There are a lot of things that annoy me about Web 2.0 - the lack of sound business models, the buzz-driven approach to investment, the return of pastel colors, but I don’t think anything bothers me more than the cutesy culture that pervades this entire quadrant of the IT sector.

Yahoo and Google started the trend of using cutesy names for multi-billion dollar corporations, a trend which has become so commonplace that it would almost seem out of place for a Web 2.0 company to name itself using words found in Merriam-Webster’s English Dictionary. Google also introduced funny Easter Eggs, like the results when you search for “How Goes Google Work?“

As a result of Google’s success, many shiny new Web 2.0 company has sought to recreate itself in Google’s image, sassiness and cuteness included. While I think cuteness is fine for all of the general service-to-consumer interactions between Web 2.0 services and their users, I think this cuteness comes back to bite those services in the ass when it comes to getting businesses to adopt Web 2.0 services as part of their outbound marketing platform.

Let me share you a quick anecdote:

Over at Working Smarter, the blog I manage for work, we use a number of screencasts that we host with Vimeo, a YouTube competitor. We went with Vimeo because its Adobe Flash player had less compatibility issues than our in-house one and YouTube’s. Well, today we experienced a brief service outage and we were presented with the following error message:

SUCKER

Vimeo drank your milkshake!

This is what greeted all of our customers and potential customers when they came to visit the homepage of our corporate blog; isn’t that wonderful? Even if the majority of our customers have seen There Will Be Blood I don’t think most of them are going to understand right off the bat that this is an error message. It’s bad enough that our customers can’t see our screencasts, but having to show them this silly error message makes me regret giving this Web 2.0 company a chance to begin with. Why? It makes us look just as cartoonish and cutesy as Vimeo, an image which rests in stark contrast to the one that we’ve been trying to build.

So after being the butt of a few jokes by our CIO for my decision to use a third-party service to resolve some of our compatibility issues, I’ve decided that the cost of having this stupid error message rear its head to our customers isn’t worth the benefits of using Vimeo. We’re planning on scaling up our video usage considerably and we drive thousands upon thousands of eyes to our videos each week, which was essentially free exposure for Vimeo. Sucks for those guys.

A bit of downtime I could tolerate - that’s expected from any service, even YouTube, but the fact that we have to broadcast a bunch of cutesy garbage that clashes with our image to our customers whenever something breaks is unacceptable. The bigger lesson I am trying to draw here is that the cutesy stuff might be something that end-consumers appreciate, but a lot of businesses who try to integrate social media platforms into their outreach marketing efforts don’t.

Business Idea: Develop a YouTube, Vimeo counterpart that specializes in hosting corporate videos specifically, like training videos and so forth. Screencast.com is probably the best example of a “closed garden” in this regard.

Ultimately bad reviews and stories from these sites force companies to stay honest by hitting them in the pocket book, and that’s one of the beautiful things about the Internet: the complaints of a few “average Joes” can be leveraged successfully against powerful companies.

But what happens when an army of misinformed consumers use these sites as echo chambers for false claims about small businesses? What happens when a small business is caught in a self-feeding storm of inaccurate, yet damaging buzz with no opportunities to defend itself?

This hit close to home for me recently - we had a negative review pop up on Amazon, one that also happened to be grossly inaccurate and speculative. The details of the review wouldn’t make such sense here unless you’re familiar with our product, but the spirit of the article was something along the lines of someone who didn’t understand why this product didn’t work like an entirely different product aimed at a different market.

Imagine if someone bought a rider lawn mower and complained about how it was a pain in the ass to push - that’s the level of inaccuracy that went into the review about our product.

Of course, being that most of the people who came to check out our product on Amazon have never actually used the product they have no inhibitions about voting up the review, and that has quickly made the review the most popular. I also suspect that there’s some psychology at work here - I think a lot of people want to be talked out of spending money on a product, even if it’s good, and are relieved as soon as they see a negative review which gives them a legitimate excuse for not purchasing.

We’re not the only ones who’ve had this problem - Dino Esposito, a prominent .NET author, has had issues with trolls writing zero-substance digs at his books since 2004.

I wonder how many sales have been lost to totally inaccurate reviews; probably a lot. Amazon began using the Real Names engine a while back in order to eliminate trolling, and that’s a good start, but it still doesn’t do anything to enable companies to fight back against inaccurate reviews written by real people.

Why should a company lose tons of potential sales because a customer couldn’t figure out that you’re supposed to sit on top of a rider lawn mower and drive it per my absurd example? Giving customers a voice is a great but when that voice starts shrieking inaccurate information, aren’t companies entitled to clear their names?

I say “yes.”

Joel Spolsky was an early pioneer in the field of Gillmor translation, but as you can tell it’s a rather difficult field of study - right up there with deciphering hieroglyphics or cuneiform.

Amateur Hour at TechCrunch?

I completed a 5-panel MS Paint last Saturday called "The Adventures of Steve Gillmor" but I couldn’t publish the whole thing since it was a little over-the-top. However, the panel that I am using in this post illustrates my point beautifully: doesn’t Steve Gillmor’s work make the entire TechCrunch staff look like a pack of crayon-wielding amateurs?

Here are my grievances against Steve Gillmor:

• Gillmor’s outrageous claims are shrouded by so much bad writing that it takes hours for TechCrunch readers to figure out what parts of the story pissed them off most;
• Gillmor routinely attacks his own readers in an immature, puerile style;
• Gillmor’s evangelism makes Robert Scoble look like a web 2.0 cynic; and lastly
• Gillmor has not hired Joel Spolsky to translate full-time.

As TechCrunch reader (and Marketing-Ninja reader) Tom put it:

It comes across as pretty hypocritical for Michael Arrington to bash the mainstream media for shoddy work while publishing this type of thing on his blog.

That is the single best way to summarize the Steve Gillmor effect - Steve’s work simply undermines the credibility and authority that has taken years for Arrington to establish. Why does Arrington let this guy keep publishing?

Not a week goes by when I don’t read a post about Twitter. It’s a technology that’s soaked the panties of many web 2.0 aficionados - that’s probably the most succinct, crude way to put it.

I’ve been pretty hesitant to try it out, namely because I was dubious when I heard people shouting praise from all corners of the Internet. Well, they’d shout praise about the service only in between the hilarious Ruby-on-Rails scale=fail Twitter outages that would occur during any event that the Twitter community at large deemed remotely newsworthy.

However, after reading Marketing Sherpa’s recent article on Twitter as a legitimate marketing tool, I decided to give it a try - because I finally got it. I had read a number of other articles talking about how Twitter is a powerful networking tool and blah blah blah - basically a bunch of drivel pushed faux-marketers who should be flipping pizzas instead of pretending that they know anything about legitimate networking.

If you’ve ever read my blog before, you know that I think joining social networks exclusively for the sake of “networking,” i.e. trawling for business opportunities while offering nothing in return, is an activity done primarily by people with whom you should never considering doing business. When I read article after article on how “you can network your business by asking random people to follow your Twitter messages and this will somehow make you rich$$$$!!!!11!” I naturally came to the conclusion that Twitter had little-to-no merit on the behalf of serious businesses.

Marketing Sherpa’s article made it clear to me, however, that while there are a good number of idiots who would use Twitter in such an asinine manner, there is a legitimate business opportunity to be taken with Twitter: a self-selecting audience.

Rather than try to actively push your content onto a passive audience, proper use of Twitter will allow companies to have their content pulled by an active audience that has chosen to listen to your company’s message. Sure the actual publishing mechanism is a “server-push” technically, but it’s a push that’s completed with the full consent and awareness of the recipient so I’m going to call it a “pull” by the audience - deal with it.

So with this in mind, I’ve gone an signed up for my own Twitter account, which you can follow if you are so inclined:

Marketing Ninja’s Twitter: http://twitter.com/MarketingNinja

Much of what I’ve written just now may seem obvious to some of you long time Twitterer’s, but cut me some slack - I’m getting there.

A few weeks ago one of my college friends installed an application which spammed my feed every day for three days until he uninstalled it - he didn’t even know that it was contacting me.

Recently though, something more disturbing has been getting spammed at me via my Facebook account, and I’m not talking about the massive Facebook Inbox spam from events and groups that I’m not even a part of - no, I’m talking about full-fledged “male enhancement” spam. Take a look at this:

ok guys heres the update on the man enlarger pills that mike and his bro have been taking, you know the ones i told you about that actually worked for both of them and they have been the hottest thing since sliced bread with all the girls around town? well they have been getting them from [SPAMMER URL] and if you read the site carefully like i did, they actually have a 100 percent money back guarentee, that if it does not work fully on any man, you get every penny you paid back, including the shipping. with an offer like that and the proof i seen for my own eyes with mike, his bro and a certain someone else, i am convinced enough to order 6 months worth for you know who. this is not a joke, go see them at [SPAMMER URL]

I deleted the post from my wall, naturally, but I saved the message in its entirety. This was posted on my wall by a friend and he’s someone that I know wouldn’t send out this kind of crap. I assumed that the posting on my wall was the result of some sort of unethical Facebook application, even though that I was pretty sure that Facebook’s REST API doesn’t allow any applications to interact with users’ walls.

However, a couple of days later I received another Facebook spam message, advertising something totally different - I left that post sitting on my wall but my friend went and deleted it later. As it turns out, his account was hacked and someone used it to spam their wares using poorly written English.

I guess this is a sign that you’ve made it big on the Internet - when spammers are lined up in front of the gates waiting for an opportunity to capitalize on any weakness, even a handful of users, and try to leverage them to get some traffic for their wares.

Honestly though, how different are unsolicited wall spam messages from the unsolicited Facebook News Feed advertisements that Facebook sells? Is “official” spam somehow better than unofficial spam?

The basic issue is that the advice handed out by most “social media consultants” fails to help businesses achieve their long-run objectives and the entire notion of “social media consultation” is deemed laughable by a sizeable portion of the blogosphere as a result.

Social media consultants are painted as know-nothing technology zealots because that’s often who they are, but it’s also because so many of them replace discussions regarding crucial business issues with preachy social media sermons in their “consulting” practices. A few observations:

Many Social Media “Consultants” Are Oblivious to Obvious Business Issues

I’ve done some social media consulting work, not initially as a strategist but originally as a developer for Facebook applications. I got into the business-end of things just because I had an opportunity to get a bird’s-eye view of how various companies are trying to leverage Facebook applications to increase their bottom lines, and to be honest most companies aren’t doing it well.

I think a lot of the people who are “consultants” on social media are just expert users who one or two different social media systems - businesses who hire these sorts of people run into trouble. Expert users, while enthusiastic and sometimes knowledgeable, don’t necessarily understand how to relate specific social media technologies to the business objectives of their clients.

For instance, here’s how an “expert user” might explain social media as a marketing process to a potential new client:

Aside: I’d be surprised if an “expert user” consultant brought up the concept of “touchpoints.”

What is missing from this sample (shitty) business process explanation? Here’s a short list:

• No Budgeting;
• No Strategic Planning;
• No Goals or Milestones;
• No “Analyze and Refine” Stage;
• No Training Phase; and
• Worst of All - No Explanation of How Social Media Integrates into Existing Marketing Activity.

Expert users are experts because they are well-versed in the “execution” part of the business process, but I think they often overlook crucial parts of their clients’ overall business processes. Integration into ongoing marketing efforts is the most important - you don’t  want to waste additional marketing dollars on overlapping activities or not spend dollars on areas where social marketing and ongoing marketing can (buzzword alert) synergize each other.

Many Social Media Consultants Don’t or Can’t Determine the True Dollar Cost of Social Marketing Activities

If my time was worth $25 an hour do you know how much it has cost me to build up Marketing-Ninja’s audience to a size of roughly 400-410 readers? The dollar cost would be somewhere between $5000 and $10000 dollars (200 - 400 hours) over the span of 11 months.

Now if I were sitting down with a new client, an ultra-light air vehicle (ULAV) manufacturer, who wanted to build a blog with 2,000 readers in one year, how could I accurately project the costs of this marketing initiative assuming that the client’s goals are within reach?

If your answer was “estimate cost based on your experiences with your own blog” then you’re incorrect, and this is where “expert users” fail again - at least in some instances. In the rare case where your personal blog’s audience and your client’s desired audience overlap significantly then this answer would be reasonable. However this doesn’t work in the common case, like the example I have described.

Each area of interest or domain is going to have different time/channel/approach requirements in order to successfully build an audience, a fact that is ignored by a lot of social media consultants.

The best approach to budgeting the dollar cost of a long-term marketing project in a new or unfamiliar domain is to simply use a prototype campaign for a short period of time, measure the results, compare results to cost, try to estimate the “liftoff cost” as best as you can, and allow some room for error.

The Clients of Social Media Consultants Don’t Do the Right Things and Make Us Look Bad

I can go on all day about the things that consultants might do wrong, but the clients who hire social media consultants aren’t blameless. Social media consultants are plentiful because the demand for them is high - social media is a hot, new, unconquered marketing channel that few companies have learned to master and therein lies a lot of potential for growth.

However, many companies simply don’t know how to use a social media consultant once they have one - an experienced consultant can tell clients what they need to do in order to have a successful working relationship and subsequently successful marketing campaign, but the consultant can’t force his or her client to listen.

I’m going to write about this at length in the future, but for now let’s just leave it at what I said - you can’t tell your client what you think they need to do, but you can’t force them to do it.

Man… there’s A LOT more stuff I can cover here, but this post is getting lengthy as it is. I think I’m going to cut this off and get back to my last paper I ever have to write before I graduate.

del.icio.us Tags: Social Media Consultants,Consulting,Consulting Hazards

A few weeks ago I received a friend request on StumbleUpon from a dude named Andy MacDonald who runs an SEO/Meta-Blog called Swift Media UK.

The day after I accepted his friend request I received a Stumble from Andy, asking me to read over one of his new blog articles about “engaging your readers” or something. My first response to stranger who starts sending me stumbles to their own site is usually to remove them from my friends list.

In this instance I decided that it might be fun to see if he’d give a piece of my content a Stumble, mostly to see how he responds to his own medicine.

Sure enough, I got a Stumble back. Within a few days, I got another Stumble request. I haven’t Stumbled any of Andy’s pages since, and I’ve actually got a bit of a back-up going on my StumbleBar (pictured below:)

All of those are from Andy; those requests have all come over the past week and a half.

So here’s my question; isn’t what Andy’s doing, adding people as friends and flinging off Stumble requests, fundamentally wrong? Isn’t the entire point of StumbleUpon to share interesting content with your friends, not to promote your own content using strangers?*

And what if Andy and I sent each other Stumble requests on a regular basis for the sake of helping each other acquire more traffic? Wouldn’t this be an instance of reciprocal stumbling, which is against the StumbleUpon Terms of Service?

My Burning Question

The reason I even bother writing this post, is because it looks like whatever Andy’s doing: it works.

He’s got a great amount of traffic, comments, and hell, he’s even doing some guest blogging for Blogging Tips.

So here’s my burning question: should everyone get into the act? Should I start telling my corporate clients to friend people with interests that fall into my client’s business domains and start firing off Stumble requests? Will that help bring in traffic? Engaged readers?

What do you think? Is everything that Andy’s doing fine? Does it work?

Update:

Here are a few responses from readers.

From Tom’s Tech Blog: Dishonest Traffic Boosting

From System Zero: Should You Stumble Yourself?

*Disclosure: I’ve sent Stumble requests to some of my friends before when I thought that they would be legitimately interested in what I had to say, but I don’t do it often.I haven’t even used the service much in 2008.

*Disclosure: I’ve outright tried this practice before, with people who I thought might be interested in the content, and felt guilty doing it, hence why I’m surprised when other bloggers don’t feel some shame when doing it.

del.icio.us Tags: StumbleUpon,Social Media,Self Promotion

Cool brands are like a vacuum, nature abhors them. The cooler they get, the more attractive they become to the uncool and the harder they have to fight to retain their hip customer base.

This is the big problem for Facebook.

and

After 18 months, high-school kids could join the site. Finally, in September 2006, the doors were officially opened to anyone, anywhere in the world.

That is the point at which Facebook signed away its soul. It might be cool new media, but the oldest rules of marketing still apply. Some customers don’t like other customers. For all their bright new-century appeal, the founders of Facebook have a case of old-fashioned sales orientation. It should have hired a proper marketer to ensure that the wrong members didn’t ruin its brand. Unfortunately, it is now too late: the fat bastards are drinking at the bar.

I definitely encourage that you read the full of text “Facebook’s Growing Problem” text in its entirety.

This is one of the things that I’ve most certainly thought, given that I have been a Facebook member since I was a college freshman in August 2004.

The day my younger brother, a senior in high school, signed up in late 2006 was the day I started thinking that Facebook may not be so cool after all.

Years later, I started receiving my first spam messages from my University and people who don’t even know me. Facebook should have left the fat bastards out after all if it was interested in retaining its primary audience I suppose.

What are your thoughts?

Technorati Tags: Facebook,Branding

I noticed a linkback to my 7 Reasons Why Niche Social Media is Better than Digg today, and then I noticed this great article on RW/W about how as Digg has become more mainstream it has also become more narrow and less diverse. I wanted to go ahead and and respond to RW/W’s entry with one of my own.

The diversity of Digg’s content has decreased as Digg has become more mainstream and the reason for this is simple - Digg is a purely democratic social bookmarking tool - there are no editors present to impose their preferences for content over the site.

The democracy of Digg helped make the service so popular - everyone had a voice and could be heard equally. Initially Digg’s audience was comprised of techies, the same people who often frequented Slashdot. As Richard points out, Digg has not stayed true to its techie roots while Slashdot has.

Digg’s social networking features, and I’m not talking about the shouts, but the very core of Digg - the emphasis on recruiting your friends to sign up and subsequently vote on articles is what has moved Digg away from the diverse and different media to narrow, mainstream content.

Digg is a bit like big-name brand American beers like Bud and Miller - those beers use to be flavorful and distinct, but as they tried to grow their market share and become national brands they had to dumb their taste down in order to appeal to said markets. Thus we are left with bland, flavorless beer that everyone knows and loves.

The only difference between how this change occurred between Digg and national beer brands is that the end-consumers themselves made the choice to become mainstream in the process of recruiting their friends - only the topics that are broad enough to appeal to the wide variety of interests represented on Digg make the front page.

There was a post today on Reddit complaining about how Reddit’s become to broad and inflammatory also. I think this may just be an example of how pure mob rule can corrupt the original value that the service sought to create.

Technorati Tags: Digg,Reddit,Social Media

1. Google Sees Failure for the First Time

According to Yahoo! Finance, GOOG is sitting comfortably at around $690.50 as I am writing this post. I have written before about how Google is making moves to become the world’s most powerful advertising network and how it’s building/acquiring more content-oriented services in order to create more AdSense real estate and I have no doubt that the expansion of AdSense will be Google’s breadwinner for the next calendar year. However, I am also sure of the following things:

• Google will incur consumer backlash and damage its public image, either by placing its own products at the top of Google search results and damaging the businesses that depend on Google search results or by violating the privacy of its customers for profit;
• Google’s acquisitions strategy will be publicly called into question if Google continues to make more dubious acquisitions (Jaiku, anyone?);
• Google Android will either piss veteran mobile developers off or open up mobile devices to a whole new generation of developers who have never done mobile development before;
• OpenSocial will fall flat on its ass if development doesn’t show some progress soon; it’s been two months since the announcement and Google has yet to produce any substantial developments; and
• Google Knol will not work.

I don’t know what source Google’s "fail" will come from, given how many pies Google has its fingers in, but it’s going to happen in 2008.

2. Yahoo! Starts Selling off Assets

Yahoo! is a company in full tailspin. Fortunately for Yahoo!, it still has more traffic than Google and Yahoo! mail still leads over Gmail; that’s where the good news ends. Yahoo’s strategy has been both confusing and unsuccessful; most of their deviations from their core services have been disasters.

Yahoo! had seven different web properties enter the TechCrunch Deadpool in 2007, three of which occurred in the month of May alone. Some of Yahoo’s new services, like BravoNation, should have never seen the light of day. Mike Arrington said the following about Yahoo’s "Brickhouse," the unit that produced BravoNation:

The point of Brickhouse (I think) is to come up with half baked ideas, throw them against the wall, and see what sticks. That means they shouldn’t launch bland, safe products. Instead, they go a little crazy, and probably expect a high failure rate.

One TechCrunch reader said:

[Brickhouse] basically creates start-ups within Yahoo!. If something is successful - whatever that means - they give it more resources and “acquire” it, just that they don’t have to spend billions on the projects like they would have to with Facebook et al.

Let me translate this: it means that Yahoo! has no strategy; they don’t know what the hell they’re doing; they’re spending money like crazy; and they’re praying that God strikes lightning upon one of their startups and creates the next YouTube. This is not the strategy of a brilliant company; this is the strategy of a company that is awash in cash (for the moment) but has no idea how to stay ahead of its competition.

My prediction? Yahoo starts selling off its assets and focusing on its core services. Yahoo should focus on expanding its advertising network (YPN) to compete with AdSense and it should focus on competing with Google search.

3. Microsoft Moves to Buyout Yahoo!; Starts Seriously Competing with Google in Online Search

I’ve already established that Yahoo! is on the decline, but the second half of my bold prediction for Yahoo! is that it ultimately ends up in the hands of Microsoft. The breakdown of search engine popularity of roughly Google 55%, Yahoo 20%, Live Search 14%.

Live Search can’t realistically compete with Google given that its service isn’t fundamentally better or more compelling than Google’s (in fact a recent study shows that Google is still the best at satisfying user queries), thus Microsoft needs to get its users from somewhere; why not buy out the falling star of online search, Yahoo? Or perhaps Microsoft will use its terrific desktop search platform to help expand Live Search online?

There is no reason for Microsoft not to buy out Yahoo, and I predict that Microsoft will begin positioning itself to acquire Yahoo in 2008.

4. Social Media Penetrates Mainstream Consciousness

In 2008 services like StumbleUpon and del.iciou.us will begin to penetrate the mainstream consciousness and will become commonplace names. "But aren’t they already commonplace?" you ask. The answers is "yes, those services are household names among techies like us," but those services have not captured the imaginations of average Americans in the same way Facebook has.

One of the points that I try to drive home in almost every post I write is that there is a huge technological literacy gap between the average person and the average person in Silicon Valley; one of the reasons why Silicon Valley is a black hole for so many millions of venture capital dollars is because people in SV drink their own Kool-Aid all too often.

Regardless, my prediction is that StumbleUpon and del.icio.us in particular will make waves in 2008 and will become household names for a lot of average users.

5. Ruby on Rails Starts to Die a Slow, Agonizing Death

I got great pleasure out of reading Zed Shaw’s "Rails is a Ghetto" rant this morning, and I took it as a sign that the RoR fad may finally be over. Zed’s post made me thankful that Microsoft handles all of the testing and development for ASP.NET; specifically:

I believe, if I could point at one thing it’s the following statement on 2007-01-20 to me by David H. creator of Rails:

(15:11:12) DHH: before fastthread we had ~400 restarts/day
(15:11:22) DHH: now we have perhaps 10
(15:11:29) Zed S.: oh nice
(15:11:33) Zed S.: and that's still fastcgi right?

Notice how it took me a few seconds to reply. This one single statement basically means that we all got duped. The main Rails application that DHH created required restarting ~400 times/day. That’s a production application that can’t stay up for more than 4 minutes on average.

[...]

If anyone had known Rails was that unstable they would have laughed in his face. Think about it further, this means that the creator of Rails in his flagship products could not keep them running for longer than 4 minutes on average.

Could you imagine how much crap Microsoft would catch if one Scott Guthrie’s ASP.NET applications had to restart 400 times a day?

I’ve always been annoyed by the RoR community, kind of like how I was annoyed by the ColdFusion community when I was first learning classic ASP. When I read about a hot, new technology that isn’t even thread-safe, I groan, roll my eyes, and say "oh God not this, again." There’s more mouth than substance behind it, and the promise of RoR is quickly falling apart. The RoR honeymoon is over, and I predict the start of a slow, agonizing death for RoR in 2008.

6. Social Networking Clearinghouse

2007 was the "Year of Facebook" and as a result, every jack-ass with an MBA thought it would be a good idea to start his or her own social network. 2008 will be the year that pissed off angel investors scream "show me the money" and those same MBA types go running over the cliffs like a pack of lemmings hunting for the next bandwagon / investment sinkhole.

The Social Networking bubble is going to burst and only the major players will be left standing; weaklings, like Bebo, aren’t going to make it. The "we do what Facebook does minus being evil" clones aren’t going to make it, either.

2008 won’t be a year of "failure" for social networks; rather it will be a year of failure for social networks with poor business propositions. Simply having a "social network" won’t be enough to guarantee interested users or investors; in 2008, new startups seeking to utilize a social network in their web applications will have to demonstrate innovation and reasoning behind creating an entirely new social network rather than leverage existing ones via APIs.

7. Increase in "Cloud-Computing" Buzz

One of Eric Schmidt’s hopes and dreams for Google is to use Cloud Computing to create the next wave of productivity applications, i.e. Google Docs, GMail, Google Calendars, etc… The basic principle behind Cloud Computing is to move basic computation away from personal computers to amorphous "clouds" of computational power, namely large server farms that are professionally managed by organizations like Google and Amazon.

The biggest splash in the Cloud Computing pond this year was Amazon’s SimpleDB Web Service, which had a lot of bloggers asking "is this the end of MySQL/MSSQL/Oracle?" As organizations begin to spawn more Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products, the hype for Cloud Computing will only continue, especially when services such as Amazon’s SimpleDB and EC2 become more popular in Silicon Valley. I predict that in 2008 we will see a lot more hype around "Cloud Computing," but whether or not we see anything revolutionary come out of Cloud Computing is anybody’s guess.

Note: Amazon announced their new DevPay service today, which enables developers to monetize their web service usage. Given that this news was announced in 2008, I’d say it’s a good indicator that prediction number 7 is going to become true

8. The Internet Establishes itself as the Conversation Leader of the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election

While I’m sure there are people who believe that the Internet has done this already (Ron Paul supporters), I predict that the Internet will be the number one source of buzz surrounding the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election.

Dan Rather, Brian Williams, and Katie Couric will be maneuvering their shows around "what’s being said on the Internet" rather than the Internet maneuvering itself around "what was said on television." My reasoning for this?

Memogate. It was the first time that the blogosphere stepped into Presidential politics and precipitated actionable consequences, which in this case was the dismissal of Dan Rather from the CBS network.

If you want to do more reading up on Memogate then I suggest you read the first heading of my article from August, Blogging for Business: Blogs are not just a fad.

I predict that in 2008, Internet-based sources will be the conversation leaders in a Presidential Election.

Lingering Questions for 2008

I’m going to toss these questions up to my readers, because frankly I don’t have any particular inclinations toward their answers. Here are my lingering questions for the upcoming year?

• What’s going to happen to Digg? Is it going to fall apart? Is it going to be fine? Will it get sold?
• Will Facebook "show us the money" in 2008? Is Zuckerberg going to stay in the driver’s seat or will Facebook find its own Eric Schmidt?
• ASP.NET & .NET 3.5 - Are developers going to start thanking Microsoft or are we going to grumble and start rewriting our applications?
• OpenSocial vs. F8 - If OpenSocial ever gets off the ground, will there be any serious platform competition? Speaking of which, will we see some useful productivity/contact management applications in 2008?

We’ll take a look in one year and see how right I am if I am right at all

In Mid-October I wrote about the idea of a “Web 2.0 Middleware,” a technology capable of eliminating the “platform dependency issue” for developers who are interested in developing applications to serve social networks. Within a couple of weeks of my first article Google announced OpenSocial, which, by the sound of it, is more or less the “middleware” that I was calling for.

One of the great bonuses to having a cross-platform middleware for developing social network widgets and applications is that it can

[implement] a common data tier which can intelligently differentiate users from each social network; perhaps even allow for cross-network friending and publication.

Yesterday TechCrunch ran an article about Bunchball, an application developed for the Facebook and Bebo social networks; Bunchball allows users from both social networks to play flash games with each other in real-time. Mark Hendrickson, a TC writer who was previously unknown to me, hints that this form of cross-network interaction may be the future of social networking.

Mr. Hendrickson’s conclusion is correct, but the fact that it took someone at TechCrunch, the town crier of all things Web 2.0, nearly two months since the release of OpenSocial to realize the possibility for cross-network interaction astounds me. Another blow to TechCrunch’s steadily sinking credibility, I suppose.

TechCrunch’s credibility really isn’t the point; however.

Cross-Network Interaction Expands the Networks

I’m in the middle of designing and developing a Facebook application with the intent to leverage Facebook’s power against that of a smaller social network, the goal being to allow members of the smaller social network to find each other on Facebook. Should I be able to adequately provide this level of “search functionality” within my Facebook application, I will have effectively expanded Facebook’s social graph to include connections between Facebook users who are also members of the said “smaller social network.”

The point of social networks is to establish relationships between users on the network by finding points of commonality, such as

• common friends;
• common places of work;
• common locales, areas of residence;
• common educational backgrounds;
• and common interests, hobbies, activities.

Why wouldn’t common participation in an additional social network be an adequate point of commonality between two individuals on Facebook or MySpace?

If two networks with open, preferably common, APIs exist, therein lies an opportunity to expand both social graphs to include each other.

Does Cross-Network Expansion Help Both Networks?

Herein lies the real question: when an application is developed that effectively includes membership from two different, distinct networks, does it benefit both networks involved or just the bigger network? The network which owns the more successful platform? The network that has more users using the application?

Both networks should benefit from an influx of activity from external sources (the application users who belong to the opposite network.) The number of total possible relationships on either network increases when more potential points of commonality are available; by making points of commonality from multiple networks available more room for potential connections is available.

The future of the social graph? If OpenSocial ever gets off the ground and if Bebo ever makes its Facebook clone API available, social graphs will begin to merge, and that’s when the social networking branding wars will begin to get interesting.

Technorati : Facebook, OpenSocial, Social Graphs, Social Networks
Del.icio.us : Facebook, OpenSocial, Social Graphs, Social Networks

I put together a massive resource list encompassing a large spectrum of the StumbleUpon tips and tricks last week. I knew it would take off like hot cakes on StumbleUpon, were it not for one crucial mistake.

I didn’t self-submit my article because I wanted to take the “high road”

I’ve talked about avoiding self-submitting your own articles as a strategy to making them ultimately more receptive to social media users, but I want to point out that this strategy is a bad idea for StumbleUpon. It’s CRUCIAL/ESSENTIAL for Digg and Reddit, but for StumbleUpon, it will screw you 9 times out of 10.

Most StumbleUpon users are not expert users and don’t take the time to properly categorize their stumbles; sometimes they’ll let the StumbleUpon engine itself determine what the “best fit” is for the article they stumbled.

This is what gets you into trouble: my great piece of StumbleBait was initially stumbled by some one who didn’t categorize it, thus StumbleUpon filed it under JOURNALISM. I used the appeal feature as many times as I could to try and get it properly categorized but it was to no avail, as it is STILL categorized under Journalism.

Let this be a lesson to all of you; never count on being able to use to StumbleUpon category appeal feature. It simply does not work.

I’ve had other pages that belong to me get stumbled under other bizzarre categories (I had an article about video games get categorized under South America once), and it just happens.

Remedy: Send your pages to your friends for the initial stumble

So we don’t want to self-submit our own articles because that can actually hurt our StumbleUpon’s receptiveness to our domain, right? Therefore we should send stumbles to trusted friends on our network in order to assure that our pages will be properly categorized the first time.

I’ve written before about how it annoys me that it takes a lot of time and effort to develop powerful social media accounts. However, one of my friends is trying to learn how to use StumbleUpon in order to help promote his humor blog, so I set out to gather some resources to help him out. I figured I’d share them with AjaxNinja’s readers.

Enjoy and please add suggestions in the comments!

Don’t forget to subscribe to AjaxNinja.

Introduction to StumbleUpon

• How To Stumble
  A blog dedicated to the subject of how to use StumbleUpon.
• Stumblers.net - The Unofficial Guide to StumbleUpon
  An online handbook for Stumblers.
• Unoffical StumbleUpon FAQ
  If this resource’s title requires an explanation, then I am at a loss for words.
• StumbleUpon Official FAQ
  Seriously, it’d be a bit screwed up if I included the Unofficial FAQ and not the official one too.
• Beginners Guide to StumbleUpon
  Just read the freaking title.
• StumbleUpon Help Forum
  StumbleUpon’s official online help forum.

Drawing Traffic from StumbleUpon

• A Comprehensive Guide to StumbleUpon: How to Build Massive Traffic to Your Website
  A thorough guide by Dosh Dosh on how to develop your StumbleUpon account into a powerful weapon for driving traffic to your website.
• How to Get Traffic from Web 2.0 Sites like Digg, Reddit & StumbleUpon
  Probably the most informative article out of all the traffic-drawing ones I mention on this list.
• How to Draw StumbleUpon Users Into Your Blog
  A great ProBlogger post on how to attract the attention of Stumblers who land on your site.
• The Secret to Massive Digg/StumbleUpon Traffic Without Spamming
  How good, polite StumbleUpon etiquette can increase StumbleUpon traffic to your website.
• How to Use StumbleUpon to Promote
  How to use StumbleUpon as a promotional tool.
• StumbleUpon Optimization: Leveraging Photo Stumbles for More Web Traffic How to leverage photos on your pages in order to increase the amount of traffic yielded from StumbleUpon.
• Writing for StumbleUpon: High Impact Content “Above the Scroll” in Four Easy Steps
  How to write impactful copy that grabs the attention of StumbleUpon users.
• The Why, How and Who of Marketing in StumbleUpon
  The marriage of StumbleUpon and marketing.
• How to Generate REAL Traffic from StumbleUpon
  I’d certainly hate to generate fake traffic from StumbleUpon. Covers a lot of the basics, but I like the netiquette covered at the end of the article.
• 5 Tactics for Driving Traffic From StumbleUpon
  5 helpful suggestions on how to drive traffic from StumbleUpon.
• The Ultimate Guide to Leveraging StumbleUpon
  An in-depth article with figures which demonstrates the power of leveraging StumbleUpon. Oh, yeah, it also tells you how to leverage it too.
• How Important is StumbleUpon?
  An in-depth look at StumbleUpon from the bottom-up.
• for photographers: how to optimize for stumbleupon photo-blogging traffic
  Muhammad Saleem shows you how to optimize your photography pages so they can be easily photo-blogged by stumblers.
• Cross-Pollinating Social Media Viral Seeds
  Leverage StumbleUpon against your other social networks to boost your overall traffic-driving power.

StumbleUpon for Businesses

• How to Use StumbleUpon for Your Business: The Definitive Guide
  Tamar Weinberg breaks down StumbleUpon for business owners.
• Run a StumbleUpon Advertising Campaign For Your Blog
  How to use a StumbleUpon advertising campaign to drive traffic to your blog or website.
• Effective advertising strategy using StumbleUpon
  A detailed tutorial on how to create effective advertising campaigns on StumbleUpon.
• Stumbleupon can get your AdSense Account Banned for Invalid Impressions Fraud
  I haven’t had this problem, but that doesn’t mean no one else has. If your business depends on AdSense revenue, the explanation and remedies in this article are a must-read.

Becoming a Top Stumbler

• stumbleGods
  A website created by some of the most powerful Stumblers; “[their] thumbs move masses.” Learn from the best in the business.
• StumbleRank
  The more qualitative cousin of stumbleGODS; ranks top StumbleUpon users for fun.
• How to Become a Top StumbleUpon User (or Why You Really Shouldn’t Bother)
  Dosh Dosh’s guide on how to achieve the coveted “Top Stumbler” status; I guess if you really want to be listed on that stumbleGods site then this is the best place to get started.
• StumbleUpon - How to make yourself a good stumbler
  If you want to make yourself an effective stumbler without trying to necissarily become a top stumbler, then this is a good resource for you.
• How to Use StumbleUpon Like a Pro
  Seriously, some of these titles are so freaking self-explanatory. Why do I feel obligated to keep writing my own descriptions of them? Damnit…
• How do you become a StumbleUpon power user? Ask a 16 year old.
  Everyone is an expert but me
• fast-track yourself to a stumblegod
  Muhammad Saleem shows us how to set StumbleUpon’s keyboard shortcuts to help speed up our Stumbling.
• Claim Your StumbleUpon Blog through Technorati
  Increase the number of links to your StumbleUpon profile by claiming your StumbleUpon blog with Technorati. Also increases the power of all of your reviews and StumbleUpon blog entries.
• Making a Power Account on StumbleUpon
  Short article that covers the basics of how to position yourself as a top stumbler over time.

Advanced Stumbling

• Advanced Stumbling
  A wiki page covering some of the advanced strategies used by experienced Stumblers. The page covers photo-blogging, polls, StumbleUpon add-ons, and other more advanced uses of StumbleUpon.
• Using StumbleUpon PhotoBlog It!
  A tutorial on how to use the StumbleUpon photo blogging functionality.
• How to Use StumbleUpon to Generate Topic Ideas
  My Rea Maor debunking came about as a result of StumbleUpon; SU really is a good resource for coming up with topic ideas for blog entries, papers, or web pages.
• Stumbleupon mathematics for stumblers
  Tim Nash provides some insight and speculation as to how the StumbleUpon algorithm determines how to route visitors to a stumbled page.

Participating in StumbleUpon’s Network

• Building Your Blog with StumbleUpon
  From the website: “how you can build your blog and your blogger profile by participating in the StumbleUpon community - while having plenty of fun at the same time!”
• Share Your Stuff: Effectively and Ethically Submitting Pages to StumbleUpon & Stumblers
  Learn how to build an effective network of Stumblers through seeking out like-minded users.
• Organic Stumbling Tip
  Tim Nash, once again, provides a great piece of advice on how to boost the effectiveness of your friends’ Stumbles.
• stumbleXchange
  Use stumbleXchange to form a network of mutual Stumblers. There is not a doubt in my mind that this is against StumbleUpon’s Terms of Service, and I do not use it. Use at your own risk.
• Are you banned by StumbleUpon? What is the consequence?
  Stumbling your own websites too often can result in your domain name being banned from StumbleUpon. This site covers some of the big no-nos of StumbleUpon.
• Whiteboard Friday - “How to Win Friends & Influence People”
  A SEOMoz video covering how to make establish networks on services like StumbleUpon.

Stumbling without the StumbleUpon Toolbar

• How to Use StumbleUpon Without the Toolbar
  If you’re a StumbleUpon user who has experienced a lot of technical difficulties with the traditional toolbar, then this resource provides some tips on how to keep on stumbling without the toolbar.
• StumbleWeb
  An easy way to use StumbleUpon without having to use the StumbleUpon toolbar.

StumbleUpon Tools

• StumbleCrumble WordPress Plugin
  Use this plug-in on a WordPress-powered blog to show all of your latest stumbles to your readers.
• StumbleUpon Facebook Application
  Show your Facebook friends your latest stumbles with this Facebook application.
• StumbleUpon Add-Ons
  A comprehensive list of StumbleUpon add-ons.
• Del.icio.us Stumble
  A PHP script that converts your del.icio.us bookmarks into stumbles.
• StumbleUpon WYSIWYG Editor
  A What You See Is What You Get editor for StumbleUpon.

I hope you found these to be helpful. Feel free to add me to your StumbleUpon friends.

Technorati : SMO, Social Media, StumbleUpon
Del.icio.us : SMO, Social Media, StumbleUpon

Every blogger wants to make a big splash in social media; I think landing on the front page of Digg is the number 1 prized cow for any blogger or website operator in terms of rapid traffic acquisition. I’ve discussed how impactful a massive traffic surge can be on a blog’s readership and traffic before.

AjaxNinja is only a few months old and I’ve been aggressively trying to reach a larger audience by submitting a lot of my own content to social media outlets. I use a combination of niche tools like Sphinn and a few major ones like StumbleUpon and Digg. I’ve been met with varying degrees of success in each instance, especially on the niche portals, which I happen to prefer over Digg.

However I have yet to land a major score with Digg; while I have written about how much its hostile user base annoys me, I don’t think the fact that I wrote that has anything to due with my lack of success on Digg. I had long suspected that Diggers were either not voting on my content or not seeing it because I was submitting my own content and I’m not a “powerful” enough user to make a big splash.

I came across a great interview with Muhammad Saleem, a top Digg and StumbleUpon user, on Blogging Experiment which confirmed my suspicions:

There are several ways, and unfortunately submitting it yourself is not one of them (social media sites have an unnatural hatred for own-submissions). What you can do is reach out to the community leaders (without spamming of course) and see what they think about your content.

I think what Muhammad meant was that Diggers have an irrational hatred for self-submissions, but yes, that’s the bad news.

Bottom line: If you are not a power user on Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon to some extent, then you can actually be damaging the exposure of your blog’s content when you submit an item yourself.

So what can you do?

1. Hope a big fish just happens to come across your blog or website and submits your content.
2. Reach out to a community leader in the social media portal of your choice and hope he or she approves of your content.
3. Submit your content to niche portals to increase exposure, and perhaps a big fish might come across your articles through such a portal.

I prefer to submit my content to niche portals where they will receive at least some traffic, but it should be noted there are a lot of big players on Digg and StumbleUpon who pay notice to small niche sites, Sphinn especially.

Ultimately I think the best approach is simply to do a good job writing your articles once you’ve established a decent size audience (100+ readers), submit content to appropriate niche portals, and perhaps if you write something that catches the eye of a powerful member of the social media, you’ll be fortunate enough to be on the receiving end of a traffic surge.

If you have a lot of spare time on your hands you can always build yourself into a power user on the social media outlet of your choice. Given that this is a technological blog as much as it is a promotional blog, I have to divide my time between writing code and testing promotional techniques.

However, for a lot of other bloggers building up a power account is a good way to drive traffic; Dana Wallert, an up and coming Stumbler, built an audience for her blog almost instantly via her authority as a stumbler. It can be done.

How cool is that? Check out WebProNews’ article, AjaxNinja Whips Shurikens Into Digg!

On another note, I’m sorry for the delay of updates; I have a lot of work this week so some of my blogging has been hindered, although I promise I will have a list of some cool .NET hacks later this evening!

Digg has an immense amount of traffic and getting landed on the front page will send a tsunami of new readers to your blog or website, but getting onto the front page is incredibly difficult.

Getting onto the front page of a smaller, more appropriate niche portal, by contrast, is much easier, quicker, and ultimately you get a better return on your time/traffic ratio in the short run.

I have yet to determine the long run implications, although I am fairly certain that my high placement on DZone’s front page is what resulted in my 10+ Firefox Extensions for Developers and Bloggers article being picked up by Lifehacker.

Here are 7 reasons why niche sites like DZone and DotNetKicks give you a better return on your time spent promoting/traffic ratio than Digg:

1. Digg has a very hostile user base; niche sites have supportive ones - The more popular you are the more criticism you will be subject to.
   

   Small communities are filled with passionate users who are genuinely interested in the specific subject covered by that site; Digg users are interested in a wide variety of topics, and if your article doesn’t meet their quality standards (or more accurately, your title; many of them never read the article), it’s the bury button for you.

   In addition, any site that makes the front page of Digg is going to be subject to flames, but this is true for any really popular website; when my Firefox article made it to the front page of Lifehacker I was raked with some genuinely good suggestions but also there were a ton of dive-by readers who just wanted to take a pot shot at AjaxNinja.

2. A lot of Diggers are in it for promoting themselves as power users - There are a number of Diggers who simply have egos; this is true of any online community. Some power users simply love the service and love spending time on it; others simply have nothing better to do; and others still simply want to feel important or feel that they have influence and attempt to do so by leveraging themselves against a large community of users.

   The second and third types of power users are the ones who cause trouble; they’re not in it for legitimately helping everyone else, they’re in it for their own amusement or to advance their own agenda.

   In a small niche community like DotNetKicks I don’t have to worry about Digg users who are PHP/Anti-Windows zealots burying my Phalanger article. My Phalanger article even made it to the front page of DZone, a community that has more than its fair share of PHP users, but since DZone doesn’t have a bunch of Anti-MS power users hell-bent on burying anything that makes MS look good, I still made it to the front page.

3. Digg has too broad of an audience - Digg is great if you’re a blogger who comments on news, liberal politics (you will NEVER see a Little Green Footballs article appear on the front page of Digg), Ubuntu Linux, offbeat news, life tips, the occasional SEO article, iPhones, or random photographs, but if you write about something outside of that realm then you’re not going to get much of a following from Digg unless your article is exceptionally good.

   update:A reader on Sphinn has pointed out that LGF has actually made it to the front page as recently as 43 days ago. Duly noted.

   Take a look at at the front page of Digg’s programming section. Upon writing this some of those “popular” articles have been up there for over 20 days; this indicates to me that the world of Digg/Programming is not very fast-paced or happening. Take a look at the Digg/Programming/Upcoming section too; many of the “hot” articles have less than 10 votes. My article on Phalanger, which was buried, had 16 diggs and it generated maybe 30 unique visits total.

   That same article made it to the front page of DZone and DotNetKicks within a day or two of me posting it, and they stayed there for approximately 24 hours.

4. Digg’s high volume of stories makes it hard to get noticed - Unless you have a ton of traffic to your blog naturally, it’s going to be hard for users to find your article when it hits page 2,3, or 4 of the “upcoming” section of the appropriate category within a few hours of your submission; this is especially true for programming, where there are more articles submitted than there are people who Digg them.
   

   DZone and DotNetKicks have a much lower volume of stories and it’s a lot easier to get yours noticed once you add it to their list of new submissions. The readers of DZone and DotNetKicks simply have less shit to filter through.

5. Digg’s categories are too broad - There is no category for ASP.NET, PHP development, or Facebook Application Development; there is simply “programming.” This means that if you’re hoping that Digg users will find your article in the programming section of Digg, then they’re going to need to not only be interested in programming, but Diggers interested in your kind of development specifically.
   

   Niche sites are already governed into one general category, like DZone is all about software development in general and DotNetKicks is about .NET development, but they also give you a more fine-grained amount of control through additional sub-categories; this makes it easier for interested readers to find your works in their listings.

6. Digg is not transparent; we don’t know why some stories get buried - One of my recent free-lance pieces on health and fitness that I wrote for Dumb Little Man was initially Dugg by one of Digg’s most powerful users, Mr. Baby Man and it received 40-60 votes within a 4 hour Window of submission. That’s more than enough to appear on the Hot section for Digg/Health/Upcoming, but the article never appeared there. Dumb Little Man is one of the most popular blogs out there (top 1000 in Technorati.)

   Update Jay White of Dumb Little Man wrote me this morning to inform me that while Digg’s algorithm is a bit odd, DLM made it to the front page as recently as last week.

   Tamar Weinberg wrote a great letter to Kevin Rose addressing some of these transparency issues with Digg and I’d recommend giving that a read.

   However, I’d like to point out that niche sites like DZone and DotNetKicks are VERY transparent; you can even download the source code for DotNetKicks. With DZone you can see how many people looked at the article, how many people clicked the link, how many voted it up, and how many voted it down. DotNetKicks adjusted the front page of the site based upon how long it’s been up there, although the Kicks do help. There’s no secret sauce behind most niche portals.

7. In order to improve your effectiveness and visibility on Digg, you have to invest a lot of time into its social network - A lot of SEO sites out there recommend building “power accounts” on major social media sites like Digg and Reddit. While I believe that networking with other people with similar interests is a great thing (it’s actually one of the things I enjoy most about StumbleUpon), I don’t believe that bloggers, companies, and website owners should have to invest HOURS into using Digg like it’s World of Warcraft.

   Bloggers should be spending as much time possible reading, researching, and coming up with interesting material to write about, not methodically gaming a social network for leverage. If you spend a lot of time using social networks because you enjoy using them, then go for it.

   If you’re willing to spend hours tweaking your site for search engine optimization, why not spend some of that time building up a social network?

   1. I don’t have to spend any time building up a social network if I use niche sites to drive interested readers to my content and
   2. people who use search engines are not casual browsers; Google users are users with intent and they will click on my advertisements at a much higher rate than social media users.

In a nutshell, I think using small Niche sites to promote your content will not only save you a lot of trouble, but I think ultimately you’ll find more interested readers rather than casual browsers from niche sites.

If you want to find a niche social network for your blog or social network, I suggest you look at my article, 30+ Media Sites for Promoting Your Blog.

Add me to your social networks
If you want to add me as a friend I’ll go ahead and friend you back.

• StumbleUpon
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• del.icio.us
• MyBlogLog
• PageFlakes

Update: Corrected some typos; I was in a rush for boxing practice when I wrote the last bullets :p

What is “Social Media?”

For those of you who have not heard of social media, it’s simply a technology on the Internet that allows people to explicitly share content and experiences with other online users. YouTube is a great example of a video-sharing social media website.

We’re going to run down a categorized list of social media sites for promoting your blog or website.

A word of caution: there are hundreds of social media websites out there; if I don’t mention one, it’s probably because I’ve never used it or heard of it. Leave a comment on this entry if you feel that I’ve made a critical error.

The Big Players

If you land on the front page of one of these sites, even for a few hours, you’ll be on the receiving end of a tidal wave of traffic. The best part is, once your of your pages makes it big on just one of these sites, you’ll probably end up getting highly ranked on another.

1. Digg - Digg is the ultimate social media site; it’s become notorious for producing traffic waves so massive that they can have a DOS-style impact on smaller hosts. Digg is scrutinized routinely for being an intensely negative community, and it has become difficult to make the front page.

2. Reddit - A popular Digg clone. It has less traffic than Digg does but it may be easier to make the front page; I’ve never used it but I’m going to begin experimenting with it.

3. StumbleUpon - I think StumbleUpon is by far the best service on this list; not only does it send more users over time than making the front page of Digg, but the bounce rate for an article that has been reviewed multiple times is ridiculously low. My average bounce rate is pretty high; my bounce rate on a page that’s doing well on StumbleUpon is usually 35-45%, with 85-95% of those users being first time readers to AjaxNinja.

StumbleUpon is doing a better job marketing my site than I could! StumbleUpon is basically channel surfing for the Internet, and it’s advertising campaigns are very effective in the right hands. By far the most worthwhile service.

4. del.icio.us - del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website; users can mark their favorites with del.icio.us and share them with each other; making it onto the front page of the “recently popular” section on del.icio.us will send a decent amount of traffic so long as the category you’re tagged into is popular. My article on Firefox extensions was tagged approximately 300 times within 24 hours and that was enough to slap it on the front page for a brief period. This is a great service for recurring traffic over time as well, but not as good as StumbleUpon in that regard. I guess del.icio.us’ traffic effects are a bit of a mix between Digg and StumbleUpon.

5. YouTube - I was going to stick this in my “video blogging” category, but honestly, if you do video blogging and you haven’t heard of YouTube then you’ve probably been living in a cave for the past few years.

General & Offbeat News

Here are sites that are similar to Digg and Reddit but aren’t as prominent as those two in the lexicon of the average user.

6. Netscape - Didn’t they used to make a web browser or something?

7. Fark - From Fark’s about page:

[Fark] is a news aggregator and an edited social networking news site. Every day Fark receives 2,000 or so news submissions from its readership.

8. Newsvine - A standard news aggregator complete with comments, voting, etc. Probably the best service if you’re interested in getting real news junkies to visit your site.

Blogosphere Pulse Detectors

While you cannot explicitly “submit” your entries to these services (they can be read automatically via RSS when you publish), you can register your blog and make it easy for your readers to add you as a favorite and make it easy for other bloggers to find you. Definitely register with these two services and publish Technorati Tags along with your entries in order to improve visibility.

Update: You actually can submit articles explicitly to Technorati as “favorites.” I overlooked this; my apologies.

9. Technorati - Every blogger knows about Technorati and the authority ranking it assigns to bloggers based upon how many other blogs link to them. Another prominent feature of Technorati is that it aggregates some of the latest blogosphere buzz on the front page; having never been anywhere near the front page I wouldn’t be able to tell you how much traffic it drives, but it has been alleged that Technorati’s system for determining what appears on the front page is fatally flawed.

10. TailRank - Another service similar to Technorati; TailRank’s front page serves as an indicator for what the blogosphere is talking about. Technorati and TailRank both have explicit voting/tagging systems for determining popularity, but the most important metric they measure is blog responses, i.e. how many blogs are linking to one of your entries.

Marketing and SEO Services

If you’re in the business of writing about marketing, search engine optimization, or some sort of promotional business, then these social media sites are for you.

11. PlugIM (Online Marketing) - Right now all of my blog entries are syndicated to PlugIM for voting, and I don’t think I have even received a single pageview from it. I’m not impressed, but hey, it’s effortless given that you can automatically syndicate your RSS feeds to PlugIM, so why not sign up for it?

12. Sphinn (SEO & Online Marketing) - I’ve never used it but apparently it has a pretty active user community. I can’t say the same for PlugIM!

13. DNHour (Domain Names) - I couldn’t think of an appropriate sub-category for domain names but I figured that domains are pretty pertinent to online marketing; anyways DNHour votes up and down on the latest domain name news.

Programming, Development, & Geek News

14. SlashDot (Technology of all kinds)- The grand daddy of them all; SlashDot was one of the earliest and most successful online communities, although it may be over-shadowed somewhat today by Digg. When you submit a story to SlashDot, it’s evaluated by the editors, and then pushed to the front page; it’s similar to Fark. SlashDot’s audience is primarily techie.

15. DZone (Developement and Programming) - Thus far every time I have used this service I have landed on the front page, and received a decent amount of visits (over 1000 unique visits). Writing a good headline that catches the eye of developers is key, but you don’t really need too many votes to make it to the front page; I also find that the people who comment on DZone are generally very positive and helpful. This is one of my favorite new social media websites.

16. DotNetKicks (.NET Technology) - I made it onto the front page of DotNetKicks today and received a nice wave of traffic (a couple hundred uniques); DotNetKicks is an absolute must for submissions if you blog about ASP.NET at all. In addition their site is all open-source so if you want to start your own social media portal you should check out their code.

17. Tweako (General Computing, Internet) - From Tweako’s about page:

Tweako.com is a place to learn and share information and knowledge about every computer and technology topic out there. We hope to create a website where users can find information and help for all their computing needs that accommodates all levels of skill and difficulty, from programming to cleaning spyware.

Please note that Tweako uses human editors to determine what appears on the front page.

18. Pixel Groovy (Web Design) - Covers a lot of different web development and web design aspects, but really the forte of Pixel Groovy are the slick CSS/AJAX tips, which usually populate the front page regardless. You can still try and submit articles about PHP/ASP.NET design as Pixel Groovy has categories supporting those.

Video

19. Game Diggity (Gaming Videos) - Video voting community for gamers.

20. Video Bomb (Videos) - Social Bookmarking for videos… Seems a bit sketchy to me.

21. Video Sift (Videos) - More social bookmarking for videos… Classier than Video Bomb.

Politics and Political Issues

22. Care2 (Social Action) - The tag line says “green living, health, human rights, and more.” If I ran a non-profit or an interest group this would be a stop in my story submission route.

23. Plant Change (Environmental Issues) - Most of the articles on the front page do not have a very high vote count; I honestly would not be able to tell you how much traffic runs through Plant Change.

24. News Heat (Politics) - Social media outlet for politics, mostly American. The vote counts aren’t very high here either so I’m not sure what the traffic levels are like.

25. Hugg (Environmental Issues) - Higher vote counts than Plant Change, but it’s the same idea.

Deals & Bargain Hunting

Honestly I think these sites are beyond boring, but then again I don’t find much interest in bargain hunting.

26. Dealigg - Social Bargain Hunting

27. AgentB - More social bargain hunting.

28. Judy’s Book - Find what’s on sale near you.

Sports

29. ScoreGuru - Vote up and down on the most interesting sporting news.

30. Ballhype - a much more popular social media outlet for sporting news. Go Chargers.

WHY ISN’T COPYCAT SOCIAL BOOKMARKING SERVICE [ABC] ON THIS LIST?

Because I’ve either never received traffic from it, or because I’ve never heard of it.

Credits to Tropical SEO for a great list of niche social media sites, most of which I put onto this list.

Also, for your reading pleasure, check out the Facebook Application Extreme Stress Test from Mashable.

Google is pretty sure that Digg users can’t talk to women without pissing on themselves or fleeing in terror… They are probably right.

Maybe 98% of Digg users…