Blog Entries for Don

Digg Analytics Can Retrieve the Friends of Banned Users

Don — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:00:00 +0100

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 [...]

Digg Analytics and the PageRank of Powerful Profiles

Don — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 22:00:00 +0100

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:

Page RankCount
636
526
4361
3906
21,501
11,546
Total4,376

This is based on an [...]

Stop Shouting on Digg

Don — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 22:00:00 +0100

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. [...]

Dominate Digg with a Comment Strategy

Don — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 22:00:00 +0100

Being a prolific commenter is a key to social media success on any network, but especially on Digg. Aside from being able to expose your great prose to all humanity, there are many excellent reasons you should leave comments on as many stories as you can:

Get Seen - Leaving comments gets your name out there. People start to recognize you. If they recognize you,
they're more likely to Digg your s [...]

Get Productive on Digg

Don — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 22:00:00 +0100

You can now have a few quick peeks at the new capabilities of our PMS Social Suite! We've put up a few videos on YouTube that walk you through some of the really interesting points. For starters, here is a quick overview of the dashboard:

Hot Articles to Submit

There are a lot of reasons that you want to submit excellent content to social networks, other than just being a good unpaid worker
for these sites:

Build a Following - Submitting articles that are likely to hit t [...]

Trend Micro False Positives

Don — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 22:00:00 +0100

Remember when we told you that McAfee Recklessly and Wrongly Accuses Yahoo Store Owners of Malware and Spam? That situation was resolved, sort of. McAfee has at least removed the blanket flag on Yahoo Stores and now merely says "unknown" for most stores, even though many of those stores are paying McAfee for their security services.

Well, it seems that Trend Micro is up to the same thing. They were blocking Chris Lang [...]

More Reasons Not to Buy Our Software

Don — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 22:00:00 +0100

Chris Lang is running an unbelievable contest over on his blog. He's giving away a copy of his book, a ton of extra goodies, a 90 day subscription to our software, and a bluetooth headset. You don't have to buy anything, just do a little bit of analysis.

All you have to do is come up with a feature that we should add to the PMS Social Suite. The person submitting the best sugges [...]

Digg to Bury Buries

Don — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 22:00:00 +0100

If you noticed that Digg posted a blog article announcing the retirement of Digg Spy, then you read this:
"One issue I suspect may be brought up is that Digg Spy is one place on the site that surfaces some burying activity. People have tried using Digg Spy to track burying activity and I won't be surprised if conspiracy theorists accuse us of burying (pun intended) the feature to hide this. In fact, only a very [...]

Stalking Small Game on Digg

Don — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 22:00:00 +0100

A while back we wrote about Stalking Big Game on Digg. We pointed out that the PMS Social Suite had an easy way to load the Top 100 and Top 1000 Diggers. Friending them consists of just selecting them in the Find Friends grid and clicking Go To Page. The application will automatically open a tab with each user's profile for you. Just click on the tab and click Add Friend and you're their friend.

Please Do Not Buy Our Software

Don — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 22:00:00 +0100

No, our site hasn't been hacked.

If you're an existing customer of the PMS Social Suite, you've noticed some huge changes. Yes, we got the latest version out yesterday. It's chock full of new features. But we don't want you to buy it from us.

Death to Robots!

What's more important is what this version is missing. We took all the robots out back and shot them.

Really. All the rob [...]

Stalking Big Game on Digg

Don — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 22:00:00 +0100

We're starting to add data from Social Blade on the Top 100/1000 Diggers to our PMS Social Suite. As they say, their data is only an estimate, but it seems to be a widely accepted measure for the Top 100 and Top 1000 Diggers.

The first place you'll see this is on our Add Friends tab in the freemium version. Scroll over to the right and you'll see a new column in the results grid: Rank. If it's [...]

Cross Pollinate Your Social Media Profiles

Don — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 22:00:00 +0100

I did a simple experiment this morning and it has already paid off. Have you come across profiles on social websites that have a grocery list of links to other social networks? I've read that this strategy can be useful, but I didn't understand just how useful until today.

Today I updated my LtDraper Digg Profile and added my Twitter, StumbleUpon, Sphinn, Delicious, and AIM accounts in the link section. It [...]

PMS Social Suite 1.1 Goes Live

Don — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 22:00:00 +0100

After a lot of work and even more bug fixes, we released what we're calling Version 1.1 of the PMS Social Suite on Sunday night. Those of you who asked for features will see much of what you asked for. You can go back to the post that suggested you watch our FireBoard RSS Feed and see that we've delivered what was promised, plus a few more extras. Let's go through the new features:

Cached Search/ [...]

Twitter Gave Me the Mark of the Beast

Don — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 22:00:00 +0100

I got into twitter in a big way last week. My account had been around for a long time, but I wasn't doing anything to promote it. Then I started using our Twitter Greasemonkey Script and started following 2,000 people that were interested in the same things I was. After a few days I removed everyone that wasn't mutual (down to about 500) and started adding more. I was looking to build a large community of pe [...]

Take Advantage of your Opportunities for Communication in Social Media

Don — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 22:00:00 +0100

You should seriously consider effectively communicating with the people that follow you on Twitter.

There's a twitter account called RU4real that claims to be an experiment. Here's the only thing they've tweeted:

DO NOT FOLLOW THIS ACCOUNT. It is an experiment to see how many people read the pages of the people they follow. You are a tool.

The problem is that this exper [...]

The Right People on Social Networks

Don — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:00:00 +0100

Social Sites like Digg are like being in high school all over again.

You really have to keep that in mind when you're coming up with a strategy of how to promote your content on these networks. If you're just starting out, you're sitting with the geeks in the cafeteria, and the cool people aren't going to pay much attention to you. It will take a long time (at least in internet time) to carefully craf [...]

New Features in Manage Friends

Don — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 22:00:00 +0100

Managing Shouts isn't the only thing we've improved in the PMS Social Suite. We've also made a number of enhancements to the manage friends tab. The major features of this release are:

Calculating Deadwood - what percentage of your submits does a friend Digg, and how much do you Digg them back?Welcome Messages - An easy method for the care and feeding of new fansShouting - Send a shout to a group of friendsGo To Friend Page - more options for which page to visitMulti Digg Submits - now y [...]

New Features in Manage Shouts

Don — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 22:00:00 +0100

We've been busy beavers here at Promote My Site! Between taking in all the feedback from the beta as well as fixing some post release reported bugs and dealing with changes in the Digg pages, we've had a lot to do. We've also put out two very useful Greasemonkey scripts that you can read about in the last few days posts.

New Features in Manage Shouts

Manage Shouts is a premium feature of the PMS Socia [...]

Greasemonkey Script to Help Digg Your Incoming Shouts

Don — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 22:00:00 +0100

You're going to want to install the PMS Digg Shouts Greasemonkey Script right away.

As we've said many times before, if you want to be effective on Digg, you need a large friend network. But more importantly, your
friends need to be the type of friends that will be receptive to your shouts and Digg your articles if they like them. And the best
way to have good friends is to be a good friend.

That means that you need to actively evaluate and Digg your incoming shouts. People [...]

Greasemonkey Script to Quickly Delete Your Shouts in Digg

Don — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 22:00:00 +0100

Sometimes you just slap your head because a very hard problem has such a simple answer.

If you use Digg, you're well aware how painful it is to delete your incoming shouts if you have a large number of friends. And of course,
if you're serious about promoting anything on Digg, you'll have a lot of friends. After a week of vacation over the 4th of July, I
recently came back to 50 pages of incoming shouts. That's a lot of clicking on the delete button and the "Are You Sure you want [...]