Before Digg went on its banning rampage, they had a little bug. If you had friended someone that had their account banned, you'd get an error when you clicked on the "remove friend" button in their interface. If one of your friends were banned, you couldn't remove them.

That wasn't such a big deal when bannings were few and far between, but with the recent spate of bannings Digg had created a bit of a problem. There is a hard limit of 1,000 friends for a user on Digg. So if 100 of your friends had been banned, you were effectively left with only 900 slots.

A few days ago I noticed that Digg had finally fixed that problem. I don't know when it happened, but at some point they implemented a kludge that allows you to delete friends that have been banned.

The Good News

As the saying goes, I told you all that so I could tell you this. By fixing that bug, they've introduced a new bug which most power users will find is a real feature. If you were a banned power user, one of the most stinging aspects of the ban is the loss of all your friend data. You'd spent months building up a nice friend network, and now all that data was gone. But is it?

Try this page: Oliver Taco's Profile. Yep, it's the oops page as expected. Now try the same page but via the Digg API. Again, as expected you get a "No such user" error return. Now, try this: Oliver Taco's Friend List.

The data is still in the database. They couldn't delete the linkages because that would obviously break something else that allows the banned users to be removed as friends. So the upshot it that even if your account is banned, you can recover your friend list. Just replace the user name and change the value of "offset" to 100, 200, 300, etc and you'll get pages of data 100 records at a time. If you want a list of your fans, just change the "friends" to "fans". BTW, that's an XML file that you can download into Excel if you want to see a pretty spreasheet.

Of course, if you were using a tool like the PMS Social Suite none of that would be a concern because you'd be concentrating on building real relationships outside of social networks and wouldn't be a victim of the whims of Digg.

We've talked about finding profiles on Digg that have Toolbar PageRank to pass. It's one of the criteria for finding an Interesting Digger. But how many Digg profiles are out there that have positive Toolbar Page Rank?

The answer is quite a few, even after you get past the Top 1000 Diggers:

This is based on an analysis of around 100K Digg profiles. Here are some key take aways from this analysis:

• 4.3% of Digg Profiles Have Rank - That's a pretty significant number when you factor in how very few users are really active. It's been my experience that with a few months of active digging and attracting strong profiles to make you a mutual friend you can build a profile with positive link juice. Guess what? You can add links in your profile directly to the URL of your choice, and they're do follow. Consider that a bonus in additional to everything else you get from Digg.
• You Don't Have to be in the Top to Get Value - The Top 1000 are only about 25% of the profiles with positive link juice to spend. There are a lot of strong profiles that never get a submission to go popular. You can fly under the radar on Digg and still get a lot of benefit.
• Having Positive Page Rank Will Get You More Friends - It's a self feeding cycle. As your profile becomes more powerful, more people want to be your friend, making your profile even more powerful.

What level of activity does it take to get a Digg profile with positive page rank? Check out these stats:

As you can see, the average amount of activity for a user with positive pagerank is pretty low. 4,298 Diggs is only 200 Diggs per day for 21 days. 10 comments/day for 31 days will get you into the average number of comments. 5 submissions a day during that first month will get you into the average number of submissions. The numbers of friends, mutuals, and fans is not that high. That's not to say that if you do just those things you'll get a Digg profile with positive pagerank -- you still have to garner the appropriate internal links on the site into your profile. In other words, you've got to get the right friends in order to build up the profile. But it clearly does not take an extraordinary amount of activity to make it happen.

It's even more interesting to look at the numbers it takes to reach the various levels of pagerank. There is actually a trail off in the amount of activity between 6 and 5, except for the number of fans. Which makes sense -- fans are a one way link into your profile, so having more of them will bring more internal juice.

Take a close look at the PR 1 column. It really does not take a lot of activity or numbers of friends/mutuals/fans in order to get to that first level. You could easily build a user with those characteristics within a month.

Remember when we suggested that you Cross Pollinate Your Social Media Profiles? This makes even more sense in light of these statistics. A few inbound links from other social networks can dramatically improve your link juice. If you look at some of the PR 6 profiles, they've got incoming links from blogs because people talk about them. Supporting your social media profiles with incoming link juice from your other web assets can be very helpful. As your profile becomes more "high profile," you'll add friends and juice.

Now, if only there was a way to buy a book and some software that would show you exactly how to build a powerful Digg profile and make the process easy. Oh wait, there is a book on how to Dominate Digg! And it includes free software!

I can't tell you how many times I've seen messages like this on the profile page of a Digg user:

Add me as your friend. I'll digg your shouts if you digg mine. I'm an active digger and I'm always looking for people to reciprocate shares/shouts. Active diggers only please.

There's only one small problem with this. Votes from shouts are mostly useless.

Votes from your friends are heavily discounted. Votes from shouts are discounted even more. This was probably a result of Digg trying to crack down on gaming of the system. If your strategy is to Digg your friends shouts heavily and then shout your stories, you won't have a lot of success. Take a look at MakiMaki's profile:

Add me as a friend if you wanna. I never shout stories. Not even once. So read and digg only what you like.

MakiMaki understands how the system works. He doesn't shout -- he expects his friends to look at his submissions and vote from that. You'd do well to follow his lead.

But Shouts Get My Story Seen!

The biggest argument in favor of shouts is that even though the votes are discounted, they at least will get your story noticed by enough people to give it a critical mass to get it to the next level. The converse is that if you've got 50 people that you can count on to Digg your story from a shout, you're only getting the benefit of about 5 votes. Wouldn't it be better to get half of them to allow you to send them an AIM or an email asking for a vote? Then you'd get the full strength of their vote and you'd be well on your way to popularity.

The better argument in favor of shouts is that you don't care about making the front page. If you can get 50 votes on a story from a shout, that's 50 incoming internal links for the search engines to see and you've accomplished your goals. That's completely valid, but wouldn't it be better to spend your time building your relationships outside of the purview of Digg and getting full strength from your votes?

Build Relationships, Not Friend Lists

Hopefully the recent spate of bannings on Digg has taught social marketers the valuable lesson that it's much more important to build up a set of relationships rather than a friend list owned by the social network. If you were a banned digger and you didn't maintain an offline database of your friendships and how to contact them, you were pretty much out of luck when the ban came down. On the other hand, if you were investing in relationships, building up another powerful account is only a new IP address away.

Now, if only there was a way to find out the email addresses, twitter names, and AIM addresses of your friends list with just the push of a button. Hmmmm......stay tuned!