Check it out.

I’m not following any of these 4 users but some how they appeared on my @replies page. So I asked a few twitters if its showing for them, some said no, and some like my pal Calvin (mayhemstudios) said yes.

So what does this mean? Well I hope it means they will bringing back @replies for non mutual followers because it rocks! Totally love it because I always its important to connect with people who you don’t follow. I’m only guessing that Twitter is trying to roll out something new with @replies but until they release public information we’re all clueless.

Update 2: Twitter CEO Evan Williams just tweeted about the change: “Reading people’s thoughts on the replies issue. We’re considering alternatives. Thanks for your feedback.”

If you know something feel free to comment below or @reply me.

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Here’s How The New Diggable Ads Work

On the homepage of digg where the square banner resides, you will see a corresponding digg post on the side where you can digg, comment or bury. With this new system digg actually charges customers based on how many buries or votes it got. The more diggs for the ad, the cheaper for the customers. The more buries the more expensive the ad space is.

Our goal for Digg Ads is to create a better experience by giving you more control over advertising content that appears on Digg. You’ll start to see changes on the site in a few months, but we will continue to iterate over the course of the year based on your feedback. This is an exciting step for Digg as we work to create a compelling, innovative advertising experience for our community and the industry at large.
Read the original post here

A Confession

Ok, I have a confession, I’ve never seen any ads on any websites for as long as I can remember. Why? Well here’s my secret weapon “AdBlock Plus” its a Firefox plugin which works like a charm and does not require any setup. Once installed you will not see another banner ad, flash ad, youtube in video text ads, adsense ads, you name it, ever again.

Can Diggable Ads Backfire on Digg

Firstly, I’m not sure if people with AdBlockers can see diggable ads, this will require more testing and since I haven’t seen any of these ads yet, I can’t tell. If you do know something about this hit me up.

Would you vote for such ads on digg? I know I would if the ads are more targeted to my taste. However I don’t think that’s what digg is doing.

The goal here is to give advertisers a way to present content related to their brands and get immediate input on whether it’s relevant to the Digg audience, or not.

So that just means that digg is going to spam us with ads whether we like them or not (that’s not new). Untargeted ads don’t do well and if you have ever used Google AdWords, you’ll know why. Untargeted ads either get buried or ignored. All the better reason for me not to turn of my AdBlocker.

Here’s an example of a sponsored ad:

EA to Launch ‘Sims 3′ on June 2nd
Electronic Arts said on Tuesday that The Sims 3, the third full iteration of one of the most successful video game franchises of all time, will hit store shelves on June 2

Sort of A Good Move Digg

I think the diggable ads really sync with the whole “content is controlled by users” theme, but I’m not sure if I want to participate in untargeted ads. I’m all for the new move but unrelated ads just piss me off. For those of you who already use AdBlocker, you might want to keep it running.

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This story is going to shock you as much as it has shocked me and its all due to a pretty damn tricky and deceiving website, Reddit.com. I first joined reddit over a year ago but never really used it like the way I use digg. I simply found that content was a little more bias and it was heavily moderated by user moderators.

This means that reddit staff is not responsible but individual users who were made admins of the category which have the power to destroy you submission with a click. Actually sounds just like digg’s bury brigade but that’s another story. A few months ago I started noticing that my account was missing.

And well I didn’t pay too much attention to it so I just logged it to see if my account was there and well it was! So I ignored the 404 page not found error and continued on reddit. However I did notice that my submissions were getting deleted lately. In fact most of my submissions were getting deleted.

A friend of my Gerald Weber wrote this article just when I was starting to wonder WTF was going on.

There Is Definitely Something Devious Going on Over at Reddit!

This opened up my eyes! I had a chat with him and he figured it out, bottom line, my account has been deleted of the face of the earth but only viewable to me if I log it.

Reddit Bans You Quietly…

So why does reddit want to deceive me, a low lever user with only 2000+ karma points? Am I’m spamming them? No, I’ve submitted some great content and yet I’ve been deleted (mostly submitted what ever I submitted to digg). Honest truth, I’m not even going to bother to start a new reddit account, because what gives reddit the right to delete my account without warning or notice.

And I don’t appreciate the fact that individual moderators have the ability to delete my submission just because they don’t like it or have a submission of their friends they want to promote. I don’t have proof that they are doing this but its simple to see, if you give these types of powers to users, they will abuse it discreetly.

It seems to me that reddit is far more political than digg. I thought that digg was bias, but now I know it’s not. At least on digg you don’t get deceived and banned without notice. So I’m with Gerald, I’m going to Mixx.com, seems like a much better place to spend my time.

If you’re feeling like a change come and join me http://www.mixx.com/users/benjam1n

Thanks Reddit, it has been a pleasure being silently banned. Next time try to grow some balls and just tell users.

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But can you blame Twitter for breaking down? No! There’s a huge influx of people using it and that’s a fact according to Mashable’s article.

Close to 20M hits just in march alone. Twitter has done well but maybe its time to upgrade servers and some coding issues. Either way I’m proud of what twitter has done so far. Take the poll below and tell me what you think?

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I found out the hard way what the most popular sites were. You can now do it easier with di66.net in Digg’s Top Sources. If you want to get popular articles than submit from the top sites more often. Why? Because these sites already have a hugg digg following thus you’ll get natural digg’s anyways even if you’re a newbie.

I added users who had high % of digg popularity counts like Zaibatsu, MrBabyman & Msaleem. I also added people who were active commenter’s. Having the right friends that will actually read and comment on your submissions are a great way to get the recommendation engine going.

I also recommend you make friends with some top digg users hopefully they will notice you and make you a mutual friend. To get them to notice you, you need to firstly improve your stats, once you do this you will notice more top users making friends with you.

Having less friends makes it easy to monitor what they submit and when they comment. It also makes your shout inbox clean. I use to have 100s of shouts sent to me per day and that got annoying. So cut friends who you don’t really talk with and keep users with similar topics of interest. The misconception of having 1000 friends is not the way to go. I personally try to keep my friend count to around 180.

Can you read 500 words in 5 secs? Well if you can than you could possibly digg everything in your friends submissions page but do not do this. It’s blind digging and this will only get you banned from digg. Digg what you like or find interesting. Comment and favorite only the ones you really liked. I personally digg betwee 80 - 150 per day as I don’t have time to read everything and digg’s new algorithm is giving me the itchy finger if I try to go above my average count.

I asked a few people on digg, mostly active ones, for any tips on how to submit great content. Eventually I learned that Google Reader was the best thing you can use to manage 100s of RSS Feeds from multiple sites. You should add at least 100 sites to your RSS Feed. Google Reader is one of the best RSS reading app and its free to use online.

We all know Cracked.com hits digg’s front page all the time. It’s also one of the very few sites that people literally camp on hitting that F5 (refresh) button waiting for a new post. If you’re not fast you won’t get to submit from Cracked (which is an almost guaranteed front pager). So the lesson here is not to camp out on Cracked.com but to take this idea and apply them to sites that you want to submit. One strategy is to use any webpage reloader software or firefox plugin. I personally use “update scanner.”

If you have something to say make sure you comment. But if you only have something like LOL or WOW, then I strongly suggest you keep that to yourself. Be smart, witty or funny in your comments. This can help the rest of the community see that you’re an active member. Commenting also shows your friends that you are reading their submissions and in return they might pay more attention to what you submit. Try to comment at least 3 - 5 times per day if you have the extra time do more.

http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Digg_This_If_You_Voted_For_Obama_2

There’s nothing worse than a digger with 50 submits a day (no offense to you if you do). Try not to do this. Submit things that matter and things that people want to comment about. This how I increased my % of popular articles and became successful on digg. You can take a look at my history of submissions, check the front page of digg or fark.net for examples of what you should be submitting. Learn from other people’s success.

My personal recommendation is 2 – 5 submissions per day anything more would be just too much, if you think all your friends will digg everything, think again. Some people submit way more than just 5 per day so it’s entirely up to you to set your own limit.

Ok shouting to your friends on digg is a pretty good way to get digg’s recommendation engine working in your favor. Personally I would only shout 20 – 50 people at any one time. Try not to shout to the same people more than twice. Be considerate, they have a life besides digging your stuff. If you have 100 friends you can do 2 shouts on 2 different submissions, this is a great way to get exposure to your best submissions for the day.

Twitter, the newest kid on the block is the one site I love more than digg (sorry Kevin but twitter is just hot). I can recommend you tweet what you submit but don’t tweet the digg page because not everyone is on digg, most people would get pissed if you gave them a digg page where they had to click on another link to read the article. People who have digg, will notice that it’s submitted to digg and eventually you’ll get some natural diggs from people you don’t know.  You can always include a digg link with the tag #digg on it on all your tweets.

Example:
Obama Is The 44th President of America – http://tinyurl.com/1111- (#digg - http://tinyurl.com/2222)

If I knew the magic number to get an article made popular on digg, I’d tell you for 1 million dollars. But I don’t so I guess I won’t be getting rich anytime fast but the magic number is determined by many factors. Some of the more common factors I’m guessing are:

These are a few factors but no one knows the real secret. These factors are based on experience and a few smart people that I’ve conversed with.

It is very important to add and remove new friends on your digg profile. You could remove friends because they don’t read or comment on your submissions anymore, or simply because you don’t like what they submit. Also check your fan page because there are always new digg users who use digg regularly and comment on your submissions. I can recommend you add and remove friends and fans once a month. New friends can also get the recommendation engine to work in your advantage.

That’s about all I can give you. I wrote this because many people ask me how to get a front page and improve their profiles so here it is. I hope this article will help improve diggers who want to contribute and make digg a better and brighter place. If there’s anything I left out feel free to send me an email here and I’ll try to update this article from time to time.

I won’t be thanking anyone in particular but those of you who have helped me in the past, you know who you are =)

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I really wanted to help out this dude so I tried to contact Reg. Must have left him a dozen emails and messages on his other profiles including Skype all within 3 days. I think it was my persistence and annoyance that Reg decided to talk with me. Anyways after an hour with Reg he decided to help me out. One thing I remembered most about our talk is Reg asking me why I wasn’t using digg? At that time I had a dead account which I never really used.

From that point onwards I decided to try out digg for about 1 month. Like a newbie I got hooked in trying to understand how it worked. Eventually my 1 month trial turned into 4 months. This is when I made the top 100 diggers list. It was like a drug, hearing the little bell chime from Digg Alerter was the only thing that made my day (yes it’s sad, how geeky am I?).

So how did I get to that top 100 list in 4 months? Hard work and dedication. I spent hours on digg everyday learning as much as possible. I tracked everything I did and studied what power users did. I even got all the stats from SocialBlade and studied the times and the frequencies of FP’s (front page - made popular) from the top users. And you know what I learned, absolutely NOTHING!

After that I decided to just submit content and study what content made the front page and what didn’t. I eventually realized that the 1# contributing factor to getting a FP , was the content & title. Once I found this out, my fp’s were hitting fast and often. There are of course many other factors to getting a fp and if you’re interested here’s my post “12 Tips To Improve Your Digg Profile and Stats” read it and share your thoughts.

Ok, my story is not glamours but that’s how I started on digg. I must give thanks to Stephen Pierce for inviting me to his event and Reg Saddler for his part in getting me to use digg, and sad enough Reg got banned in 2008 for some BS reasons.

Got 10secs? Than answer this poll below.

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In fact I’m just someone who stumbled across the social media scene and managed to get good at creating and building my online presence.

Now some of you know me as Ben, upick on digg or upicks on twitter if you don’t know me than I welcome you to add me or contact me when you see fit.

GTalk: upick3 at gmail dot com
Digg: http://digg.com/users/upick
Twitter: http://twitter.com/upicks

So Who Am I & What Do I Do?

In a nut shell, my main line of work is web development with the occasional website design. I also specialize in pay per click marketing and search engine optimization. I do the occasional speaking gigs at internet seminars like UYMG and GIS. And in my spare time I’m digging it up.

Why Am I Blogging?

After much thought I decided to give it ago, I mean how hard can writing a few words here and there be? It’s actually a lot easier than I thought plus I have someone help me set the whole site up!
The main reason to why I’m blogging is to share my thoughts and experience on social media and hopefully educate or teach a few people what I’ve learned.

I would like to make this blog dedicated to help people with social media related topics. I’m also going to be taking request meaning if you got something interesting send it my way and I’ll take a look at it… and if its cool, I’ll tweet it, digg it, stumble it, the whole 9 yards. More about this in another post.

Am I A Social Media Expert?

I don’t claim to be an expert, but an addict. Sure I know a few things about digg and twitter, that’s why I’m writing this blog to share my knowledge and yes it’s for free so bookmark and subscribe to my RSS feed. Who knows maybe one day I will be a professional and speak at SMX or any other industry seminars, but for now this is just my hobby.

I’m Open To Your Thoughts & Content

I would like your help if you are interested in contributing to this blog with content that can benefit users and is around social media topics, than email me right now. Your contributions will be credited and I’ll personally add you to the author’s page where I’ll be listing everyone that contributed here along with links.

That’s All Folks

I want to personally thank Noura Yehina for helping me create and put this blog together and Reg Saddler (Zaibatsu) for getting me start on digg. He might not remember the story or how it happened so I’ll be posting my story soon. My name is Benjamin Teo and thanks for reading my first post =).

Photo Credit 1

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