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it’s not a shame that the offender was caught, but a damn shame that such a well-respected institution has to go through this.

working on behalf of the times, a sitelynx employee posted thousands of links to community and social news websites, including mahalo, del.icio.us, stumbleupon, metafilter, yahoo! answers, ma.gnolia, and netscape’s propeller. his actions were done without any disclosure of his affiliation to sitelynx or The Times and were, in some cases, posted under the assumed identity of his wife.

we’ve already permanently banned the offending account at propeller. if you are friends with the offending accounts on any of the networks, please report them as soon as possible and make sure that they are banned.

Technorati Tags: social media, spam, times, mahalo, del.icio.us, stumbleupon, metafilter, yahoo answers, ma.gnolia, propeller

on wednesday January 23rd, a core group of submitters to social bookmarking site digg.com, represented here by digg users andy, mu, reg, and david cohn, collected all their major grievances against digg and issued them in a statement. we discussed these issues in a live forum, with over 150 digg users in attendance. in this segment, jay adelson & kevin rose, founders & operators of digg, address those concerns.

please head over to the drill down to listen to the conversation.

Technorati Tags: digg, social media, kevin rose, jay adelson, the drill down

note: for more information on the entire event, plus the complete conversation with kevin rose and jay adelson, please listen to this week’s episode of the drill down (which will be posted as soon as possible).

update: part 1 has been released.

update: part 2 has also been released.

update: coverage on nytimes, wsj, gawker, and the complete blogosphere coverage.

if you’re plugged into the social news space or the blogosphere at all, you’ve probably already heard about the mini-revolt that took place at digg a few hours ago. here’s the story from start to end of what happened, the mavericks who did it, and why they dared to do it.

it all started when digg altered their content promotion algorithm, as they often do to make the site fairer to the community and at the same time to combat spam and make sure the best content rises to the top. i’ve written extensively about how i think the digg algorithm works, but since the algorithm is part of digg’s secret recipe , we can only speculate. what seemed to have happened, however, as a byproduct of the most recent algorithm tweak, is that a majority of the submissions from the top users were stuck at the top of the upcoming queue for hours without getting promoted.

frustrated by what we saw as a move to suppress the top contributors to the site and penalize them for their popularity, andy (mrbabyman), reg (zaibatsu), and myself (msaleem) decided to have an impromptu conference call to discuss what was going on. obviously angry, we decided that we had to fight back at the system somehow, and that we weren’t going to take this lying down. we immediately created a google group along with an email list-host and started inviting other trusted members into the group to discuss the problem with them and try to come up with possible solutions to the problem.being a bit of a fire-starter myself, i proposed that we immediately rally the troops and boycott digg until our demands (at that point undetermined) were met and our concerns (at that point a work in progress) resolved. at the end, however, andy’s diplomatic nature and good judgment prevailed - at least for a few hours.

waking up yesterday, i saw that a friend’s observations on the algorithm were already on the front page of digg and were prompting a lot of discussion. furthermore, a completely unrelated blogger had made similar (but more critical) remarks on the algorithm that were gaining some traction on digg. making a snap judgment and seizing the opportunity, i decided that it was now or never so i started sharing the second story with my friends on the site to the point where it also got popular. at the same time, two daring friends, dave and brent, helped propagate our concerns further, both taking a stronger stance against the pressures we were facing. all the while, of course, digg had responded to what was going on in the blogopshere, with kevin himself writing a few words on the algorithm.

but perhaps it was a little late and we had gotten our thoughts out on several different venues already and they were generally well received (4/5 of the articles were made popular on digg). it was a risky move and it could have blown up in our faces, but the three of us (andy, reg, and myself) had the support of a majority of the top users on digg along with some large blogs. a blogger from valleywag did a quick profile and recap of what was going on, and followed it up with an open letter several of us wrote to digg. also, other sites such as techcrunch and mashable were busy writing their versions from the sidelines, but we were already on the move to the next step. we had already setup a social network, and were about to go live.

after a quick chat, andy, reg, and i decided to host an emergency session of our podcast, the drill down, to discuss the matter with our community, and in the hopes that kevin and jay would join us and open dialog with us. over 125 people participated in the live discussion (though from preliminary numbers, thousands of other visitors watched it directly from the ustream homepage where we were pinned as the hottest stream of the night). after 2 hours of heated discussion (just as we had made a collective decision to boycott digg for a week), to our amazement and delight, kevin rose and jay adelson actually showed up in the chat room, and proceeded to spend over an hour with us on the live chat, one-by-one discussion all our concerns (which we had listed in our open letter to digg) and promising quick solutions. here are three different accounts of what the five of us discussed.

just as quickly as the fire had started, kevin and jay stepped in to extinguish it. it was never our intention to cause harm to digg (though every protest naturally gains that element as it intensifies) and ultimately all we needed was to be assured that our concerns were being listened to and that the community we have helped build was going to address them in a timely fashion. they listened to the problems, acknowledged that there were issues, and promised to address them as soon as possible. big things are coming ahead for digg, based on what we have learned from our conversation, and with the channels of communication now open, hopefully we will all be a part of the conversation.

thanks to andy and reg for putting up with me, thanks to dave, anonymous, brent, jim, and jordan for helping us get the word out through their blogs, thanks to dave (again), jim (again), karim (supernova17), and jay (silent-jay) for joining us on the podcast, thanks to kevin and jay for taking out the time to listen to their community (i know it was incredibly late on the east coast) and thanks to everyone else who stood by us on digg and was a part of the conversation.

p.s. happy digging.

Technorati Tags: digg, social news, revolt, changes, community, communication, mrbabyman, zaibatsu, msaleem, kevin rose, jay adelson

i’ve written a post on search engine land explaining the impact of social media on search rankings and visibility.

note: this is not an invitation to abuse social news sites to game your search rankings or search visibility. use this as a guide to understanding how social media affects your search rankings and use it to optimize your best content (best in terms of most-likely to be socialized). always remember that good content is good bait (and that’s all folks).

read on for all the details.

Technorati Tags: search engine land, social media, search, visibility, ranking, digg, del.icio.us, stumbleupon

i’ve written a post on problogger on the matthew effect in the blogosphere.

as james surowiecki makes the case in his book the wisdom of crowds, ‘ideas are meant to triumph not because who is (or who is not) advocating them but because of their inherent value…’ but in reality this is hard (though not impossible) to come by.

read on to learn how to make yourself heard.

this post is a part of my journey through james surowiecki’s the wisdom of crowds.

Technorati Tags: matthew effect, blogging, blogosphere, problogger

if i mentioned the user name ‘msaleem’ out of a pool of over one million registered users to a regular contributor over at digg - or propeller for that matter, chances are they’d know whom I’m referring to. a self professed social media maven, extremely talented writer, creative thinker, and university student, saleem is considered the second most successful and largest contributor on digg - so when the opportunity to conduct an interview came along, best believe i wasn’t going to let this one slip. and now that I’ve ‘obtained’ muhammad until the end of the interview (let me check if his still confined to my dungeon), we better get crackin’ before he finds a way to escape.

i have actually managed to escape from justin, but do check out the interview.

Technorati Tags: justin khoury, interview, digg, propeller, muhammad saleem

i’ve written a post on techcrunch on why digg has been embraced by the mainstream media and the blogosphere alike.

so why does the digg story sell so well? here’s a look at 9 elements that make a good story - one that people embrace and propagate through their networks - and how digg has taken those principles to heart.

read on for an exploration of all 9 elements that have made digg successful.

this post is a part of my journey through seth godin’s all marketers are liars.

Technorati Tags: digg, social news, techcrunch

i’ve written a post on search engine land giving out 7 tips that will help your next social news submission shine above the rest.

how can you increase your chances of appealing to an average digger, stumbler, or other social media user, and actually get them to vote for your content?

read on for all 7 tips.

this post is a part of my journey through james surowiecki’s the wisdom of crowds.

Technorati Tags: social media, social news, james surowiecki, the wisdom of crowds, keynes, search engine land, digg, propeller, reddit, stumbleupon

the simple fact that you have a community around your service or a readership around your blog means that you’re doing at least something right, and that people want to participate. at the same time, however, the participants aren’t always necessarily happy or as happy as they could be. what amazes me about this situation is not only how easy it is to make these people happy/happier, but also how many people fail to do this.

as james surowiecki describes in his book the wisdom of crowds, according to the human-relations movement led by sociologist elton mayo, people are not only happier, but also more productive when they feel their concerns are being listened to. it’s rather simple, really: just listen to what your community has to say and the next time you make a decision, take their thoughts into account. if you end up implementing one of the suggestions, go ahead and give credit where it’s due. but before you do this, you need to have a system in place that easily let’s your community get in touch with you, and create a culture where the community actually believes that their concerns won’t fall on deaf ears.

it seems foolish to me (if not self-sabotaging) that socially driven news and content sites in particular have managed to get millions of people to participate in the process of submitting, voting, commenting, and sharing content, but have failed to institute a system to allow the same community to recommend improvements to the sites and discuss the best way to go about making those improvements. do we honestly think that the 15 people at digg know more than the site’s million-plus users know about where the site needs to be going and what improvements should be next? the same applies to all other social media services. in fact, i find myself wondering if these sites even know the first thing about the very phenomenon they are presumably taking advantage of (the wisdom of crowds). so far, the only site i’ve seen that allows people to participate in the process of site improvement is reddit, where you can submit self-referential posts pertaining to the site (and they’ve usually been implemented fairly speedily).

as for the argument that digg or any other site may not want community input because they want to make decisions which increase the sellability of the site the direction where many claim they are going), i think its impossible to differentiate between features that the community wants and thinks will improve the site, and the features that make a site more sellable. lastly, fevote is a site that allows people to make suggestion boards around communities (for example, here’s one for digg), but ultimately, for any such system to work, it has to be hosted on the site itself, and be instantly available to the entire community.

so help your community get one step closer to nirvana, listen to the very people who are responsible for your success.

this post is a part of my journey through james surowiecki’s the wisdom of crowds.

Technorati Tags: digg, reddit, social news, community, james surowiecki, the wisdom of crowds

while reading the wisdom of crowds by james surowiecki, i came across an old (but highly applicable) forbes article titled are you a chump? the article is a commentary on the american tax system, tax avoidance, and whether it makes sense. let’s think about this problem.

the money that the government gets from tax collection goes towards things that benefit everyone. you get public services such as roads, police, firemen, and you get a military that protects you, irrespective of whether you actually contributed to the pool or not. why then do people pay taxes? ultimately what it comes down to is that if you cheat on your taxes, chances are that you will be caught, and the penalties you will have to pay then are high enough to deter most people from playing the numbers.

comparing cheating on your taxes to gaming a social news site may be stretching it a little but bear with me for a minute. the more i participate on these sites, the more it becomes obvious that certain sites and people are participating in a way that isn’t the ‘good citizen’ way of contributing to these sites, even though it might not explicitly violate the terms of service. take the example of digg and propeller. both these sites have systems in place that allow users to share their submissions with other people (shouts versus site-mail). though the systems are in place to allow people to share one-off interesting stories with a few of their friends, they are increasingly being used to mass-spam entire friends lists to rally for votes.

until today i had resisted using these systems simply because it’s not the ‘good citizen’ way to participate. however, now that more and more people are abusing this functionality, at the cost of users in good standing, and aren’t being punished for what they’re doing, i can’t help but wonder why any user shouldn’t similarly abuse them for their own benefit. most of us are contingent consenters, i.e. we are willing to participate and abide by the community rules as long as everyone else also abides by the same rules and those that don’t, are punished. if the system breaks down, the community leaders have no choice but to resort to the same methods. after all, no one likes to be the chump.

what do you think?

this post is a part of my journey through james surowiecki’s the wisdom of crowds.

Technorati Tags: rules, contingent consenters, james surowiecki, the wisdom of crowds