We’ve all seen the Twitter Fail Whale error, but this is something new. Around noon today, it looked like all twitter “following” and “follower” stats reset to zero. Dreadfully, I thought, no, please tell me I did not lose all my friends and have to hunt them down, explain and restart the relationships. Seems the stats are back now. For a few moments at least, I had the same number of Twitter followers as Ashton Kutcher. Hardly enough time to apply for a guest appearance on the Larry King Show. More of this blog post »

Diggileaks? Digggate? Diggournolist?

I normally don’t blog about politics, but have little choice today. I just discovered that I am part of a conservative censorship group on Digg.com that has been

caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, upvote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives.

At first, I thought it might be a joke because of the premise that a group of conservatives have nearly succeeded in wrestling control of Digg away from the overwhelmingly progressive audience. But, the Alternet.org post went popular on Digg yesterday. It now has over 9000 diggs and 2500 comments–more than I recall ever seeing. The news is getting mainstream media attention this morning with a post at guardian.co.uk.

The organizer of the investigation and likely Digg Patriots’ infiltrator is said to be Digg user novenator. The timing of the release is probably due to the fact that buries are going away in the very soon to be released new version of Digg. 

The writer of the post, oleoleolson, says that the group:

has become so organized and influential that they are able to bury over 90% of the articles by certain users and websites submitted within 1-3 hours, regardless of subject material. Literally thousands of stories have already been artificially removed from Digg due to this group.

More of this blog post »

Have you tried Foursquare, the lightweight mobile app that let’s you “check-in” to various locations you visit? Foursquare shows you what restaurants, coffee shops, stores, etc. your friends are visiting. You win badges along the way depending on what types of places you visit and how far you travel in certain time periods. You battle with your friends to become the “Mayor” of a local place of interest. The more check ins you have, the more likely you are to be awarded mayorship. 

What you see above is pretty much what Foursquare is

“Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven” -John Milton, Paradise Lost

“I’m not your boy.” -Emory Rowland

One week has passed since I traded my SEO Manager title for full time entrepreneur. I want to report back to you some things I’ve learned over just the past seven days. Some great wins along with a few defeats came my way. Here’s what is going through my mind along with some lessons learned and discoveries. More of this blog post »

Good Morning Everyone!

Today is is an exciting day for me. It’s my first day on my new job of working for myself. I can already see that there is a big difference in working for a boss and being the boss. Another thing that strikes me about my first day on the job is how different certain things are from my previous job.  I’m getting the feeling that maybe I have been missing out on some benefits. Am I totally off base or could this be true?

New Org Chart

Let’s get one thing straight. I’m in charge. More of this blog post »

Shh… It’s 4:59 pm. Friday. The sushi lunch buffet has faded.  The weather looks promising for the weekend, a slight breeze judging by the swaying trees and fluttering of leaves outside. The person patiently waiting at home seems farther away than the very last row in your spread sheet. I can feel something about to happen. More of this blog post »

These are the types of psychological appeals spammers make and someone you know always falls for. Most of this is produced through automated blog commenting software. Want to know how many times all of the SPAM messages below are returned in Google exact match search results? Try 574,266. This tells me that Google either can’t or won’t remove this stuff from their index. Why make SPAM searchable?

Example of a SPAM comment that appeared 13,400 times in Google for the exact match search

Guilt

Stop killing yourself with cigarettes!
Cigarettes are filled with poisonous toxic chemicals that will take years off your life.
Take the step towards changing your life now with LiveFree Patches, guaranted to help you stop smoking and give you a new lease on life!
I’m happy to report that it worked and that I haven’t had a smoke in over 11 months. Thanks for giving me my life back. More of this blog post »

More of this blog post »

I’m sitting there conversing with Sarah about an important financial transaction and just as things start to get heated, I realize she is a “Virtual Agent.”

I know. There are more Digg tools out there than you can shake a virtual shovel at. I’ve tried many. These are the tools I find myself going back to and using over and over again to build and prune my friends list and track stats.

These digg tools:

• will help you become an influential Digg user
• won’t risk getting you banned 

1. BiggBoard by Brainnovate

BiggBoard is a “real-time dashboard for Digg.com”

BiggBoard lets you type in a Digg username to see how well your story submission is performing during the 24 hour period it has a chance to make the Digg front page.

Enter your username from Digg in the box at the top, and then select a story you would like to track from your upcoming list. There is no need to refresh the page, everything happens automatically and you can track your stories as they move from left to right and hopefully to the front page.

Digg has de-emphasized its category structure so that it is not always apparent what category or subcatory the user is looking at (ew, those yucky old web 1.0 pointers). Brainnovate lets you see how fast your submission is moving up the categories to the top compared with other stories. Use this tool to determine the best categories to submit to. For example, you may want to submit your story to “Microsoft” instead of the potentially more competitve “Software” or “Industry News categories.”

I used this to speculate about the Digg bury brigade and accomplish some therapeutic whining. More of this blog post »