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In recent months I basically got myself addicted to Digg.com .  Digg  In my opinion has a great Community and returns good traffic in return.  I also have been Suggested to look into using  Propeller.com as well.

I had a propeller account since July but have barely used it until now. After getting more involved  With propeller I use the same techniques that I use to get my stories popular on digg.com. It seems that everything that I do continues to no show any results.

In a recent test I submitted the same article to Propeller then I submitted to Digg, Propeller  Gave me 14 votes Digg 500+.   Now don’t get my wrong propeller has over 5 Million backlinks  And Digg has 6 Million propeller also has an Alexa ranking around 1000 digg around 100. Propeller has the traffic but here is a couple of reason why I think propeller does not work.

• 1. Community Sucks - They do not vote or comment on Shouts sent which on Digg is pretty much Vital for getting diggs and comments.

• 2. Friends online option is broke! - You see an option on the right hand side which slows How many of your friends are currently online.  The does not work because it fluxuates from15 friends to 1 friend, back to 15 friends again.  Then when you click on friends online It does not even tell you which friends are online! It just shows you a list of your friends

• 3. Sending shouts sucks - I will go back to the sending shouts complaint again first you canOnly send shouts to only 5 people at a time for some reason, second there is no AJAX which Is so 2006.

• 4. Popular stories do not shine - What I like about Digg is that the top stories of the day Are highlighted on the front page in a widget.  Propeller has its old stale stories on the front page With 50 or 60 votes.

• 5. One word Anchor s - So Propeller has ‘ Anchors ‘ who select quality stories and have it posted On the front page at the very top, how corny is that?

Now for Digg
Digg as you know is the creator the voting system for stories online, they have the largest
Community and most active community.  The only problem that I can see in the future with Digg
Is where the quality stories are going.  It seems that Digg has been banning way too many people
And those people have been an asset in the Digg Community.   Just this week alone if you take a look
At the front page alot of Non-front page worthy stories have been making it to the front page.
Thanks God the Ron Paul stories have worn out because they were becoming a 10 time a day to the front page.

1. Digg bans too much - Digg banned way too many people over the past few weeks and I really
Think that has a lot to do with the decline of quality submissions over the past few weeks.

2. Let people know whey they got banned - Digg is notorious for just banning people without letting
Them know why they were banned and how they can get unbanned.

3. Customer support? - Forget about customer support at Digg, if you have a problem
You have to live with it!

4. Buries - There are a few good options missing that I hope one day that Digg Will
Add to their site.  It would be nice to know if a story was buried or not, it does not pay to keep on
Promoting a story that was buried, it hurts to find out that you wasted all day to get a 100 diggs
And the story was buried at 10 diggs

5.  Who Buried the story - This would be cool also if you were able to see who buries your story
This way if that person is on your friends list you can remove that person from the list to prevent
Future buries.

Please feel free to add any comments or suggestions.
As always if you need your story promoted on Digg contact me and we can talk.

I am now ready to let everyone know about the next big thing. I launched our new Social Bookmarking site today. I decided to name it Upchuckr.com. I would have preferred upchucker.com but all the good domains are all parked. That is one thing that really pisses me off!. Any how off the bat what makes this site different is that it is DoFollow, meaning that each bookmark that you add will count as a backlink in Google’s eyes.

The Site was created using the Scuttle Script. It is basically a open source version of Del.icio.us. You can export all of your existing bookmarks into an .XML file and import them into Upchuckr. To import bookmarks from your del.icio.us account, go to http://del.icio.us/api/posts/all, log in using your del.icio.us user-name and password, and save the XML file to your computer. Thus all of your bookmarks will not be Do-Follow. Once you register at Upchuckr.com you can also Export your bookmarks to save them or insert them to Del.

You can add bookmarks the same way as with Del either by going directly to the site or using the FireFox plug-in. To use the FireFox plug-in with Upchuckr.com you will need to first download it here . After you have downloaded the plug-in firefox will need to be restarted. As soon as it comes back up goto

Tools -> add_on’s –> scuttle –> options –> then you will add www.Upchuckr.com .

To Save the pages to Upchuckr.com Right click on the page that you will want saved and select ” Scuttle this page”.

You can also Added pages using Bookmarklets.  To use this feature you must login to your account - > select Add a bookmark –> On that page you will find ” bookmarklets “  –> Drag and drop the bookmarklets to your Firefox toolbar  –>  And thats it!.

Upchuckr.com allows you to specify one of three types of security settings for each bookmark in your collection — public, private, or “shared with watch-list.” Public bookmarks are available to anyone, including guests that are not registered with Scuttle. If you set a bookmark status to shared with watchlist, it will be available to registered users, but not to unauthorized users. Finally, private bookmarks are available only to you. Each security setting has its own color code, which makes it easy to identify a bookmark’s status.

Like del.icio.us, Upchuckr exports RSS feeds, so you can keep an eye on other users’ public bookmarks. However,Upchuckr takes the idea of sharing bookmarks even further. Using the Watchlist feature, users can view each other’s public bookmark listings, and add interesting bookmarks in the watchlist to your own bookmark collection by simply clicking on the Copy link. To add a user to your watchlist, point the browser to http://www.upchuckr.com/bookmarks.php/username, where username is the user’s Upchuckr name, then click on the Add to Watchlist link on the sidebar.

Upchuckr has several other features you won’t find in del.icio.us. All tags in Upchuckr are presented as a tag cloud, making it easier to locate the most popular tags. The tags can be sorted either alphabetically or by popularity. The same goes for bookmarks: you can sort them by date, title, or URL.

Upchuckr also supports the related tags feature that allows you to view bookmarks with multiple tags. And when you add a bookmark containing a link to an audio file in MP3 or Ogg format, Upchuckr places a tiny player icon next to it, and you can play the file without leaving Upchuckr.

As you can see the site is pretty much bare at the moment, not many bookmarks yet, no ads, But not to worry you will hear and see alot more of This site very much in the near future!.

Again the site can be found at WWW.UPCHUCKR.COM

I ran across some pretty interesting information released by Digital Footprints. Digital footprints is a project from Pew Internet and American Life Product. They have released findings this week which show that 47% of Internet users have Google their name to see exactly what is out there about them. This has rose 22% percent since 2002. Now I understand that people are worried about their security and their information that is online but why a study? Why do this non-profit organizations spend so many man hours researching such irrelevant stuff?.

We already know that people search their names online each day, you do not have to get a huge grant from the government to tell us this!

As I went on to read a bit more I found some of this information

Fully 60% of internet users say they are not worried about how much information is available about them online.
Similarly, the majority of online adults (61%) do not feel compelled to limit the amount of information that can be found about them online. Just 38% say they have taken steps to limit the amount of online information that is available about them.
Online adults can be divided into four categories based on their level of concern about their online information and whether or not they take steps to limit their online footprint:

• Confident Creatives are the smallest of the four groups, comprising 17% of online adults. They say they do not worry about the availability of their online data, and actively upload content, but still take steps to limit their personal information.

• The Concerned and Careful fret about the personal information available about them online and take steps to proactively limit their own online data. One in five online adults (21%) fall into this category.

• Despite being anxious about how much information is available about them, members of the Worried by the Wayside group do not actively limit their online information. This group contains 18% of online adults.

• The Unfazed and Inactive group is the largest of the four groups—43% of online adults fall into this category. They neither worry about their personal information nor take steps to limit the amount of information that can be found out about them online. Digital Footprints

The rest was pretty much blah, blah stuff that we already know, I can’t believe how long this PDF is and how many facts are listed. After reading this I felt the same was that I feel when a solicitor calls be on the phone asking me the dumbest questions. I probably would have, no excuse me I would have hung up on them if they called me!

Just when you thought that Google owned everything they are now going after DoubleClick.com. Businessweek.com reports that the FTC ruled in Google’s favor today 12/20/07 but they still need approval from EU’s anti-trust commission. Google is prepared to shell out $3.1 Billion to close this deal.

Now it seems that Google is starting to feel the heat from other advertising agencies in this Billion Dollar industry. Microsoft is really trying to get their head back in the game since they suck so bad and from what it looks like they are leaving software behind. Microsoft already has their Ads running on Major sites such as Digg.com, Facebook and Newscorp ” FoxNews”.

So Lets see what happens.

You can read more on this article at Businessweek

Just tonight I logged into Google reader to take a look at my RSS feeds and I was invited to use ‘ shared items ‘. I am not sure if this is something new or I was just blind and did not see this ever. So I checked this out and looked a little further into this.

It seems now that Google has added a new feature into the Google reader which will allow you to flag individual post from your RSS feed and dump them into a shared folder. This shared folder is then made public so that the world may see them. When you want to view others you would simply select ‘ friends shared items ‘. Inside of that option you can select who’s reader you want to view.

Its that simple just one more way of getting your story out!