Ramblings from the Marginalized

Internet and Social Bookmarking October 11th, 2007 by HMTKSteve

The forgotten side effect of moving to Propeller

A lot of things have already been said about Netscape's dumping of their social news site to a new domain. What has not been pointed out (and is now coming up due to Google's late Page Rank update) is the loss of PR juice involved with being on the new Propeller.

Propeller, as a new site, has a very low Page Rank, as in zero. Their Alexa is hovering around 16K but they have a ton of incoming Yahoo links.

Current Rankings:
PageRank: Not Ranked
Alexa Rank: 16,049

Incoming Google Links: 0
Incoming Yahoo Links: 670,500
Incoming MSN Links: 0
Incoming Alexa Links: 3
Overall Incoming Links: 670,503 (Overlap is possible - Estimated 670,500 unique links)
Outgoing Links: 206 (Ratio: 0.000% - Each Link Receives Approx. 0.000 PR)

The former Netscape site has much better stats:

PageRank: Not Ranked
Alexa Rank: 533

Incoming Google Links: 129,000
Incoming Yahoo Links: 5,264,263
Incoming MSN Links: 946
Incoming Alexa Links: 24,502
Overall Incoming Links: 5,418,711 (Overlap is possible - Estimated 5,264,263 unique links)
Outgoing Links: 201 (Ratio: 641.791% - Each Link Receives Approx. 0.000 PR)

Netscape dot com still has a Page Rank of 9, you just can not see it above.

A lot (as in thousands) of bloggers tok over the old Netscape and covered the front page with blog stories. Part of the reason for doing this was the PR9 link you would get from Netscape. The other part has to do with the click-happy nature of Netscape traffic.

Many bloggers who made the front page on Netscape saw a huge jump in their Page Rank numbers. Now that those PR9 links are gone they are seeing their Page Rank drop. I have seen some go from a PR of 6 down to a PR of 3... OUCH!

So, as the new Page Rank numbers roll out don't be surprised if your numbers drop. It's not just about selling paid links anymore, it's also about the PR drop the sites that link to you are experiencing.

Internet and Social Bookmarking September 10th, 2007 by HMTKSteve

Do you Stumble?

Do you use StumbleUpon? I have been using StumbleUpon off and on for a few years now. I even became a donating member back before they got gobbled up by eBay.

My StumbleUpon Profile

One of the great things about Stumbling is that you can tell StumbleUpon what sort of sites you want to see and it will deliver them to you in a semi-random manner.

By using the simple thumbs up / thumbs down interface on the toolbar you tell StumbleUpon what sites you like and what sites you do not like. In fact, you can even change the way the thumb buttons work in that you can make it so after you give a thumb to a site a new one is sent your way. The default system has you hit the Stumble button to get a new site sent your way.

Because many in my audience are bloggers looking for ways to get more traffic to their site let me tell you this, StumbleUpon is a great source of traffic. Granted Stumblers do not click on ads but they may become permanent readers if your content is good.

In order to make your Stumbles send traffic you have to become an active Stumbler. This requires (drum roll please) using StumbleUpon! Yes, the more active you become with StumbleUpon (stumbling sites and gaining friends) the more power a thumbs up from you will have.

Why not make me a friend on StumbleUpon and begin the path of Stumbling your way to blogging success!

Internet and Social Bookmarking September 7th, 2007 by HMTKSteve

Netscape: Let the Clone Wars begin!

Earlier today on the Netscape Blog it was announced that the impending shutdown of the social news experiment at Netscape dot com was true.

Visitors to Netscape.com will see a more traditional news experience very soon. Don't worry, the social news site isn't going away! We will keep you updated on where you will be able to find the social news site as we get closer to making the switch.

Translation? We don't like seeing the Netscape brand dragged through the mud by blog spammers and other not-so upstanding elements of the interwebs.

We received some feedback that people really do associate the Netscape brand with providing mainstream news that is editorially controlled. In fact, we specifically heard that our users do have a desire for a social news experience, but simply didn't expect to find it on Netscape.com.

Yup, sounds about right.

Netscape realized something that digg discovered many months ago. If you build it, they (spammers) will come (and try to game it). The sad thing is that the blog post also slaps all of those Netscape Navigators and Scouts right in the face by saying the people want editorially controlled content from mainstream sites.

Take a look at what passes for home page content on Netscape:

What was the whole point behind the Navigator and Scout programs? Why to bring some editorial control over the social news side of things. This post essentially says that all of those editors they hired are not worth a damn and failed to keep the site properly edited.

So let's take a quick look at Netscape's new design.

Wait a minute, where have I seen that design before? Oh yeah...

It looks just like Yahoo!!!

First they cloned Digg, and failed.
Now they clone Yahoo...

I've heard that imitation is the highest form of flattery but this is down right ridiculous. Know what is real ridiculous? That the people in charge of making these decisions get paid in the millions of dollars!

Internet and Social Bookmarking August 28th, 2007 by HMTKSteve

New Digg says, “You must watch videos!!!”

OK, is this some sort of joke? Why is Digg forcing me to include at least one category of videos?

After the last site redesign Digg removed videos from the front page all together. Now that they have added them back they are forcing me to include at least one category of videos in my home page preferences.

"You need to have at least one videos topic selected or you won't see any videos." is what it says. What if I do not want to see ANY videos? Notice the grayed out "save changes" button?

Internet and Social Bookmarking August 24th, 2007 by HMTKSteve

How To: Correctly game a social news site

So, you think you found a way to game a social news site such as Digg or Netscape? You think you are so smart because you are emailing links to your friends and asking them to digg your story? Guess again chump! You are about to run into the cold hard door of failure.

The problem with emailing links to your friends is that when your friend follows the link the site they go to gets a referral link attached which tells them where you came from. It is a simple matter for the site in question to throw in a filter that scans your referral link for certain keywords such as "mail" and to then discount the vote and mark your account as a possible spammer/gamer.

You can tell your friends to cut-and-paste the link but that is even more suspicious because then you lack any referral link. There is no way for you to have organically found the story if you have no referral link.

Sit back and let me explain to you the proper way to "game" a social news site. In todays lesson we will look at Digg

Step 1: Submit a story

So, you found a story and you have now submitted it. For illustrative purposes I have submitted a story but I am not going to provide you with a direct link. If I id that the digg server would know you came from here and discount the digg.

This story is in the programming section of Digg. It already has a few diggs. How do we get more?

Step 2: Sharing a story

We could email the link to our friends but we already know that that is a bad idea and may result in us being marked as a digg gamer or spammer. We still want our friends to digg it so what do we do? We email them the name of the story and the section it is in. We then ask them to follow these simple directions.

Step 3: Instructions on organic story digging

This is a screen shot of the story in the upcomming section of digg as sorted by newest stories. Depending on how active this section on digg is the story may not stay on the first page of upcomming stories (sorted by newness) for long. You can also sort by most popular, most commented, etc... For our purposes we will ignore this page. Instead we will focus on the far more usefull cloud view page.

The cloud view page shows every upcomming story in the given section at one time. There is no need to jump through pages and pages of stories to find the one you want. since most borwsers allow you to search a page for text via Ctrl-F we can tell our friends to search the cloud view page for our story.

Once they find it and click on it they will be on the stories page and able to digg it. As far as Digg is concerned this will look like a legitimate organic digg.

Wrap-up

So, are you ready to try this out?

1) Open up a new tab or new browser window.
2) TYPE www.digg.com into the browser URL bar and hit enter.
3) Click on the Technology section link.
4) Click on the Programming sub-section link.
5) Click on the Upcomming Stories tab.
6) Click on the Cloud View option.
7) Hit Ctrl-F and search for "Fogey" (many browsers can not handle a multiple word search on a web page so pick the one word that sticks out).
8) DO NOT CLICK on the story link yet.
9) Click (and digg) 3 - 7 other stories mixing the one you want promoted somewhere in those clicks. Just make sure the stories are all "somehow" related.

NOTE: If the story does not show up as upcomming one of two things has happened:

The story has made it to the front page - Go there and look for it before digging.
The story has been buried - DO NOT DIGG A BURIED STORY!!! Digging a buried story looks very strange because the only way to find a freshly buried story is with a direct link. Digg removes freshly buried stories from their site search soon after they are buried. Digging a recently buried story is a sure way to get your account flagged for gaming/spamming.

That is it.

Proper Social News Gaming Tips

1) Digg often - nothing shouts "gamer/spammer" like someone who only logs onto digg once a day to digg very few stories.
2) Have a Digg pattern - If you always digg programming stories no one will suspect you of passing some gaming diggs in the programming section. It is when you suddenly toss one digg into a new section that you get marked as a gamer.
3) Do not use the digg friends system - This one is sure to downgrade the value of your diggs no matter what Digg says about it.
4) Have fun - Digg is still empty traffic. Diggers do not click ads. If you are gaming Digg for exposure to good stuff go right ahead and do it. If you are trying to make some money than do not bother.

Internet and Social Bookmarking July 12th, 2007 by HMTKSteve

Dealing with too much traffic

I recently moved hmtk.com and a few other websites to their own dedicated server. There are currently ten sites running on the same server as hmtk.com. A few days ago one of those sites got dugg.

While that one site was on digg's homepage the server load was in the 10 to 60 range. A server load higher than one indicates that you need more CPUs in your server.

The server never crashed and all of my sites that use static content worked fine. The MySQL server, however, was under a heavy load. It also did not collapse but many pages took 500+ seconds to load. Because every site I host uses the same MySQL server every site that is database driven was impacted.

The person who submitted the content to digg sent me an email asking me if my site could handle a "digg effect". I had no idea why he was asking me this because I constantly point out how digg is "empty" traffic. It's the sort of traffic that just comes in like a swarm of locusts, leaving nothing in its path but destruction.

Within 20 minutes I found the article he submitted to digg and it had already hit 40 diggs! Not knowing what else to do I opened up an SSH terminal and logged into my server. I used that terminal to run top and I watched.

Everything was running smooth for another half an hour and then it hit. The server load jumped from .12 to 60 in the span of five seconds! It stayed above 50 for ten minutes and then began to drop into the 20's for another ten minutes. It then hovered in the 8-15 range for the next few hours.

It was at this time that I realized I was pretty much dead in the water. Duggmirror and all the other cache options had failed to grab the page in time and I had no way of making a cache copy now. That was when I started doing some research on redirects and cache options for WordPress.

Cache Options

I found the wp-cache plugin but it does not seem to work with the newer versions of WordPress. Only one of my sites gives any indicator that the plugin is working and that one uses an older version of WordPress. With that failing me I went to my next step, building a redirect into the .htaccess file.

This step required me to save a static copy of the page and put it on the server. I then set the redirect to check the referer information and send a digg user to the cache copy instead of the real site. Because the cache copy is static it does not require any MySQL overhead. This works well enough if you prepare or expect the digg effect but you can't fully implement this until after your content has been submitted to digg. To enact this before the digging will not work because when digg checks the URL they will see the redirect and not allow you to submit the content.

Proof of Concept

If you go to digg you will see As Apple rises so does at&t fall which is also on StockScams. The big change is that by clicking on the digg link you do not go to As Apple rises so does at&t fall. Instead (via the magic of .htaccess) you are sent to As Apple rises so does at&t fall CACHE COPY. Yes, digg users go to a static page rather than a dynamic page. This should alleviate my server problem upon getting on the digg homepage.

This does not mean a thing though until I get on the digg homepage! Until this system goes through its "trial by fire" I will not know if it will allow me to survive a digg effect.

I'm going to keep an eye out for "diggable content" and try this on some of my other sites. No, this particular entry is not cache so please don't submit it!

Internet and Social Bookmarking June 29th, 2007 by HMTKSteve

Technorati can’t count?

It has recently come to my attention that the blog tracking site Technorati is suffering with a math problem. Yes, the site that tracks millions of blogs (and rates them by popularity) does not understand that their Top 100 list should be just that, a top 100 list. Instead their Top 100 list appears to be a fictional list of blogs that they think should be the Top 100 blogs.

Take a quick look at their Top 100 list. The blog currently at the number 1 position is Engadget. If you click on their summary page you will see that they are number 1, with an authority of 31,053 (as of this writing). Everything seems good.

Now take a look at blog number 100, The Blotter from ABC. According to its summary page it is number 112 with an authority of 3,499 (as of this writing).

If this blog is not in the Top 100 why is it listed in their Top 100 list? How many other blogs are not properly listed in the Top 100 when they should be?

After looking through multiple blogs on the Top 100 list I found that the majority of them were in the accurate position based on their summary pages and some were in the Top 100 but in the wrong place on the list. There are a few possible reasons for the inaccuracies in the list.

The list is updated via cron job at certain hours of the day
The list is updated by hand
The list is so important that it involves money changing hands and new blogs are not just added automaticaly.

I'm hoping it is just an issue of it being a cron job. Constantly regenerating that list (and the most favorited blog list) must be a server drain. Finding the Top 100 out of millions of blogs probably takes a second or two of time on the database server and, with the amount of traffic Technorati gets, generating that list on the fly would likely bring the site down or seriously slow it down.

Why do I think it might be politics or "pay-to-play"? Just look at John Chow's blog summary. He is listed as number 55 with an authority of 4,980. Yet, he is nowhere to be found on the Top 100 list.

It's no big secret that being in the Top 5 of both Technorati lists can get you some nice traffic and exposure. I would hate to think that those top five spaces were under some sort of political pressure. I mean, it's not like Technorati ever removed any blogs from their system for jumping into the Top 5, right?

Wondering about me? HMTK.coms summary page.

Internet and Social Bookmarking May 17th, 2007 by HMTKSteve

Digg: Open up the Bury Data Petition

Attention all current and former digg users. There is an online petition for you to sign if you believe that digg should open up the bury information.

To: Digg Staff

Digg has become a slow RSS feed for big media companies. In all honesty anyone could setup an RSS feed with a few of the major internet giants and you would get the news much faster. Digg used to be a great place to find new content, but now it seems that most of the unique content that once made the site great is almost always buried immediately. This petition calls on Digg to open up the data on how stories are buried show who is burying the articles. If you think Digg should open up this information please sign the petition.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

Digg Open Up the Bury Data petition

The petition is correct and points out a problem that I have spoken about (and blogged about) many times. The problem being that digg has become nothing but an RSS feed (with comments) for the major players in the media.

The amount of new content on digg is so small these days that digg is no longer worth using. Every time I see news about a startup on digg it gets buried. Once I even saw a digger submit a link directly to a startup company while another person submitted a link to a news story from one of the tech sites about that startup. Do you know what happened? The link to the startup was quickly buried and the link to the news site hit the home page.

Some people think I am anti-digg because of the things I say, I'm not. I'm a tough-love kind of guy and I want to see digg become useful again.