People soshalize. They don't care how it's spelled. They just do it.
This is a rant so I’m going to keep it short and not so sweet. There’s a trend in the automotive industry towards putting out really, really bad webinars. It hits really close to home because I absolutely love them, have been doing them for three years now, and get really annoyed when other professionals in the industry use them as pitch sessions.
They say, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Grammatical challenges aside, it’s a quote that has indirectly driven many lives in many different aspects. We often get comfortable, complacent, and we start harnessing an attitude of safety over adventure.
It isn’t just the fact that I detest waiting in lines and the one that led to the infamous Grumpy Cat was long. It’s the sheer fact that there is absolutely no reason why an animal should have been at SXSW in the first place. Shame on Mashable for allowing (encouraging?) this sort of PR display using an animal. Hurray to PETA for…
There was a new promise the internet gave us when social media started popping up a few years ago. Sites like Twitter and Facebook have delivered on the first promise of breaking down many of the walls of communication that kept the world separated for thousands of years. Now, there’s another promise that is being fulfilled…
Dear World,
Today the Mayans declared that the world was going to end, in fact the calendar was never meant to have a 2013, much conspiracy surrounded today and some even stocked up on perishable items in the instance that today ended… so did it?
Bloggers often take heat for posting incorrect, misleading, or false information. The need to get something out there early is intense because it can be the difference between getting a lot of traffic and not getting any at all. However, there are times when journalistic responsibility must trump the need for page views. This is one of those times.
It is a sad day to wake up to hearing of another virus has infected yet another tool or social platform by people who clearly get pleasure out of making the lives of others more difficult. It is even more disgusting to learn that the virus is meant to hack accounts and spread hatred, such as the Tumblr virus has done.
I am so tired of seeing newsfeeds flood with status updates and images that try and guilt people into contributing an action on their Facebook activities. This is very reminiscent of the “Please Retweet” that used to baffle me on Twitter, even still when I see the odd one roll by… I am still baffled.
I don’t get it, have we become so desperate for actions such as a like, comment or share that we have to try and guilt each other into making them happen. Most don’t even realize that many are playing on that emotion, it is manipulation and it needs to stop.
Recently, I called out a couple of vendors for selling a sub par product. I thought about it and decided that if my own services can’t stand up to that level of scrutiny, I have no business telling anyone else what they should do about their service. So over the weekend, I tore apart every thing we do for our clients – Top to bottom; report after report. You know what I found? Something we sell SUCKS and it is completely UNACCEPTABLE.
I told Kevin Rose that he made a huge mistake with Digg v4 a couple of days after launch. He Tweeted some snide remark about how he’d built such a large site and dismissed the warning.
I told Matt Williams shortly after he took over that he had to get extremely aggressive if his site had any chance of surviving. He and his team stayed conservative to the bitter end.
As progressions go, I had expected to offer some meaningless after-the-fact advice to the new owners of Digg once they launched “V1″. Unfortunately, I have no advice to give. It seems that in 6 weeks of development they managed to obliterate the site beyond repair.
In short, Digg is officially dead.
Had they just completely given up, moved all of the content to a WordPress blog, and tossed some adsense in the sidebar, they would have been better off. Here’s why.
“I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.” ~ Obi-Wan Kenobi
There is only Digg.com now. All of the content, all of those highly ranked pages in Google, all of the accounts with years of records and service to the site – gone. They weren’t even redirected. They’re now just a blank 404 page.
This in itself is arguably the dumbest move in the history of websites. Despite the decline in recent years, Digg still received a good amount of traffic from search. Google ranked the pages well on many topics and it was a trusted source with inbound and outbound links that met perfectly with what Google wanted.
This was the one great asset that Digg still held. It was wiped clean, presumably irreversibly today. Nearly 20 million pages. Lost. Forever.
If you had a Digg account, you don’t anymore. Nobody does. You have a Facebook or a Twitter account and that’s all that Digg recognizes.
From New Digg’s perspective, those of you who spent years of your life contributing content, comments, Diggs, and buries – you are worthless trash that has no place on their site. The friends you made – better find them on other networks. Digg isn’t a social network. It isn’t a social media site. It isn’t even really a social news site anymore. “Submitting” is meaningless. If you want to “submit” to Digg, you’d better get your Twitter account ready.
We’ve posted dozens of stories today to Digg without a single one making it into the upcoming section. If you think it’s because of human moderation, think again. We’ve seen stories in different languages make it. We’ve seen Reddit.com make it. Even “Pain Control” made it.
The closest approximation we’ve seen so far is that it’s like a mini-Techmeme. You Tweet tips to them. They pick top stories weighed against a makeshift algorithm. They favor mainstream media sites.
We love Techmeme, but we don’t need another one. For general topics, there’s already Google News which seems to be more up-to-date.
Those who will cry, “Give them a chance” or “They just got started” probably haven’t seen the complete scope of Digg’s obliteration. They didn’t just come in and “rethink” Digg as they claimed they were going to do. They did everything they could to destroy it. V4 for the last 2 years was bad but it had a few redeeming qualities. Betaworks has come in and removed the last remnant of what made Digg good.
We were hopeful. We expected bad but kept a positive outlook. The blog post about what Digg was going to become seemed to have some good ideas. This is worse than we could have imagined.
So long, old friend.
As a fitting note, the top story in upcoming right now tells the sentiment that many feel right now:
