough to have the Digg-effect overload my server like a Ritalin kid on crack sugar. I can tell you that one social site that has never sent me an iota of traffic is Reddit. Perhaps their algorithms simply don’t like me - or maybe my content just sucks. I’ll let you decide.

Showing my objective-nature, I will not hold a grudge and will tell you about Reddit’s much-needed, well overdue redesign (the first such change since 2005).

The gang at Mashable have outlined the notable changes:

- The top navigation bar has been re-styled, and now includes a link to the site’s “most controversial” stories (stories with both a lot of up and down votes).

- On the right, you can now customize Reddit based on the topics you want aggregated on your homepage. Just check and un-check the categories you want included/removed.

- Links for creating your own Reddit and submitting a link to the site are much more obvious (also on the right sidebar)

- Story links have been re-styled – it’s not a dramatic change, but it’s easier on the eyes and includes links to comments, saving, hiding, and reporting.

One thing is dramatically clear: Reddit is easier on the eyes. Since I don’t expect the site to suddenly fall in love with my content, I’ll chalk this up to putting some makeup on an average looking woman.

Has anyone out there ever experienced a bump in traffic from Reddit?

The latest buzz on the blogosphere lately is the “revolt” (if you may call it that) of Digg users against what they considered to be a violation of the very nature of Digg itself. Here’s a brief recap via AP/NY Times and BBC News.

An entry containing the encryption key of HD-DVD (which allows users to break the copy protection of HD-DVD discs) was frontpaged. Shortly after, this and similar entries were buried–or taken off the front page and basically hidden from most searches–and the accounts of the submitters were suspended. DIGG’s CEO Jay Adelson later on explained that these actions were done to avoid potential lawsuits by the Advanced Access Content System, “the owners of this intellectual property,” who got in touch with Digg and other sites saying they “believe the posting of the encryption key infringes their intellectual property rights.” He added that the suspension and burying were part of Digg’s terms of use and stressed that Digg was not immune from lawsuit and must abide by law.

However, the Digg community, perhaps used to the notion of the community itself having the power to determine what happens to the entries (frontpaged, buried, or simply ignored), acted strongly against what they felt was censorship on the part of Digg. The community also took the HD-DVD Promotion Group’s sponsorship of Digg’s DiggNation podcast as possibly the real reason behind the banning, and accused Digg of being a sell-out. Users then revolted by flooding the site with entries relating to the encryption key, which filled the front page. Some of these entries garnered record Diggs or votes, even (screencap here). read more

Add another one to the pile. MySpace is the latest of the big players to adopt the socially driven model for news delivery. Being one of the top 10 most visited sites on the web, its natural to expect a lot from such an offering. It also begs the question, with a user count that is an order of magnitude higher than all other social news sites, can MySpace News be more relevant?
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Here’s a list of ideas I’ve had over the past year or so while using social news sites. Most of them are ideas that I think would improve sites like Digg, Netscape and Reddit in one way or another. Admittedly, one or two of them would just be interesting to see implemented on an experimental level. Either way, feel free to rip each and every one to bits.

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