Well, now you can answer that for yourselves, thanks to some creative piping at Yahoo Pipes.  There’s a mashup that alleges to remove some of the front page results of the Digging Elite (or Top Diggers, or Top X number of Diggers) over here; its been in response to the drama that has surrounded the most recent algorithm change at Google that prompted Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson to drop in on the DrillDown Podcast to do some grassroots “PR” over the past week.

The drama, in a nutshell, surrounded the fact that a few top Diggers (or, perhaps all of them) felt like that the new algorithm change inappropriately penalized them, and made it more difficult for them to promote stories for everyone to enjoy on the frontpage of Digg.

On this particular “emergency” episode of the DrillDown there was some talk about boycotting Digg and moving away from Digg altogether, as the algo change was thought to be a slap in the face of these Top Diggers who have put so much time and energy into Digg.

Well.

I had some thoughts at the time about the subject, but — and there’s no way for me to say this without sounding pretentious, so I’m just going to say it — it was really busy at hospital this week and I was trying to save some lives.

<shrugs>

Anywhoo, as someone who isn’t a top Digger, but someone who has been watching from a distance for some time, I couldn’t help but come up with a few thoughts (Let me preface this by saying that I know some of these Diggers, and they are fine human beings).  Having had to wait, it really distills down to one point.

Digg is bigger than all of them, and for the average visitor, there would probably be no material change if they left.

The biggest reason for this, I think, is that social news is such a big phenomenon now it doesn’t take many dedicated and active social news gatherers to find most, if not all, socially “acceptable” news in any of the popular genres of news.

Couple that with how easy it is to scan feeds via RSS readers, and the logical conclusion is that its a matter of time before any given story of any particular importance is found.

If the top tier diggers left, the second tier (let’s say the next 100) would likely find the same stories, if a little slower, they would grow their own fellowship or fans over time, and while there would be some idiosyncracies in some of their postings (perhaps a group of them have an axe to grind with, say, the evils of Best Buy, rather than the evils of Scientology), they would — literally — be the next “Top Diggers”.

And nothing would have materially changed for the average reader of Digg — who, I suspect doesn’t have many friends on Digg, doesn’t recognize the Digg “personalities” who are submitting, doesn’t actually submit news, but quickly scans for interesting tidbits while they’re at work or at school.

Where’s the proof in all of this?

Well, if the pipes are built right, you can find out for yourself if the quality of the stuff on Digg changes for your tastes by checking out the mash up for yourself.

What’s the alternative?

One way to get at the bottom of this is to get the current top 10 (or 20, or 50, or what have you) if they’re all in solidarity over the algo change, to in fact, do an experiment of their own.

Stop submitting for 24 hours.  Or 48 hours.  Or 72 hours.  Get them to tell their friends to stop using Digg if you want as well.

And let’s see the effect it has on the quality of the submissions, or, any other metric you like.  Engagement, visitors, what have you.

My guess is that nothing much will change from a quality point of view — mostly because many stories that they would have found will probably get found by someone else.  Oh, and that Digg is so big, and the average user so uncaring about this Drama that none of the other numbers will likely change either.

Hey, if anyone doubts this thesis, or thinks I’m out to lunch, that’s totally fine — and I’m happy to eat big ol’ slices of crow pie if need be.

But there’s a real easy way to prove it, and before I do chow down, I’d like to see that little experiment go ahead first.

Interesting thoughts about the TechCrunch Effect today.  Two things to say about it:

1. Its almost always unpredictable in its timing: my understanding is that Mike doesn’t email you the heads up as to when its happening, so you can’t necessarily prep your site for the giant influx of traffic from a load-handling point of view OR a marketing point of view (or, say, a “working” point of view).  So, when a site gets “crunched”, it better have all its ducks in a row well in advance because it sure as hell won’t get a warning

2. If your site is no good, it doesn’t matter how much traffic you have: in fact, getting a whole bunch of traffic, whether through Digg, or TechCrunch, or whatever, is like a test.  If you can’t convert all that traffic into regular users (or buyers — but, let’s face it, very few web2.0 startups actually sell anything other than advertising) then it doesn’t matter that you got covered because it needs to be Good to retain traffic anyway.

Put another way, you can “crunch” all the metrics you want (pun intended), but you should already be running your own internal tests, know your own numbers, and above all, create something that people will actually want to use.

The flip-side of that is that using the TC crowd / flashmob as your ‘testing’ group may not be all the representative of the traffic that you’re looking for (you have a social networking site for Mom’s?  TechCrunch filling up 1000 beta invites probably isn’t a representative demo), in which case you probably shouldn’t care about how the residual traffic plays out anyway.

Over at Scobleizer, I was reading a comment thread and a very interesting comment came up.  It was in the context of Robert Scoble giving a few pearls of wisdom about “what to do if you get fired in this kind of climate” (Cole’s Notes Version: Don’t slack off, work real hard at getting noticed, whether it be flooding folks with resume’s or networking until your fingers/ears/feet bleed).  Anywhoo, there was one particularly interesting comment about resume’s and keywords by a blogger named Poetslife (who works as a technical writer amongst many other things)

Keywords?  For real?

Call me naive, but I didn’t think there was an association — and perhaps neither would you, unless you began to wonder if machines (i.e. software, i.e. algorithms) are sorting out resume’s.  And in fact, perhaps, this is the case at some larger companies.

To wit:

“Keep in mind one huge technology change in the way your submitted resume is “read”: by software, not humans.

Writing resume for a headhunter for side money many years ago I discovered one critical job-finding tip: most resumes now are scanned and parsed by software in HR departments and only a small number of those get to hiring managers hands.

Tip? Increase your odds by placing your qualifying keywords (software experience, certifications, etc.) at the top of your resume where the scanning software will lift it and match it with any job keywords the employer has listed in the job notice.

It works. Because I’m a technical writer and people ask me, I’ve volunteer re-written resumes for many people over the years, from ex-White House guys to geeks just out of school.

When I’ve rewritten their resume to include keywords at the top where the scanning software can read it (and not buried on the second or third page)…they get interviews and then that converts to a job.”

[emphasis my own]

Hmmm.  Identifying keywords that match the goals of your resume.  Having it close to the top, or above the fold.  Now, all I’m wondering is if we need to be careful about keyword stuffing! (Or inserting paragraphs of keywords near the bottom of the page … )

Now, I have absolutely no way of verifying if any of these kinds of claims are true, but of course they make total sense in a general hand-waving kind of way: software is getting more sophisticated; it can help with parsing out and searching for Stuff; resume’s could be that Stuff; the way that it parses and sorts and organizes could be based on keywords, which is what Search Engines do (and what Google has built its multi-billion dollar business on — yes, and Adwords / Adsense).

Bottom line?

Maybe knowing a little bit about SEO that you’ve picked up creating your blog has some portability into your other offline life [there’s probably, as well, an entire commentary on how software algorithms may soon play an integral part of our lives, but that’s a post for another time]

Who knew?

In the long running, agonizing death spiral that that is the CD Business, its refreshing to see new models for distribution that Just Work (and that don’t involve iTunes).  One example is the example of Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band, two games for next generation consoles that allow players to play instruments along with real rock music.  The kicker?  There’s a way for players to pay for additional music to play with, as new tracks are released every month.

Just how successful has this been?

Well Rock Band has sold over 2 million tracks in just 8 weeks, at anywhere between $.99 per song to just over $5 for a pack of three.   Guitar Hero 3?  They’ve sold 5 million tracks this way in a little more time than that.

Pretty awesome stuff — and as someone who purchased Guitar Hero 3 on the basis of the buzz alone (as I’m not really a fan of Classic Rock) for my PC, I can personally vouch that A) It is one helluva fun game, even if you’re not intimately familiar with the music (most folks will know the chorus’s to many songs anyway) and B) once you’re done, you just want to play MORE music!

You start imagining “wouldn’t it be great if this band was on GH3?”  You start compiling playlists in your mind, you start air guitaring to stuff you hear on the radio … well, as someone who has been gaming for a long time, its something that really has to be seen to be believed.

And when you put it into the context about the economics of new media and the business of music these days, you can’t help but wonder — this is brilliant in its simplicity and execution in so far finding a way of giving people exactly what they want, and them dying to pay for the privilege of having it.

Its clear business models like this aren’t going to be the only solution to the woes of the music industry, but its clearly one solution.  And as purely digital content faces all kinds of challenges in its own evolution, its one example I’ll won’t be forgetting any time soon.

Well it looks like Nokia may be partnering with Facebook in a fairly major way to allow placement of Facebook right onto the main menus of Nokia screens.  Pretty important stuff in terms of utility and branding.

Not just in terms of the kind of reach Nokia has in Europe (and beyond), but I think its a pretty wise move overall, and something that they’d do well with in terms of reaching deals with *other* phone (and carrier) companies.  Why is this?  Oh, nothing profound here other than the fact that a new generation of digital natives will be doing more and more with their cell phones, and less and less with old fashioned desk tops.

While the digital milieu is clearly different in North America (and in Canada, than say, the United States), if places like Japan are a harbinger of this kind of future, where cell phone novels are clearly the Next Big Thing (as a means to get discovered, cut a book deal, fame, fortune, and so on), creating partnerships to make your functionality available on the go is a good thing.

I have to admit that I don’t actually use Facebook much; however, when it was still fresh and new to me, there was an appeal about checking the mobile site via Blackberry — and in a very Twitterish kind of way, update my “what am I doing” portion as I go.

Sure there are issues about how a monetary partnership might affect Facebook’s bottom line, but I think that getting your brand onto cell phones — no matter how you do it, through important partnership deals to expand “distribution” — is forward thinking, and is clearly where the future is going.

Facebook’s in decent company, I suppose, as its hard to question Google’s own moves, as they are making a billion dollar play with the 700Mhz spectrum auction (complementing their push with Android, of course).

Maybe.

There’s an oldish (interesting what passes for “old” in blogging time) study that was released two weeks ago, which surveyed a whole bunch of American journalists over their attitudes on blogs, and more importantly, how they interact with them.

Have you ever wondered if mainstream journalists are reading blogs?  Ever wonder if they’re appropriating the fresh, new, and fast ideas amongst bloggers on various issues and incorporating them into their work?  … perhaps without crediting their sources?

It would be easy to do, after all.  Bloggers live in a 24/7 world where amongst certain niches, bloggers live to break stories.  There are no boundaries between when we “work” and when we “stop” working.  And if you’re publishing for a deadline the next morning, it would be easy to not only scan the meaty news, and then search blogs for the “angle”, or interesting opinion on the story.

Do journalists do this?

Well, data says they really might.

According to the study, more than half of them read blogs between every day and 2-3 x per week; furthermore, more than half of them rated blogs as being “very useful” to “somewhat” useful for getting good angles on stories and gaining insight into the tone of the discussion.  Just over 50% also admitted that blogs and social media had a significant impact in the potential editorial direction and tone of a piece.

Pretty interesting stuff, no?

I mean, the next time I read a piece where the blogosphere might have several opinions (perhaps breaking even breaking the news on said piece), I know that I’ll be wondering how many uncredited bloggers (A-list or no) that piece is sourcing.

I’m embarassed to say that I actually knew this tip a while ago, but never got around to implementing it until I read about it *again* today.  Embarassed because this blog has been hacked a few times, and in a fairly devious fashion as well, sometimes perhaps because of an old Wordpress installation — or, perhaps because of insecure folders (which makes me think someone behind Wordpress should really fix it).

What’s this tip?  Oh, a simple fix to get around securing your Plugins folder.

If you’re running Wordpress, unless you’ve already locked down your Wp-content folder with some .htaccess fixes, you may not notice that your Wp-content/plugins folder is naked and bare to the world.  That is, navigate to http://www.yourblogname.com/wp-content/plugins and you may find a directory listing of your plugins folder, files and all.  How do you fix it?  Easy.  Just upload an empty index.html into the wp-content/plugins folder and its all fixed.

Just out of curiosity, I decided to check the plugins folders of some other bloggers that I knew — whole some did have this fixed, a surprising number did *not*.

If you haven’t locked down your plugins folder, please do so, because for many people its showing, and its just about as easy to fix as doing up your zipper.