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beginning of this month, loren feldman decided to post a video on his site about the lack of black technology bloggers, a video that eventually stirred up quite a bit of controversy. because loren decided to use blip.tv to host the larger flash version of the video, some of the site’s patrons got upset and one of them actually sent them a letter detailing the potential damage to the blip.tv brand as a result of hosting the video.

Are you sure that blip.tv wants to have their brand associated with such “comedy”?? The blip.tv logo is prominently displayed next to his player (as was podtech’s) - is blip.tv as a company willing to risk such negative news coverage as this.

rather than taking the video down, blip.tv has responded as follows:

I found the video distasteful and not funny. But as a company we don’t delete videos on that basis. Instead, we err on the side of free speech, and enabling discussions. I think that a remix or response video would be more effective a refutation than censorship.

not only has this put blip.tv on my radar, but i have an enormous amount of respect for the site and their team.

i saw the following submission on reddit earlier today,

and couldn’t help but point out the irony. as of last count, the submission had 35 positive votes (and 25 down votes). the following are screen grabs of two different times from the reddit front page from a little while back:

one of the things social media is about, is instant gratification. and maps, charts, graphs, statistics, and pictures, help content producers do exactly that.

there has been too much talk going around about this site or that site being a digg killer (or replacement). while i think its great for the ‘socially driven news’ space as well as for digg itself that new sites pop up and try to compete with the incumbent, it is not only frustratingly inaccurate but the practice of labeling every new socially driven site as a ‘digg killer’ has become incredibly trite.

here are some examples from bloggers that (while i disagree with them from time to time) i have a lot of respect for and think have enough foresight (and their fingers on the pulse of the industry) to predict the next big thing. let’s take a look at their thoughts on what would kill digg and how it obviously didn’t.

Behind Curtain Number One: Michael Arrington

What he said: “On Thursday, AOL’s Netscape property will no longer be just another portal - it’s being converted into a Digg-killer.”

Verdict: While I think Netscape, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc are all great sites in their own right, none of them is a Digg Killer.

Behind Curtain Number Two: Pete Cashmore

What he said: “MySpace News: The Digg Killer?”

Verdict: MySpace News is not an Anything Killer.

Behind Curtain Number Three: Jason Calacanis

What he said: “Will digg die the death of 1,000 cuts?”

Verdict: Pligg is a great content management system, but the secret behind digg’s success is not just the socially driven system the site uses but the huge incredibly active community that it has engendered. Pligg is not going to kill digg.

Behind Curtain Number Four: Robert Scoble

What he said: “Google Reader + Facebook Application = Digg killer?”

Verdict: Mario Romero’s application is great but by no means even close to being a replacement for Digg.

Behind Curtain Number Five: Josh Lowensohn

What he said: “Streamy-yes, it’s a Digg killer”

Verdict: After using Streamy for a couple of days I can say with complete certainty that Streamy and Digg aren’t even competing in the same space.

Behind Curtain Number Six: Jeremiah Owyang

What he said: “Could NewsTrust be a Digg Killer?”

Verdict: NewsTrust is a great product and while i don’t see it as a digg killer, it is definitely something that could be integrated into digg to provide a better social news experience.

Behind Curtain Number Seven: Steve Rubel (and Steve Mermelstein)

What they said: “Steve Mermelstein wisely states that Google Reader could be a digg killer.”

Verdict: Google Reader is not even a high-end feed reader replacement, let alone a Digg Killer.

As you can see, I have only begun to skim the surface with these few observations. There are hundreds if not thousands of sites that are referred to as Digg Killers while they are simply socially driven sites trying to implement or further the socially driven news model. While it’s great to give these sites coverage and complement/critique them for their work, it’s just unfair to expect them to stand a chance against Digg and in most cases even the other big sites (Netscape, Reddit, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Fark, Slashdot, and so on).

comscore has released its list of the web’s 50 most trafficked sites for july, and it’s incredibly interesting to look at the top few companies. take a peak at what powers these online giants and you’ll note more than just a touch of the social:

1. yahoo! sites (also include flickr, upcoming.org, del.icio.us, mybloglog, etc.)
2. google sites (also include blogger, dodgeball, youtube, feedburner, orkut, etc.)
3. time warner network (also includes weblogs inc., netscape, etc.)
4. microsoft sites (also include wallop, windows live services, etc.)
5. fox interactive media (also includes myspace, photobucket, etc.)

this goes on to show the importance these growing companies are placing on new and emerging social technologies and how these technologies are helping these online giants solidify their positions at the top.

Jeff Atwood at the coding horror blog has a great list of 13 blog cliches that we should all consider avoiding.

1. The Useless Calendar Widget
2. Random Images Arbitrarily Inserted In Text
3. No Information on the Author
4. Excess Flair
5. The Giant Blogroll
6. The Nebulous Tag Cloud
7. Excessive Advertisements
8. This Ain’t Your Diary
9. Sorry I Haven’t Written in a While
10. Blogging About Blogging
11. Mindless Link Propagation
12. Top (n) Lists
13. No Comments Allowed

while i agree with most of the points on the list, i think some of them can vary from blog to blog. for example,+ an author that attends a lot of conferences can definitely use a calendar widget, and blogging about blogging is perfectly fine because it does create value for those who are out of touch with the platform, and finally, i think top (n) lists are great (in moderation of course). nonetheless, the list is a good critique of some of the mistakes that many bloggers make over and over again.

while i’m sure most of us aren’t fans of racism or hateful and inflammatory expression, i don’t thing most of us would go far as suspending freedom of expression. british national paper, metro is reporting that there is a substantial effort within the facebook community to ban unpopular speech.

now to be fair, facebook’s terms and conditions do say that any groups that are promoting material seen as ‘harmful, threatening, hateful or racially or ethnically objectionable’ can be removed. and since facebook is not a public forum, facebook users aren’t protected by the first amendment and facebook would be right within their terms to regulate what is said on their site. this does however beg the question, how much should online communities regulate expression? should organizations like the kkk and the dnp, as despicable as they are, be able to express themselves?

bbc news has become the latest of the online news sites to embrace social media by adding buttons that let you easily submit content from the site to some of the most popular socially driven sites.

while i can’t say the placement of this ‘bookmark with’ box at the very bottom of the page is the best decision, adding the buttons makes perfect sense. if you look at the 10 most popular sites on digg, here is how the online news sites rank:

1. number 3 - ny times
2. number 6 - yahoo news
3. number 7 - cnn
4. number 8 - washington post
5. number 9 - bbc news

as you can see, online news sites already rank quite high, and making it easier for readers to submit their content will only help. for those readers that don’t know what social news sites are, bbc news offers a brief explanation.

heather posted some interesting research on the hitwise blog today about searches conducted for the terms ‘youtube’ and ‘funny videos’. while the research is limited to the uk it is general enough that it should by the same for the u.s. and most of western europe.

we found a strong negative correlation between the weekly share of UK Internet searches for “youtube” and “funny videos” over the past two years.

while we know from statistics 101 that correlation doesn’t imply causation, it seems that in this case that the decline in searches for the term ‘funny videos’ is caused by the rise in youtube’s popularity; just as youtube begins to take off, there is a sharp decline for searches for ‘funny videos’.

this is an expected result of a couple of obvious things:

1. people want to find not search: by searching for youtube, they know they can find funny videos, which would explain the negative correlation between the two.

2. people want content aggregation: youtube works because it is the hub for funny videos. rather than scouring the web and jumping from site to site, people can just come to youtube and jump from clip to clip. this is the same reason why sites like ebaum’s world succeeded.

i haven’t made a secret of the fact that i was less than impressed by the micro-blogging format when twitter was first launched. that said, over time i have realized that i wasn’t annoyed so much with the platform, rather with they way some people were using it. once i started appreciating the platform, i came up with several innovative ways to use twitter while keeping in mind the dangers that come with the territory.

but before we even get to that, have a look at chris brogan’s newbies’ guide to twitter.

Roy Jacobsen asked if there was a newbies guide to Twitter. There might be, but for those of you who want a different perspective, I feel up for writing another one. So why not? DISCLAIMER: This is how *I* derive value from Twitter. You might do it differently. Here it is, a Newbie’s Guide to Twitter.

not only is the guide itself very concise and useful but the comments on the post are informative too.

soon after the blogosphere started noticing that usa today’s social experiment wasn’t quite working, they issued a press release saying the exact opposite.

USA TODAY announces that its website, USATODAY.com, recorded a 20% year-over year increase in traffic for the month of July 2007 and a month-over-month growth of 24% according to Nielsen/NetRatings. It was also reported that more than 10.6 million unique visitors came to USATODAY.com in the month of July.

the problems with the numbers, however, is that the month-over-month increase is not a sustained growth, and as they point out in the press release, is a result of the simpsons movie and an exclusive interview with j.k. rowling (author of the harry potter series) and should level off in the coming months.

the 10.6 million unique visitors noted in the press release is not far off from the comscore data that michael arrington referred to, which showed about 10 million unique visitors. the problem is that the comscore data shows the 10 million as being a 29% decrease from the june figure of 14 million, while the press release mentions that the 10 million is a 24% increase from june figures.

now i don’t want to go around pointing fingers but i have generally found comscore and compete data to be fairly reliable.