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i’ve written a guest post at pickthebrain with 6 steps to writing content that readers will retain.

an opinionated piece with a human element should give any active reader more than enough to participate in a discussion while simplicity and brevity will appease the most reflective of readers. furthermore, while visual cues and formatting will attract the visual ‘readers’, retainability through repetition and simplicity should draw the verbal readers to your content.

please check out the complete article for a all 6 points explained in more detail.

Technorati Tags: copywriting, content, retention, readers

i’ve written a guest post at read/writeweb as a follow up to why digg is blocked.

by now most of you have probably seen the site ‘why digg is blocked’. for those that haven’t come across it, the site is on a mission to convince webmasters and content producers to reject social media traffic. here’s a look at the incredibly flawed logic the site uses to justify its purpose.

please check out the complete article for a point-by-point refutation.

Technorati Tags: social media, digg, propeller, reddit, stumbleupon, traffic, economics, readwriteweb

it’s almost been a week since digg launched digg the candidates, and it’s about time i took a shot at it. the new section let’s you keep track of presidential candidates’ profiles on digg (i.e. their submissions, votes, comments, and so on) and add them as friends.

you can now check out the 2008 presidential candidates profiles on digg! add your favorite candidates as a friend to show support, and to see all their digging activity in your friends’ activity feed. many of them will be digging, commenting and even submitting content.

on the digg the candidate’s main page you will see a star next to each article by each candidate’s name, this article is the candidate’s most recent favorite. when you add a candidate as a friend, a box will also be created on your profile showing which candidates you have added.

there are three three parts to ‘digg the candidates’:

1. the 2008 election primary calendar

the election primary calendar is incredibly simple. it just displays dates and the corresponding states next to them.

a much more interesting implementation would’ve been to allow each candidate to create a campaign hub with a detailed calendar of events that their campaign plans to hold, including a list of televised appearances and addresses, sponsored debates, candidate endorsements, endorsed advertisements, and so on. then we would really be digging the candidates.

2. the candidate profiles ranking page

the main ‘digg the candidates’ page does several things.

the candidates are divided into two lists based on their party affiliations and are ranked based on the number of friends they have on digg. underneath each candidate’s ranked profile is the latest story they have made a favorite. finally, in the right sidebar, the page displays the recently popular stories from digg’s u.s. elections category along with the candidates’ recent profile activity.

3. individual candidate profile pages

the final piece of ‘digg the candidates’ is the actual candidate profiles. these profiles function exactly like the rest of the users’ profiles.

keep in mind that this is the first iteration of ‘digg the candidates’ and even then, the feature is in its very nascent stages and is bound to evolve and improve as we head into 2008. at the same time, if you’re expecting an in-depth look at the issues rather than a straightforward popularity contest, i would suggest you take a look at political base.

Technorati Tags: digg, social news, politics, candidates, elections

i’ve written an introductory manual for participating in social media at danny sullivan’s search engine land:

i get so many questions from people about digg, propeller, reddit, stumbleupon and other social news sites every day, that i decided to write this little “manual” as something to read before you jump in head first into any social site, and to keep by your side as you progress through the ranks. it should not only help you succeed with your social media marketing efforts, but also help you avoid some of the mistakes i’ve made.

please check out the entire manual.

Technorati Tags: social media, social news, search engine land, digg, propeller, reddit, stumbleupon

when i submit content to social news sites, i usually check them at least twice over a 24 hours period to see what kind of comments they’re getting. in fact, often times, i read the title and summary of someone else’s submission and read the comments before reading the actual story.

one of the great things about the comment threads is that oftentimes when a site goes down because of the sudden influx of unexpected traffic from digg (or another social site), people point new readers to mirrors for the content so you can read and digg the story even if the site itself is unavailable. usually these mirrors point to duggmirror, coral cache, and google cache, but recently spammers have gotten wind of this tactic and have begun scraping content onto their own sites and passing them off as mirrors.

enter smith johnson (who is incidentally a 39-year-old girl):

smith has setup a blogspot blog at diggmirror1.blogspot.com (presenting a server error at the moment), and is mimicking well intentioned people by pretending to link to a legitimate mirror (i.e. duggmirror, one of the most popular mirrors for dugg sites), while actually linking to his/her own site where all the content is being scraped and reposted. i have already reported the user to digg (for posting 5 spam comments like that in the last hour) and if you come across the user, please bury the comments.

also, if you’re looking for an easy way to access unavailable content or for a way to inform your audience about mirrors, i would encourage you to look at the dugged firefox extension. the extension simply adds a link to the duggmirror page for a site that is down, right next to the submission for the site. here’s an example (notice the orange text at the bottom-left):

Technorati Tags: digg, social news, traffic, dugg, duggmirror, coral cache, google, mirror, spammers

i’m happy to announce that i was just inducted into the digg.com 1,000 club. i join the esteemed ranks of mrbabyman and digitalgopher, the only other diggers (apart from me) to promote more than 1,000 stories to digg’s home page (though i’m certain zaibatsu and supernova17 will be joining us before the end of the month). i want to thank all the content producers whose stories i have submitted (for creating the great content) and all the digg users (who have been reading, digging, and commenting on my submissions).

check out my profile, and the complete rankings.

p.s. digg was having some major issues yesterday, and it seems my promoted stories from yesterday haven’t been counted yet. i have talked to a few people with backup information on top diggers’ profiles and was assured that i had 992 promoted stories as of 4.00 am on the 14th, and since then have had 10 more promoted, out of which 6 were yesterday and consequently not counted by digg. though digg is still showing 996, the actual number is 1,002.

i have written a guest post at allen stern’s centernetworks:

this move will definitely increase the readership of the online news outlet and will most certainly further solidify the brand. however, while it is great to see that mainstream media is becoming more comfortable with new media and embracing it more comprehensively, i remain skeptical with respect to the revenue model as far as social media traffic is concerned.

please check out the entire article.

Technorati Tags: social media, digg, wsj

i’ve been getting really weird spam for the past 2 weeks or so and the first time i got it, i looked at the ‘sent to’ field and noticed that a lot of the other people this spam was sent to were other top digger friends of mine. every time i got these emails, i sent an email to [email protected] to tell them that spammers are farming digg for email addresses (i sent them an email on october 25th, then again on november 2, then on november 7th) but they haven’t done anything yet, and i got a 4th email today.

i am not the only digger that was targeted and until digg does something about this, i would recommend removing your email information from your profile.

Technorati Tags: digg, email, spam, abuse

there’s no secret that i’m currently ranked number 3 on digg in absolute terms, and ranked number 2 on digg if you only count the active diggers. furthermore, one of my closest friends on digg, and my partner in crime at the drill down (our weekly podcast), reg (zaibatsu) is close on my tail. to that effect, and since we both are currently in the high 900′s, a common mutual friend wrote an article that pushed us in a race to 1,000 front page diggs.

all warfare is based on deception. hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near. hold out baits to entice the enemy. feign disorder, and crush him.

-sun tzu, the art of war

both reg and i are competitive people, that’s part of the reason why we make such good friends. anyway, the competition forced us both to try and get in front of as many eyeballs as possible, and often this meant submitting 4-5 times as many stories in a day as we would otherwise, and at one point 33 submissions in a single 24 hour period (a number that we would otherwise reach in a full week, by keeping our submissions at 5-6 a day).

not only was it hard to come up with that many submissions, but it was obviously, and understandably, very annoying for our friends and other diggers to see the digg upcoming list completely saturated with our submissions. with that in mind, and after realizing that too many diggers simply didn’t understand the playful nature of the ‘competition’ and took it way too seriously (taking sides, etc.) we decided that it wasn’t worth it, called it a draw with me having the lead in absolute numbers and reg having the lead in the successful story promotion ratio.

as a parting gift for everyone observing the competition, both of us decided to submit a special gift for all our friends.

what does this mean? it means that digg is not a competition and it is not a race. digg is about submitting and sharing news that you like and news that matters to you. and by the looks of it, reg and i have some incredibly similar concerns, i.e. the red eyed tree frog.

Technorati Tags: digg, social media, msaleem, reg, zaibatsu, muhammad saleem

i was going through my rss reader last night, in search for something to submit to digg when i saw that engadget had published a post titled ‘charge your usb gadgets by breathing’. obviously thinking that this is something that would do well on digg, i clicked on it, but then realized that engadget wasn’t the primary source for the content. in fact, neither were the next two sites that i followed the links to.

engadget had gotten the story from gadgets-weblog, which had gotten it from treehugger, which got it from the original source and one of my favorite blogs, instructables. whenever i submit something to social media sities, i look to see if the article links to an originating source and i go back and make an earnest effort to submit for the originating source. this experience left me wondering, what is the proper way to attribute an originating source, and how far back should you go?

for example, should engadget, gadgets-weblog, and treehugger, all link back to instructables because they made the content, even though engadget and gadgets-weblog indirectly found it through treehugger? or should each site link only to the place where they found the information from? the way things are, engadget only linked to gadgets-weblog, which linked to both treehugger and instructables, and treehugger, of course, linked to intructables. from these three blogs, how many links does instructables deserve?

i haven’t linked the content above due to linking confusion. here’s how i found the article: from engadget, via gadgets-blog, via treehugger, via original source: instructables.

Technorati Tags: engadget, gadgets, treehugger, instructables, link, post, blog, usb, digg