So I read with great interest a new news aggregating service called Spotplex, featured on TechCrunch.  Mike Arrington wonders if its “better” than Digg as it is fundamentally different, and hopefully, therefore, will avoid Digg’s issues with bias and gaming: basically they use an index of blogs to generate news, and the way stories are promoted is through the popularity of the posts on that blog.  The more a post is read, the higher it will rise on their index.

While Spotplex is still admittedly in beta, its ironic that they didn’t quite prepare for the “Crunch effect” — which is probably somewhere between the Digg effect and the DJI effect (probably far closer to the Digg effect).  That is, the site is currently down, and likely because it has been featured on TechCrunch [but also Mashable].  Its ironic because they likely pitched Mike Arrington for the exclusive, but didn’t prepare for the traffic load, and doubly so because a future Digg will likely be dishing out server-crippling levels of traffic, not succumbing to it.

At any rate, without actually seeing it its hard to really evaluate it.  But in as it uses the analysis of blogs for news and buzz, it seems to be following the pattern of Techmeme, Tailrank, Megite and their ilk rather than Digg.

Mesh, the Canadian web2.0 conference has finalized its keynote speaker list and is ready to roll — including early bird registrations.  The main site is over here, with registration information over here.  Basically its $399 per person with an ultra cheap (and reasonable) $25 ticket for post secondary students — although the student priced tickets are limited to 30 in total, so if you’re thinking about saving yourself a bundle of cash (and have a student card to prove it), there’s no better time to book your tickets.

The keynotes will include a couple of gents that I’ve blogged about at some length here at DJI: Richard Edelman, of Edelman International [and Wal-mart flog fame], and Mike Arrington, of — well, web2.0 fame.  Its a pity I wasn’t really into blogging a *year* ago, as last year’s conference featured two other blogging and web2.0 luminaries, Om Malik and Steve Reubel.

I personally plan to go in *some* fashion (attendee, blogger, or who knows what else), and it would be great to finally meet some of you if you happen to be in the area.  The rare times I have done so, I have found that meeting other bloggers and like-minded individuals to be an incredibly good experience — and its funny how congenial most (all?) bloggers are in person, even if their blogs tend to have rather sharp opinions.

A big hand needs to go to the founders of the Mesh Conference who must have (and continue to) work their tails off to bring a little taste of Silicon Valley to Toronto: Rob Hyndman, Mark Evans, Stuart MacDonald, Mike McDerment, and of course, Mathew Ingram.

So, Muhammad over at ProNet Advertising does some heavy duty crunching to prove that the Bury Brigade, in fact, exists [extra tip of the hat to David “Lemieuxster” Lemieux, who did most of the lifting] I can barely make through some of the technical explanations, but basically by combing through the Digg Spy you can find out what people are “burying”.  And when you examine the actual articles that are labeled, for example “spam”, you’ll see in fact, that many of those articles are NOT spam (in any sense of the word), and that some individuals routinely “bury” certain kinds of articles.

Is this any surprise?  No — but Muhammad (and David) deserves a pat on the back for the proof.

But it illustrates the flipside to voting and promotion at Digg. 

Recently Digg decided to *unban* a whole bunch of domains because they were confident in how their algorithm circumvents what they call “grouping” in the voting process; that is, they were confident that algorithms could sort out when certain stories were being promoted in a deliberate, non-organic, quasi-gaming kind of way.

Fine.

What Digg doesn’t yet do is have a method for figuring group voting in the OPPOSITE direction — that is, group voting to bury stories.  Burying SHOULD work to alert the Digg system for stories that are inaccurate, “lame”, and Spam, amongst others.  And Digg NEEDS this kind of system in place, because it depends on its audience to police its stories.

As Kevin Rose himself has mentioned in the past, they just don’t have enough (or, are not willing to pay for enough, or, simply don’t want to pay for enough) staff to police or moderate upcoming stories. 

In fact, as of a few months ago they had a couple guys in rotation to monitor the 5000 stories or so they have a day.

Yes, that’s “it”.

And because they rely on the community to ”police” itself with these instruments where there is absolutely NO way to check the veracity of anyone’s claim that ANYTHING is a ”duplicate”, “lame”, or even “spam” — well, you can see the enormous potential for abuse.

Sadly — I think this is where Digg’s dark future lies. 

Because there is both a voting “up” and essentially, a voting ‘down’ feature to Digg so that stories can literally be wiped off the frontpage of Digg, it encourages a polarizing effect to people who use Digg. 

Microsoft vs. Apple.

Xbox vs. Playstation

Boys vs. Girls

Left vs. Right

SEO lovers vs. SEO haters

… and so on.

In fact there was a brouhaha over the weekend thanks to Little Green Footballs (a political and right leaning blog, to say the least), who discovered that the Bury Brigade exists in force, as the liberal segment of them were burying their stories with abandon.

The problem with burying, however, is that it obliterates the story off of the frontpage, essentially working as a blunt tool of censorship.  If enough people hate microsoft, for example, not ONLY will those stories not get voted on, but even if they DO, they won’t stand a chance on the frontpage, or even in Digg proper.

The only way you’ll discover those stories is by deliberately “searching” for them with the radio switch for “search buried stories” turned on.

Until Digg solves its problem of understaffing its moderators, it will by necessity require its users to “police” itself, and as such, tacitly condone the “mobbing” effect of its voting — both up and down.  And while it may have solved the issue of grouping with “positive” votes, it certainly hasn’t — and will not, for the forseeable future — solve the problem with “negative”, or censorship-votes, as I like to call them.

And as such, Digg will continue to live on the whims of burying brigades.  Those auto-spawned groups who use the pitch forks and axes of “bury” action to effectively censor those who don’t align with their own opinions, viciously labeling dissenting opinion as “spam”, when in fact, there is nothing spammy about those bits of news at all.

No, its not being boring. I can handle boring if its informative and useful. The worst sin in “How-to” blogging, or article marketing, as it perhaps was known in older days, is the crushing banality of the how-to that is filled with self-evident and the blatantly obvious.

Here’s an example.

“How to make sure you get your fly always stays zipped up!”

Step 1: grab your zipper

Step 2: pull up the zipper

Step 3 (and here’s the special step) — LOCK the zipper!

Or, how about this one?

Would you like to know how to use StumbleUpon to maximize it for traffic and business potential?

Step 1: Register an account at StumbleUpon

Step 2: Try “stumbling” on to sites of interest

Step 3: Submit your own content and follow the instructions.

Step 4: Participate in the StumbleUpon community by making friends

Did I just write anything you already didn’t know? Or were thinking of? Did I suddenly suprise you with some amazing insight? Did you just fall out of your chair, amazed at that shining pearl of wisdom?

Well, I hope not.

I acknowedge that its difficult to create worthy and decent how-to articles. But for the love of Pete, please don’t bore me with the amazingly self-evident. And yes, Tamar Weinberg, I am talking directly to you. Don’t worry though, you’re in good company — Neil Patel has come a long way since I last called him out a few months ago. I’m guilty of it from time to time as well, but all I’m saying is that we should all try and rise to our best every time.

What do I mean? Here’s a list if you’d like one.

– Three Ways to Make Your How-To Article Rock –

1. Make it Wide: if there’s nothing under the sun that’s new for your given topic, let’s say, baking strawberry shortcake, that’s fine. But you can make your article or post better by making it comprehensive. Give a shockingly long list of things you should never forget to do, from A-to-Z. Provide a resource list, even. A practical example? I wrote an article on “marketing your blog in 2007” over at ProBlogger. Any one tip was nothing to yawn at, but I tried to include every single thing I could on the topic.
2. Make it Deep: give a thorough handling of one aspect of your topic, and even better yet — reveal novel information that very few people know. If you can’t produce something entirely new, that’s fine. Provide some new analysis or insights to an arena that hasn’t yet been explored. “Strawberry Shortcake — 3 Ways It Can Be Used for Breakfast!”
3. Make me Laugh: So you don’t know much about your topic, and you don’t have the time to research things to make it comprehensive. That’s fine — but at least, entertain me! Make me think! Make me laugh, make me sad, or make me angry. But please, don’t bore me if you don’t have anything new or worthwhile to say.

StumbleUpon has been written about before. Neil Patel wrote about it 6 months ago. Now, when I read another article on StumbleUpon, I’d like to read about something that goes a little beyond the obvious. I’d like to see a posting that details or answers stuff like:

1. Do certain stumblers have more influence than others?
2. Is there a way to influence how the Stumble algorithm chooses sites to “stumble upon”
3. Are there easy ways to get your site banned from StumbleUpon?
4. What kind of people use StumbleUpon? How are they different from Digg? Is there any data to support this?

If anyone can find this kind of information, please let me know. Because until something like that shows up it’ll be hard to convince me that there is an “ultimate” guide to StumbleUpon anywhere.

UPDATE: if I do decide to monetize things, I might have take down MBL – it looks like its spying on Adsense and THAT might violate Google’s TOS

A few months ago, I signed up for ReviewMe in an effort to find out a few things about it.  Initially my attempt at signing up for an account was declined; but this soon changed.  I didn’t think anything more of it as I had already posted some thoughts on the matter.

So, much to my surprise, as I was trawling through my mailbox (sometimes I peruse, but I was trawling, as the volume was immense) yesterday, did I find a notice from ReviewMe.  I had gotten an invitation to do a paid posting!

The second surprise, once I looked up who it was (sitepoint auctions), was that the value of a paid review here at DeepJiveInterests had actually gone up – way up — since I had initially signed on.

For the uninitiated, ReviewMe uses an algorithm much like Text-Link-Ads, to determine what the “value” of your blog is worth — and assigns a value to how much a paid review is as a result.  They use a bunch of metrics, including Alexa and Technorati ranking, but its not clear exactly how each value contributes to an overall value score.

[Digression Alert!] As an aside, for those who ever want to know WHY a Technorati or Alexa ranking is at all useful, think ReviewMe or Text-Link-Ads.  They directly relate your “worth” according to these metrics, no matter how useful (or not) they are.  Since SOME people are willing to pay that price that they’ve calculated (whether in paid links or paid postings), yes — it means that the Technorati or Alexa ranking is in fact “worth something”.

So back to my point: in recent months my Alexa ranking had done better than previously, and my Technorati ranking also has done pretty well.  Part of this is because of my joining b5media, and part because of my short stint at Darren Rowse’s Problogger during the month of January.  Some of my articles were linked to, and in turn DJI.

Bottom line?  The cost of paid reviews for DJI have gone from $60 to a princely sum of $250. 

If I ever decide to take ReviewMe up on it, it’ll mean a cool $125 in the bank (ReviewMe splits the cost of the review in half).

MMmmmm.  Paying the bills. ;)

Anyway, up until — and including now — I’ve not put any ads on this site.  Mostly because in the beginning there really wasn’t much traffic to warrant it.  Then, I just sheer ass lazy, and didn’t even really think about it any further.

While blogging is a worthwhile pursuit in and of itself, I do wonder whether or not I should begin monetizing this blog.  After all, a little gas money in the pocket isn’t a bad idea every now and again.

On the other hand, where do I draw the line? Should a line *be* drawn? 

I think every blogger needs to answer that question him (or her) self — and its a personal one.  Google Adsense is fine for some, because it removes the connection between ad buyer and blogger, thereby removing any undue bias and influence.  On the other hand, some readers hate any ads — and will refuse to read a blog that has anything including Adsense.

And then of course there’s the whole thing with paid posting that I’ve blogged about ad nauseum.

At this point I’m going to give YOU a chance to let me know how you feel about this blog — after all, I don’t really write for myself, but for people who read it (at least that’s my intention).

Let me know what you think — either through comments or through the poll on the right (yes, I know it looks crapped up on MSIE as its shifted all the way down to the bottom; I’m in the process of fixing it, thanks) … because I’m very interested to know what you all think.

Cheers,
tony.

Well, it looks like MBL has done the right thing, and re-instated Shoemoney, and have created that TOS to boot.  I’ll echo Mat Ingram’s sentiments on this one: these guys may have goofed, but they’ve acknowledged it, and they’re trying to make it right — and in a timely fashion. 

So good for them. 

Sometimes you screw up, but when you do, you’ve got to meet these things head on, make your public mea culpa, and (hackneyed phrase ALERT) nip it in the bud as early as possible.

Which is what Eric and his crew seemed to have done.  Good for them.

What I’d like to see as well, as I’ve mentioned, is for MBL create a process where they invite bloggers like Shoemoney into the fold and get them to work *with* MBL to find exploits — and get public recognition for their efforts. 

After all, it would be nice for a process to be in place when the *next* exploit is found — because like any system, weaknesses do abound, and as its popularity grows, more and more, over time, will inevitably be found.

So, I’ve been following the whole expose-MyBlogLog-weaknesses, publish-MyBlogLog-exploits, business courtesy of SEO jester Shoemoney. The latest episode seems to involve Shoemoney’s figuring out to masquerade as other “people” by altering your cookie to match another individuals’ unique MBL ID — and furthermore, decided to publish a list of famous bloggers’ IDs for folks to mimick (which was easily determined).

And that’s when Shoemoney got banned.

Why?

Well, let’s quote Eric “everyone’s first contact” Marcouliier:

We banned him for publishing other people’s data on the site and urging readers to spoof them. On what planet is that not a bannable offense?

Most planets, I suppose. On the other hand, we should remember that at this point, there isn’t actually a terms of service. In fact, Eric “we’re trying our best” Marcoullier mentions on the official MBL blog:

1) We’re going to post an official Terms of Service (ToS) and hold people accountable. It’s hard kicking people’s asses for breaking the rules when the rules aren’t posted anywhere. That will change. Things like blatant advertising in profiles will not be tolerated.

While I suppose it makes sense that Shoemoney should be banned for posting other people’s data — then encouraging users to spoof them, shouldn’t MBL follow its own sentiments and at least draft a proper terms of service first? After all, its hard to obey laws when none are written down in the first place. Sure, you could argue that spreading exploits is a reasonable offence for banning.

On the other hand, Shoemoney’s a popular blogger and a reputable SEO to boot. MBL’s growing, but it couldn’t try and handle this kind of affair with a little more discretion? After all, if MBL is a blogger’s tool, ought it not try and work with bloggers towards some sort of resolution than outright banning? The temptation to game a service grows as the service grows in popularity; and I’m sure that MBL is working over time to curb spam as their latest posts suggest (as an aside, I got some Nigerian-type-scam messages for the first time via MBL a few days ago — I guess MBL is really growing when people are spamming you over their service). However, isn’t part of the solution working with the community?

Rather than outright banning, doesn’t it make more sense to create a culture where people are encouraged to report weaknesses so that they can be fixed with each “version”? Perhaps individuals such as Shoemoney (or Andy Beal) can be publicly recognized, or privately brought into the fold, for their efforts.

At the end of the day, I think that banning a popular blogger such as Shoemoney isn’t really going to accomplish much.  Its not based on any firm rules that they themselves recognize is necessary to hold people accountable to.  And its not going to prevent Shoemoney — or anyone else — from publishing MBL weaknesses, and in turn, exploits.