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Apparently there is uproar about the “discovery” that people are getting their friends and cow-orkers to Digg their stories. Whoah, stop the press!

Even worse (!), Weblogs Inc, owner of Netscape, an alleged Digg-clone no less, has been accused of using this exact tactic to boost their own stories!

Even even worse (!!), there are secret cabal email lists with the aim to share links and get certain Diggers submissions pushed to the front page.

Oh my days what is the world coming to, people gaming Digg in an organised fashion. OMG, WTF, YMMV etc.

Urm, apparently this is new to some people. Really.

Personally, perhaps it’s just how my brain is wired up, but I connected the dots between “Digg popular = traffic”, “lots of friends = lots of diggs” pretty much right away. But is it worth the backlash doing it so blatantly? I know kids with 1000 friends on MySpace, how easy would it be for them to do?

It turns out the shock isn’t so much that people are doing this, which is a given in such a system, but that people are doing it to subvert the “editorial content” of Digg. The theory goes that it’s ok for people to do this to get spam out there and popular, but when people do it for political reasons then it really gets sleazy. I can see that. Seems when you step over the line from greed to a political agenda, that is when it gets nasty.

I think people are forgetting something though, Digg just suggests “stuff” you might want to go look at. The comments give you another level of filter “obvious spam” is a popular comment. So for someone to take a Digg seriously they are going to have to also game the comments too. A little bit extra work. But you know what? If you are not interested “Austrian Economics” it will take a heck of a lot more than “It’s really good, no really!” 200x to change your mind. Seems to me all they are succeeding in is taking over the front page and painting a big red target on the site and the digg user accounts for future filtering.

What do you think? Do you do this? Would you? Heh, are you going to now that I have alerted you to it? Share your thoughts in the comments …

If you’re a regular MySpace user, and have a litttle time to help us alpha test a new addon for PFF, please send me an email to [email protected]

thanks!

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Your blogging clients may or may not have a mission-critical posting schedule, but if they do, consider what you have to do to not let them down. As I learned the hard way recently, having a second or third way to access the Internet is often a necessity.

My blogging activities are back into the 12-16 hours/day territory again because of new projects. But while writing an article may take me only 15-30 minutes, it’s all the research and the hyperlinking that increases total overall time spent per blog post. So I surf the net a lot, scanning and mentally filtering over 800 web feeds (some weeks) and countless articles, as part of my regular weekly research.

Recently, my regular Internet access was down for a few days. My alumni account at the local university had run out, as well. Fortunately, my father offered me use of his broadband access for a couple of days, or I would definitely have been letting down a big client.

So when posting articles daily is mission-critical to a client, make sure that you have back-up online access.

If you are writing for a number of clients, or even just one, you’re likely to want to keep track of your work. Why not create a private article bank, in the form of a password-protected weblog?

Depending on your uses, this article bank could be on your laptop/ desktop computer’s local web server, or a hidden subdomain somewhere. I prefer the latter, so that you can give access to a client if they need a back up copy. Either form is a backup copy for you.

Having a private article bank gives you a quick way to search older posts without skewing the pageviews of your client’s website. As well, if you post to your live article bank on the same day as to your client’s website, you have a record of your work.

For example, one site I write for asks for exclusive rights for one year. I can easily check my bank for articles in a given month and see if any are about to be “freed up”. Depending on your blogging platform, it might also be easy to keep track of which articles you’ve been paid for. (WordPress, for example, allows you to add custom variables to each post. You could a “paid status” field.)

In general, an article bank will come in hand either when you have a lot of clients, or when you have long-term projects with a few clients. It’s a supplement to the article log I mentioned previously. And you can easily see what your productivity has been in a given month.

A recent thread on performancing sparked some very quick dev work on our part to put together a plan we’d had on the back burner for some months. A marketplace for bloggers and companies wishing to hire, or engage those bloggers.

Think of it as a kind of craigslist meets job board for bloggers. Raj and Ahmed have kindly agreed to head up this new section of Performancing and we’re well set for launch next week.

Check Your Performancing Profiles!

Ahead of launch, we’ve already put a new profile system in place. I’ll be posting about it seperately, aswell as sending out an email to all members shortly, but for now — check out Ahmed and Raj’s links above, then go edit your own.. here’s how:

1. Go to “my account” on the right
2. Hit “edit” at the top
3. Hit “professional details” at the top
4. fill in details..

This should allow people to see at a glance whether Performancing members are for hire (in any capacity, such as paid bloggers, designers etc), see their background, and their blog and recent entries on Performancing.

Profiles will shortly be searchable by “for hire” also 🙂

I’ll outline some more on Performancing Exchange in coming posts, for now though, have fun with the new profiles, and let me know what you think of the idea in general — or ask questions.

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I noticed some traffic coming in via an interesting post on the Reddit effect (a social bookmarking site akin to Digg), and noticed that they were using Performancing Metrics to analyze the traffic data.

I use Performancing Metrics to handle my blog analytics. It’s really robust and easy to set up, not to mention it’s free. I was able to break down my traffic statistics by the hour.

Its an interesting read, and Reddit though not as newsworthy (clearly not trendy enough for fickle digirati…), seems to be sending a lot of traffic to sites that make it’s homepage..

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UPDATE: See here for the details, but the short version is it’s an old feed not being redirected: Newer feeds are full text.

Speaking of Yahoo, i was reading my feeds this morning, when not for the first time, I got terribly irritated with the Yahoo Search Blog. Irritated because to actually read the story I was interested in, i had to click through to the damn web page!

Sheeesh…. I have my Feed reader, deliver appropriate content to it. Include ads if you wish, i won’t mind — but man, Yahoo of all companies should be delivering full feeds shouldn’t they?

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My friend Loren Baker over at SEJ has commited to a 7 day test of Yahoo’s YPN contextual ad system. That post, from his third day in the test, makes for pretty interesting reading if you’ve not tried YPN on your blogs.

Loren asserts that the contextual targeting improved from dismal on day one, to pretty damn good on day three. Talking about day one he says…

“If we had not made the commitment to stick with YPN for one week we would have probably switched back to Google AdSense”

Apparently the quick turnaround on targeting was due to some pretty spiffy customer service, but it makes you wonder how that’s going to scale when Y! finally open the doors and let the rest of the world play

Ms. Holland shot me back an email early that morning stating that the relevancy problem had been fixed and she would be monitoring Search Engine Journal throughout the day to enhance the contextual targeting. Now that my friends is excellent and swift customer service!

I can’t imagine that happening when they have hundreds of thousands of users in the system…

I’d be interested to hear the Performancng publishers points of view and experiences on YPN, so if you’ve tried them, or are currently using them, tell us about your experience.

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