Four days ago, Stacy Doss, AKA 3monkeys, a top30 digger, had his account obliterated at Digg. For no apparent reason. Although Stacy has been trying to contact them, it appears Digg’s administration is refusing to answer his emails; for more details, hit up theMuLife.com where it details the emails that Mr. Doss has been sending to Digg and company.

What’s the alleged crime? (according to Stacy that is, as there has still been no reply) He submitted a post from an individual who had already been banned — although there are no obvious details in the TOS or FAQ which describe this as a violation. I thought it would be interesting to get Stacy’s thoughts on the matter, how Digg has responded to him in the past, what he thinks of Digg’s recent spate of negative blogospheric press, some advice for aspiring diggers, and where a top digger goes after all of this.

Tony Hung: So, Stacy — how are you feeling after all of this?
Stacy Doss: Hummmm… Fine I guess, at first I was really ticked off, but this has become *almost* comical (read a little sarcasm there). I’ll move on, even if digg reinstates my account, I doubt I will go back. I don’t have to be treated like this and will simply go somewhere where I’m a little more appreciated. So, in short, fine, unappreciated, ready to move on.

TH: Have you ever had any problems with the Digg administration in the past? Any reason for them to ignore your emails at this point?
SD: No, they have generally be quick to respond, I think the longest it has every taken them to respond was 3-4 hours, even on weekends they are quick to respond

TH: Why do you suppose you’ve been given the snub this time — after 4 days of emails and no response?
SD: I honestly couldn’t begin to guess. There has been a lot of friction between the top users at digg and the average user at digg. I believe that the digg staff has a thorny issue with that friction. Trying to play the full democracy card, they can’t play favorites. But I think that they are, deliberately or not, putting the top users out to dry in an attempt to placate the average user. In other words, they are pushing out the old, bringing in the new. The problem will persist, however, whether or not it’s me in the top 30 or some other John Doe.

TH: What’s your opinion of the spate of negative opinion of late? (more…)

Well, no sense in rehashing what Amit’s already done a great job over. If you’re not watching the web as closely as you’d like, there are tools like Zaptxt, that outgoing TechCruncher Marshall Kirkpatrick mentioned yesterday, but its also important not forget good ol’ Google Alerts. It scans the interwebs for all kinds of news based on the keywords you leave behind — and now also scans the blogosphere. What I didn’t realize is that, of course, you can use the same tricks on your google search as you can with Google Alerts.

Amit over at Digital Inspirations goes through the gory details, but you can, for example, set up alerts so that you track news in a certain place. Interested in team Rocketboom, but only in New York? Try this query: rocketboom OR “andrew baron” OR “joanne colan” location:ny … yes, Google allows you to narrow searches using US States’ two letter codes.

Nifty!

If you’d like the details head over to Digital Inspirations for that any much more Google and other productivity related goodness.

A year before I got married, a chief of medicine at a hospital I used to work at said to us residents “I’m a high-def snob — I only watch stuff on high definition.” Well, I scoffed then, but about a month after I got married, I ate a whole lot of crow. Delicious high definition crow, that is. One of the things I got as a wedding present to myself me and my wife was a high definition set. I admit that now, I too, am a HD snob and will watch almost anything in high definition, including professional baseball and PBS. PBS!

And with that introduction, I’d have to say that yes, television as it is now on standard resolution sets is dead — and the future for that sort of broadcast is some sort of symbiotic relationship with the Internet, as both a distributive medium, and a marketing arm. Standard resolution television will never go away in the same way that Radio, and even newspapers will never fully go away; they’ll evolve into something else entirely that we may not recognize from our vantage point in 2006.

High definition television, will, however, continue to live on, and stave off that future for a few years at least. And I’m in Mark Cuban’s camp on this one — the Internet is fine for watching grainy 480×640 (if that) home movies of some yahoo(!) setting himself on fire while you’re killing time at work on some 19″ monitor; its not fine for watching the latest and greatest serial drama’s in eye popping 1080p with dolby 5.1 sound.

And personally, I’ve found with a better set and a vastly improved HD signal piping through, I’m actually watching MORE television, not less.

How the internet intersects with High Definition is when, sometime in the future, some enterprising group of individuals is able to develop a compression algorithm to shrink down the size of a HD broadcast into something manageable to pass between individuals; and/or, the development of a information transportation system better than bit torrent.

When this happens, and only when this happens, then we’ll be able to make a blanket statment like “Television is dead”; the internet will have its role in chopping up the poor remains of standard broadcast television, but like the neanderthal, its being left behind for a more evolved type of organism altogether.

Now, if you’ll excuse me … I have to getting back to watching Heroes. ;)

tip: Duncan Riley

Although with the kind of coverage it gets in the mainstream media, you might think it is.  Yes, MySpace is the favourite punching bag of many an online blog and journalist for many reasons: its hideous design, the vacuous commenters,and the widespread commercialization of the network, and so on.

But as Darnell Clayton at the BlogHerald notes, the enormous breadth of the site does have its uses.  He relates:

Although I will not go into personal details here, the general gist of the story is that I had several family members who lost contact with our general “family tribe” after a disaster struck their home via fire. Since technology was not as organized as it was today (this was years before Google was even an afterthought) we lost contact with them as people relocated all over the country.

After a decade and a half of family reunions on various sides of the family, a bright cousin decided to conduct a random search for our missing relative via MySpace, since virtually “everyone had a page” online (at least in America).

After typing in their name, they were able to locate our missing relatives and after a quick exchange of calls, our family was reintroduced to the missing blood lines, making next years family reunion a little bit more interesting.

Yes, while the breadth of the network has the potential for many abuses, it clearly has its potential for connecting individuals like this as well; when social networks get that sort of critical mass, they truly get useful.  And when they get to the size of MySpace as it is right now, as perhaps, the network inside AOL once was, you start getting mega-network effects, where improbable connections start getting quite probable.

And in light of the kind of media coverage this mega network gets, its nice to hear a positive story for a change.

Thanks Darnell.

Today it was announced that Marshall Kirkpatrick, a longstanding columnist and reviewer at TechCrunch, would be departing for greener pastures, in the form of consulting work for non profits and startups.

I enjoyed Mr. Kirkpatrick’s involvement in TechCrunch, and while his reviews were always meaty and insightful, I always enjoyed his opinion pieces as well, such as his thoughts on the move by Yahoo! to help syndicate local newspapers.

It looks like Mr. Kirkpatrick will be replaced by Natali Del Conte, a journalist who has worked for Ziff Davis in the past, who has been featured on Cranky Geeks, and who has roots in the entertainment industry — and it looks Mike has put her to work already with two review pieces out already.

While there’s no denying her pedigree, I think its great to see a little more diversity in the Web2.0 arena as the landscape seems to be dominated by The Man.  After all, when you do a head count, you might agree that it does seem a little bit like an (all) white-boy’s club.

Resources:

• Marshall’s TechCrunch Archives
• Natali Del Conte on Cranky Geeks 
• TC’s about page

Every time I want to turn and write something positive about the darling of the Web2.0 set, something like this happens and just turns my keyboard to an about face. John Chow, self proclaimed Internet Mogul, and former Ultimate Fighting Championship contestant recently got his blog banned from Digg. Now, for some who have been following John’s bloggerrific adventures, they might say “Thank God, its about time” — as John has gotten a huge number of his posts to hit the front page of Digg. But no matter what you might think about his blog or his tactics, the content of his site certainly is not spam. He’s not posting about organ enlargement, mortgage refinancing, or the latest pump and dump schemes.

He’s not even posting on something off-topic in hopes of getting link-baited right on to Digg (such as “Losing weight” on a dental site).
What is really exceptional, however, is how he got banned. To quote an email from John posted right to his site:

When submitted stories are consistently reported as spam and users complain via our feedback email about submission spam, we ban the domain. The domain will not be unbanned. The domain would consistently get reported as spam otherwise. Please review our FAQ (digg.com/faq) for more information.

–digg support

So it looks like Digg has an automatic “Ban” function, where if enough posts which are submitted are marked “spam” and are actually “buried” (that is to say, gone from Digg except if you search for them clicking on the “search buried” radio item, or put in the URL of the submission right into the browser) your URL could be banned — regardless if the content is actually spam or not.

John alleges that it is as few as 10 submissions that when buried as “spam” could land your URL being banned, and wonders whether or not it could be as few as 10 “marked as spam” per submission that can bury a submission.

Now, over this quiet Thanksgiving weekend, there’s been quite the hubaloo about Jason Calacanis proving that Alexa’s old and busted (which, quite frankly, is no news at all), but can you imagine the kind of abuse that could go on with Digg if this aspect of its automagical algorithm is true? Or, if a group of individuals went out to “prove” that it were true?

For example, could we get TechCrunch, banned, I wonder?

Its not a stretch to imagine that I could pretty much submit 10 or more of posts / stories / URLs from any particular site, then set up enough puppet accounts to mark them as spam and bury them all. Poof — on the road to automatic banning. (more…)

BlogMedia, the parent company of BlogHerald, a blog that I also blog at (ah, using “blog” as a noun and a verb leads to all kinds of grammatical fun) is currently under a repositioning effort that has seen Head Honcho Matt Craven divest BlogMedia of quite a few blogs of late. With BlogMedia transforming into ProBlogging.com, I pinned down Matt for a few words during the middle of a particularly bloody divestiture (is that a word?) for a few words on ProBlogging’s plans for its future, its focus and scope, and above all the burning question on my mind — is the BlogHerald safe from its bloody axe?

Tony Hung: So, how long have you been planning these changes?
Matt Craven: I think any good businessman/woman takes time to sit down and think about where their business is and where their focus should be. This is something that we’ve always done regularly. Our recent discussions have led us to believe that we’ve made our focus overly broad and our recent steps have been to narrow that focus.

TH: It seems like BlogMedia has divested itself of many different blogs in pursuit of that focus; where does that leave the BlogHerald?
MC: The Blog Herald is a key part of Problogging, Inc. and the cornerstone of our coverage of the blogosphere.

TH: Can you expand a little on what your focus will be on — from a blogging point of view?
MC: We’ll always be covering the blogosphere in some way, shape, or form. We’ll be talking more about professional blogging over at problogging.com - and launching a new podcast only site in the near future.

TH: You’ve divested yourself of quite a few blogs; will you be looking to acquire any blogs at this point to hone your focus?
MC: While we would never rule out an acquisition of the right site for the right price, we’re not currently seeking to acquire a blog, or any other website for that matter

TH: It sounds like ProBlogging is meant to be a “full service” firm for bloggers, including consulting work. Have you done any consulting work with bloggers, and can you tell us about any successes you may have had? (more…)