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.

2. Friend Statistics

Do you expect your Digg friends to digg at least some of your stories? Do you have Digg friends who go AWOL? Friend Statistics let’s you keep tabs on how many of your submissions your friends are actually digging. Not reciprocating enough for your taste? Drop them. Or at least don’t digg their silly lolcats stories anymore!

Enter your Digg user name and this script will tell you which of your friends are digging your submissions – and which aren’t. FriendStatistics.com will analyze your Digg friends list and tell you which of your friends have dugg the last 10 of your digg submissions, and which of your friends have not. It will also tell you which users in the digg community other than your friends have dugg more than five of your submissions.

3. Neaveru

Are you the kind of digger who wins the hearts of your friends with witty comments and ascii art? Do you love making your political enemies mad until they bury your comments into oblivion? A lot of diggers use comments to charm other diggers into friendship. Neaveru let’s you see statistics on the last 10000 comments that you’ve made along with the actual comment itself. You can use this to see how popular your comments are with other diggers, even if they are not your friends.

4. Social Blade

Want to buddy up with Digg power users and win their friendship? First, you need to know who they are. Social Blade let’s you see who the real Digg powerusers are and were. Track where you appear on the top lists of users as you begin your journey to the top.

Input your Digg id into Social Blade and see a snapshot of all your digg story stats or the stats of others graphed out, active and non-active. I usually go straight to the top 1000 active user list to see if I’ve risen or fallen and who is above. Feeling nostalgic for your old friends who were banned from Digg? Enhance your reminiscing with the Digg Graveyard. There’s a lot more nifty stuff at Social Blade to check out.

5. di66.net

Like Social Blade, di66.net gives you top user data too but also gives up some other very interesting data that can help you determine how to craft your titles and descriptions.

• Top Words in Titles
• Top Words in Descriptions
• Digg’s Top Sources
• Most Popular Digg’s Topics

You can see all the top domains sources that any user is submitting. Pretty cool.

This tool has implications for my SEO brethren out there. Just look at this screen cap of the top Digg words in titles. Once you get past all the stop words and superlatives, you see what subjects users are voting to the top. You can choose stories within those topics in the hope that they will be received well by diggers.

Now where is that really cool Digg tool that does everything I want in one click? Twitter? Ah, that’s another post.

Alligator escapes from Atlanta Zoo?

HostGator’s September 09 Newsletter says the company currently has billboards “posted in 10 major U.S. cities and that number will be increasing soon.” I’ve been noticing HostGator billboard ads in the Atlanta area since September. I’ve seen web hosting billboards fragvertised before. And, I’m accustomed to seeing the blue and yellow HostGator mascot “Snappy” online, but on the way to work? On the way to dinner? While running errands? I’m going to have to adjust to that.

HostGator is not a host I’d call modest when it comes to advertising, whether online or offline. Their bite into advertising can sometimes annoy loyal web affiliate advertisers who receive 400k in payouts per month (apparently this figure does not include Commission Junction, where the affiliate ads on Clickfire come from). Consider this. If I’m on my way to get a cheeseburger after work, am I going to see the HostGator billboard, pull over, and order hosting for that new Web site I’ve been wanting to build? No, but here’s the scenario that affiliates may fear the most: I am going to either write it down or force myself to remember the name in the largest lettering: Hostgator.com. When home, I Google “HostGator” and click the number one listing (Google displays the brand site first in organic search). Unless I decide to do some research or comparisons, I’ve just bypassed affiliates and gone straight to the source to purchase my web hosting.

Do billboard ads “take” sales from online publishers? Will HostGator billboard advertising even work? How about we have some fun with HostGator’s latest campaign. Let’s do a crude test. Let’s take the three HostGator billboards in my neighborhood and see how long they stay up, the assumption being that no company would continue an unprofitable ad campaign.

Estimated start: Sept 09. Status: still live. See you later alligator? Not yet. It’s still there right next to the KFC on Cobb Pkwy, Marietta. Dude, get some chicken and stop standing there like a nerd.

Estimated start: Sept 09. Status: removed.  This reptile at Roswell Rd and W Wieuca went into hibernation by November. I think a whiskey ad appears now.

Estimated start: Sept 09. Status: still live. This one took me by surprise because of it’s remote location on Upper Roswell in Marietta.

What I searched:

http://www.google.com/search?q=irfanview+clickfire

Don’t ask why I searched Google for irfanview clickfire the other day, but the results I received surprised me. I’d seen the rare Google double indented search results, but never more than two results per search query appear. What’s going on here?

A few observations come to mind.

• All the results come from the www and not the blog or news subdomains (all 3 contain content about Irfanview)
• The indented results are missing the URL, cached link, and similar pages link commonly returned.
• The results could be replicated during the browser session with similar terms. Later, however, I was not able to reproduce them.
• 3 out of 4 of the  snippet portions of the results (normally the description meta tag or abstract) appear to show items from the global clickfire menus (top, left column).

It almost looks like Google is trying to show similar results, but from within the site itself.

Any thoughts on these types of results? Seen this before?

I walked into Lowes and was greeted by the grim reaper. Oh, it’s Halloween, I recalled. Yet, the backdrop was a bunch of Christmas trees with price tags attached. Yeah, if you say so.

I look forward to celebrating Christmas… but not in October! Let’s get Halloween and Thanksgiving out of the way first, Lowes, okay?

Is the U.S. economy so bad that we have to fast forward 3 months ahead to Christmas?

This year’s WordCamp Birmingham was my first ever WordCamp, locally held conferences that provide a forum for WordPress bloggers to learn and network. Overall, it was about what I expected–smart developers and bloggers making presentations and a good forum for meeting fellow bloggers. A big bonus of this WordCamp was the fact that WordPress founder, Matt Mullenweg made the trip to attend. What was it like being together for the first time with so many southern bloggers with a passion for WordPress blogging software? A definite high.

Matt Mullenweg spoke about the future of WordPress

What’s the obvious main course for a Southern WordPress shindig? Barbecue was served for lunch before the keynote. Wade Kwon pictured.

An Advanced Track Session

The Dougal Campbell presentation on WordPress Plugin development wraps up

Another Advanced Track Session

Another Session

WordCamp Session

Matt Mullenweg spent most of the time answering questions from atendees

Attending this WordPress event made me understand another dimension of Twitter: the benefit of the hashtag for events. Having the Twitter hashtag #wcbhm09 created a communications stream for everyone to participate in during the conference. Where were people gathering that night after the sessions? Who was in the room from your city that you could meet?

Another benefit of using Twitter was that it made it easier to communicate and arrange to the first face-to-face meeting with my Internet friend Scott Wilson and his charming wife who happen to live in the Birmingham area. Scott is a Linux evangelist, Web host industry veteran, Web designer and a really nice guy. He’s written a few excellent articles for Clickfire and blogs about Linux at The Mystic Bird.

• InMotion Hosting – The Web Host Few Know
• What you need to know about Linux!

After meeting for dinner, Scott gave me an Ubuntu demonstration and showed me his suite of Linux apps from the ALoft Hotel Lobby, stuff like KompoZer, Gimp, Filezilla and others. Scott summarized the evening on his personal blog.

I hear a WordCamp Atlanta is rumored to in the works.

I went to the water fountain, leaned down to get a drink of water, and saw this…

Working in the search engine marketing industry means you have to spend all of your time on the Internet. Sometimes, the segue into the real world blurs. This is one such case.

Have you ever spotted an object in real life that strikingly resembles a familiar Internet object?

Dragging it to the RSS reader won’t be easy. But, I’m thinking about replacing my standard RSS icon with this last image for a more industrial look. Why follow the pack of other bloggers?

Do you see a water fountain or an RSS Logo?

Within a few hours time, over 9000 Twitter users retweeted the home page of an online pharmacy site. Here is what I saw through the eyes of Tweetmeme.

McDonald’s feels the pain of Atlanta traffic and takes the opportunity to do some clever advertising.

Anyone who lives north of Atlanta and works in the city likely drives in via the Ga. 400 (Georgia 400) toll road. You guessed right if you imagined that driving Ga. 400 home from work at 5:30 on a summer afternoon is not something that most suburban Atlantans look forward too. It’s flat, hot and backed up with traffic–a great time to catch up on your talk radio or get into a mindless conversation with a salesman.

My Mom sent me this news that today, drivers will be able to come home from work via Ga. 400 without having to throw a couple of quarters into the basket at the toll booth from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. on June 3 thanks to McDonald’s.

The Atlanta Business Chronicle elaborates:

To mark the launch of its new line of McCafe beverages, the Greater Atlanta McDonald’s Operators Association will treat commuters to free toll payments and free specialty coffees. McDonald’s owner/operators will pick up the tab for drivers passing through Ga. 400 toll booths and will hand out free “Be Our Guest” cards for complementary McCafe coffees at Greater Atlanta McDonald’s Restaurants.

The gift cards are redeemable for a free small hot McCafe coffee or a free medium iced McCafe coffee.

“Just as our new McCafe beverages offer an escape from the daily grind, we’re offering a free pass for commuters eager to get to their destinations Wednesday afternoon,” said John Tamasi, president of the Greater Atlanta McDonald’s Operators Association, in a statement. “We want to thank our guests with free toll payments during those two busy hours on Wednesday and invite these commuters to our hundreds of local restaurants to enjoy an iced or hot McCafe beverage.”

Why the excitement about this? No matter how many bailouts and stimuli the U.S. economy sustains, I’m not so sure I’ll be buying my lattes at fast food restaurants. Never-the-less, I think this is an excellent way to advertise a product. Atlanta drivers can be comforted that there actually will be a positive about the trip home on Ga. 400 today, albeit small. This little McDonald’s freebie might even gain some ground toward replacing the blaring voices from the drive-in window speaker that linger in the mind with a warm feeling inside that transcends expresso.

It is not the job of search engine optimization to make a pig fly. It is the job of the SEO to genetically reengineer the Web site so that it becomes an eagle. — Lisa Barone, Bruceclay.com

SEO is only not seen as rocket science BY THOSE WHO ALREADY KNOW IT. — Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land

SEO’s are the new real estate developers. Our skillset gives us an amazing opportunity to develop an audience on the cheap. — Brian Provost, Scoreboard Media

There are three keys to good SEO: communication, content and backlinks. — SEO Refugee

You can chase whatever keywords and phrases you like, but at the end of the day it’s all about those conversions. –Matt Webb, SEO Honolulu

My rule of thumb is build a site for a user not a spider. — Dave Naylor, DavidNaylor.co.uk (DaveN)

SEO is a noun, verb, and adjective. — Todd Malicoat, Stuntdubl

SEO is fundamentally a set of methodologies that make it easier for search engines to find, include, categorize and rank your web content. — Lee Odden, Online Marketing Blog

Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first. — Wendy Piersall, ProBlogger guest post

SEO is not SPAM. — Matt Cutts

Social media takes place in your Web browser, right? You post a Facebook pic. You Digg your friends’ stories. You tweet your day’s events.

Do you ever get the urge to leave the memes, shouts, and retweets in your browser and join a PC Online Game?

When you entire a PC online game via Steam, Valve’s gaming platform, you need not leave the social behind. Steam offers real time social media engagement that transcends the browser.

For anyone not familiar with action PC games, Valve is the company famous for creating the extremely popular first person action series game called Half Life.

Why Steam?

The first time I arranged a multiplayer PC online game, it was via telephone. Later, game server browsers arrived with built in buddy systems. The Kali.net game browser software is the one I remember best (I see that the site is still live–the domain may be worth more than the product now). You downloaded a software client and browsed hundreds of multiplayer PC games from Doom series FPS to Falcon 4 type flight sims. Playstation and XBox were just a twinkle in some entertainment executive’s eye back then. Soon, every multiplayer PC online game had its own server list from which you could browse and join others playing the game you just bought.  For me, instant messaging became the preferred game arranging communications device among friends. Funny, I no longer own a land line phone.

In the nascent days of multiplayer gaming, if you wanted to update to the latest version of a game, you downloaded the latest “patch”  from a FTP site. Get a new PC? You needed to break out the discs and reinstall. Want to buy a new game? You visited your local electronic entertainment store.

Today, how does someone who has suddenly fallen in love with a new PC game meet, play and maintain a relationship with others who are engaged in the same game?

Steam accomplishes the following:

• Portable account – one account
• Game Launcher – a bunch of current games, many genres
• Software client updater – it’s automatic
• Product ratings
• Ecommerce – you can see what new games your friends are playing and buy it
• Social networking – profiles, add friends, join groups, stats
• Advertising engine

Who says social media can’t be monetized? I’ll just say that Steam does all of the above very well. It’s the quintessential one-stop gaming platform that allows users to have fun and companies to reap revenue. The convenience of being able to instantly download and play a game that you see your friends playing is very attractive.

What Could Go Wrong?

“Where did you get that game? I didn’t see you buy it?” — Wife to gamer husband

“I downloaded it on Steam.” — Husband to disgruntled wife

The ecommerce side of Steam does actually feel a bit like a Web browser. True game addicts can get what they need when they need it. But, the convenience of buying and downloading a new game for immediate play has its downside. Steam’s Achilles heel? The refund policy. The subscriber agreement states:

All steam fees are payable in advance and are not refundable in whole or in part.

I had a chance to test first-hand the we break it, you bought it policy. I purchased Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X for $49 and had problems getting it to work. I finally got it off the ground in single player mode, but never was able to join multiplayer. 

Ubisoft, the title’s publisher, admitted to me:

This issue is currently under investigation by the development team, and is expected to be corrected in the next patch.

I just wanted it to work. When it didn’t, I asked Steam for a refund and was told:

As with most software products, we will not offer refunds or exchanges for purchases made online as outlined in the software license – please review Section 4 of the Steam Subscriber Agreement for more information.

Steam cancelled my account after I disputed the charge for H.A.W.X on my credit card. That means that all games I had purchased through Steam would no longer work until such time as I would drop the dispute and pay Steam for the H.A.W.X. game that didn’t work.

So what was I to do? Pay the Steam tax and get my account with all my games back? Nope. Instead, I disputed credit card charges for all recently purchased games attached to my account since all are now unplayable due to my Steam ID being revoked. Steam’s attempt to force me to keep software that admitedly didn’t work means multiple charge backs for all the other games I purchased via Steam. Dumb I say. Dumb on my part for not buying the good old boxed version. Dumb on Steam’s part for enforcing a revenue-losing policy.

The cardholder will need to close the dispute and have the funds returned to Steam. If the cardholder is unable or unwilling to drop the dispute and let the credit card company know that the purchase is valid; and in turn have the funds returned to Steam then we will not be able to reactivate the account.

All games on your account are locked to the account and can not be transferred to a different account.

I’ve added a nofollow attribute to the Steam link to punish them for this cruel act :)

Even though games can be purchased easily, the ecommerce side of the Steam engine remains suckily broken. The refund policies need revamping. Processes for dealing with returns for defective products need to exist. Yeah, yeah, I know a patch will fix it one day, but still.

Steam Screen Shots

Steam’s info and rating of the game HAWX by Tom Clancy.
 

Intalling a game after purchase is insanely easy. Who needs that pretty box?

Look at the profile of my nemesis, Clapper with that smug look on his face that says “frag me!”

Chat messages are seen during games and when idle.

See if your friends are currently in a game and join up.

The Blotter is the ”what are you doing now” of Steam. Or perhaps better said, “Who are you fragging now?”

On Steam, you can join groups. Great if you’re a member of a clan or have a favorite mod.

Thankfully, there isn’t a mechanism for doing memes on Steam yet :)