12 Signs that You May Be a Social Media Addict
There are many social media addicts in this world. You see it every day on Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon. Even Propeller, Mixx, and Newsvine have their share. What you may or may not know is whether or not you are one of them.
It’s often tough to recognize. Perhaps the joy of seeing your first story on the front page of the site was enough to set you off. Maybe it’s a desire to promote your point of view, a political candidate, even your own blog or business. For some, it’s something that passes the time (until too much time has passed). Read these signs below and seek immediate help if 3 or more apply to you. Read more
Facebook User-Data Gathering Goes Viral
When a company has news that they want buried, they issue their information on a Friday night and hope nobody in the media notices on Monday morning. Marred in controversy over their Beacon advertising platform, Facebook hoped that their latest attempt to gather more user-data would go unnoticed.
For the most part, it’s worked so far. Read more
11 of 15: Algo Change Gives New Diggers a (temp) Chance
At 2:45pm, PST, on 1-25-07, of the 15 stories on the Digg front page, 11 are from Diggers who have never gone Popular before. For two of them, it is their only submission ever.
This was bound to happen. The super-tight status of the Digg algorithm that occurred immediately after the algorithm change helped to prompt the stalled Digg Revolt. Jay and Kevin said that it was natural and that it would be tweaked. Someone on the chat during the live broadcast said it would be tweaked too much just to make sure everyone knew it had happened.
They were right, but not necessarily like they probably expected. Read more
Building a Better Reddit, One SubReddit at a Time
New Feature Offers First Major Improvement to Reddit (possibly ever) and Not a Lot of People Cared (yet)
When Reddit posted information about new features on its blog, the buzz results were ho-hum. The post itself was bland, starting off with the nonchalant statement, “We added a handful of new features last night.” There was brief coverage at some quality sources, including Wired (which is owned by the same company as Reddit), ParisLemon, and MarketingPilgrim, and only a handful of blog posts, but for the most part, this short private beta has snuck in while Digg revolts, makes peace, and makes headlines.
Upon a close examination, this may be a huge leap forward that infuses more of a social aspect into Reddit. For present and future users, it should be the toy that gets played with for a long, long time. Read more
Rose, Adelson Respond to Diggers’ Concerns on TDD
Digg founders Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose spoke to dozens of Digg users through an emergency episode of The Drill Down tonight (part 1 of 2 is live now). They were asked about the lack of responses to emails, the change in the algorithm, the autobury theory, an open forum, and other topics.
The initial reason for the episode was to discuss a plan of action that users could do to tackle what many view as “negative changes” to Digg as of late. Rumors of revolt have been spreading across the blogosphere. Word of the episode got to Rose and Adelson, and after a humorous verification process that included having Rose digg and favorite a story on demand, they were brought into the live broadcast in front of over 100 listeners. The blogging of the event started quickly.
“We had a two and a half hour digg focus group where we showed everyone for the first time Digg Stories - Suggest,” said Rose. It won’t be popular stories, but is a possible alternative to the Upcoming section. Stories will get exposure in a different way - in theory, stories dugg or submitted by other people who seem to like similar stories will be served to us.
Rose continued by saying, “The upcoming section is flawed.” It will be another way to “expose people to those great stories you are finding.” Read more
The Digg Algorithm has Changed
Digg went down today for a short time. The results may be that many diggers will go down for a long time. It could be just a glitch as the algo is tweaked. We’ll know more over the next day or two.
Here are some things that seem to have changed since the site was brought down for maintenance: Read more
Who is Tom and how did he get so many MySpace friends?
When I told someone that I wrote for a blog that covers social media, social networks, and social bookmarking, their first question was “What’s all that?” When I told them what it was and gave them examples, the next question made me laugh.
“Who is Tom and how did he get so many MySpace friends?”
With over 220 million friends, Tom Anderson is everyone’s first MySpace friend. You can read his MySpace Profile or even the entry about him on Wikipedia. This story isn’t about him, though. Read more
Social Niche: How Ning Makes Social Networking More Personal
There has been a trend that has been percolating behind the scenes. While Facebook and MySpace cultivate their mass presence by making the world accessible to people and people accessible to the world, Ning is bringing laser-precision focus to social networking, allowing the niche aspect of internet interaction to flourish.
While the social networking powerhouses offer limited platforms for people to form groups and interact with like-minded people, Ning has made it their purpose to offer flexibility in their product. As the self-proclaimed “Home Depot” of social networking, Ning has a do-it-yourself platform (”you can do it, we can help”) that is simple to use and manipulate. A person can create an account and start a social network geared around whatever they want in a few minutes. Read more
How to be a Part-Timer and Still Hit the Front Page
Most people who submit content to social media websites like Digg, Reddit, Mixx, or Propeller do so because they believe what they are submitting is worthy of making it to the front page where it can be viewed by a gazillion people. It could be something that interests them from the news. Perhaps it’s a story they worked exceptionally hard on from their blog. Maybe it’s a hilarious video they found.
So, new to the world of social media, they submit it and wait for their name to appear in the popular section. It’s a great story, afterall. However, in most cases, it does not make the front page. Undaunted, they try again. And again. Eventually they start to look at what hits the front page and they see a discouraging trend — the same names keep popping up, and it isn’t theirs.
What do they do? They click on a profile. At Digg, they might click on Suxmonkey, a front page regular. They scan down to the stats and their eyes pop out of their head. 34,000 Diggs! Oh ____! Perhaps they check out Reddit next and click on QGYH2 to see a karma score over 100K. Moving right along to Propeller, they check the Top Contributors section to find that they’ve all submitted hundreds, even thousands of stories and comments.
If you are one of these people, don’t give up! You don’t have to spend hours a day, every day, to become a regular to the front page of social media websites. You simply need a strategy that fits your schedule. Read more
The YouTube Video Spam Flood is Coming (or is it here)
It’s time to run down to the nearest electronics store and grab a video camera while they’re still available. Many of the businesses who haven’t been posting videos to YouTube will be jumping on the bandwagon soon.
There were 34 news stories listed on Google news for January 17th and 18th, 2007, stemming from the latest comScore video metrix results that have Google video sites owning over 31% of the online video market. YouTube accounts for a huge portion of that.
Alexa data shows over 18% of Internet users worldwide visit YouTube, while Compete data has YouTube approaching 60 million visitors a month.
Perhaps most importantly, Google, Yahoo!, and some other search engines are starting to give very strong rankings to videos in their natural search results, especially those from YouTube.
All of these things point to one conclusion: the rise of video spam. Read more
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