Promote My Site

I enjoyed Don's article on firefighting and it reminded me of something so true we forget it all the time: be careful what you ask for. Or, put differently, people will do what they're incented to do.

Y2K

Back in the days when Cobol breathing dinosaurs roamed the earth there was this problem we were trying to fix and verify all the issues. I had a fat juicy consulting contract to ensure that not only was everything inside a company remediated but that they had failover plans.

One day I was in a plant and I was going through their operations manuals when the plant manager bragged that they'd thought of everything, written it down (early ISO-itis, clearly) and that there was nothing I or an "act of god" could do to shut down the plant.

As I was gazing at this pompous combed over windbag I could see the emergency cutoff swtich for the computer room power. So I walked over, opened the cover, and pushed it.

The entire plant shut down, idling 200+ workers for hours. But in all our planning we'd never thought to test that particular item. I went to eight more factories to test their failover - by the second one they'd all tested and it worked.

I got in exactly no trouble whatsoever because I was being paid to find problems that'd been over looked.

Sales

Sales people may fail to make sales no matter how you try to pay them, but they'll always focus on the shortest line between them and a paycheck.

You want to pay a guy more on new customers? Perpare to lose sales nto your install base.

Pay them to have face-to-face meetings? Watch out for those expense reports because your guys will stack up so-called qualified prospects from morning until night.

You want deals closed? Be sure to specify margin.

So when you tell a sales guy he'll get paid for X, make sure you really want X because you'll get a lot of it.

Seth Godin had an interesting article, Managing Urgencies. Here's one of many money quotes:

The problem, of course, is that most organizations are on fire, most of the time....Add up enough urgencies and you don't get a fire, you get a career. A career putting out fires never leads to the goal you had in mind all along.

Several years ago one of my employees imparted this nugget: "You are always living in the long term." Even though all of the pressures in a normal job tend to be focussed on the immediate, to quote BSG Razor "You make your choices and you live with them. In the end, you are your choices."

The fires you face today are usually the result of decisions you made months or even years ago. Here's an example. I did a consulting project for a software company that found itself mired by failing projects. Years ago, they had made some fairly poor choices, such as hiring people that weren't quite up to the job and not instituting standard practices such as source control, release management, and code reviews. They had 30 different customers with 30 completely different sets of source code, and were fixing the same bugs (with different people) at every project. The CEO asked me to come in and do a "health check" on their processes. I was to present my findings at a board of directors meeting.

I did my presentation to the board. I explained what the problems were and basically suggested that since they had 30 projects that were going to miss their delivery dates by an order of magnitude, the best thing they could do was 1) Clean house and get rid of some poor managers, 2) Start using best practices, and 3) Stop all work and concentrate on building a single branch of their source code that would be relatively bug free that they could then branch out to their projects. All pretty standard recommendations for software projects in trouble.

This approach didn't seem revolutionary to me, but it wasn't at all what the CEO had in mind. I had totally misread the situation. He was looking for outside validation that everything was ok. Or maybe he just wanted some improved firefighting equipment or techniques. Perhaps he should have spoken to me before I went in front of the board, but he was busy putting out fires. In fact, the entire company was built on a culture of fire fighting. Employees that went to extraordinary lengths to fix situations that simply should not have existed were lauded as heros, and the few technical people that were pushing for change were just "negative." Years later, the company was sold at a "fire sale" (how fitting) and almost no one from those days is now with the new company.

It's very easy to get trapped into just looking at the current fire that needs to be put out. After all, when the house is on fire it's pretty tough to be thinking about installing the smoke detectors.

But merely moving from fire to fire is not leadership. A leader is someone that can guide change even while dealing with the day-to-day. If you find yourself unable to deal with anything more than the minutiae of your business, then where will you be in 5 years? I'll give you a hint: Even if you manage to stomp out these fires, unless you're proactive you'll just be fighting another set of fires.

I've been having a right proper geek fest with Excel, PivotTables, and the output from our Social Heartbeat Monitor of 2,000+ Social Networking and Social Bookmarking sites.

Actually, that was hard to type as my hands are kind of cramping up.

I'm still pondering what this all means, and it'll get a lot more interesting when we start having week-on-week data. But here are some interesting graphs....

PageRank and Live Count

As you may recall, we looked at over 2,000 sites and found the ones that were "live" - they loaded, they at least looked like they were having some social activity, etc.

So here is the total pagerank distribution - and it's interesting to me how many middle pagerank (if you can call a PR5 middle!) social sites there are.

But this is only interesting to the point where you can see what is live.   Remeber that not-live includes stuff that does not load, linkfarms, obviously dead sites, etc, etc.

So, fear not, fifteen seconds with my trusty Excel and you get:

Quite a spread - you are much more likely to have non-live sites towards the bottom, but can you imagine a PR9 site that is linkbait or a personal blog or something?

Actually, it was half.com, which used to (if you're old enough to remember) have all sorts of things not related to selling and buying. Thanks, Meg, for all the fish.

I Feel The Need for Speed

Quick explanation: pageload is the time it takes to load the home page of a site from our server in lovely cari.net. I rounded all the times to the nearest whole number so 1 second is really 0.5 through 1.49. It is a relative measure, so that should be fine.

And what we see is, well, it's all ove the board, but can you imagine a 7 second load on a PR10 website? That was the Annotea project at w3.org. A-freaking-mazing.

Sad Sad Man

Yes, I am, and it is because I love stuff like this.

What interesting stuff are you guys pulling out of this? We've had scores of downloads - many more than we thought for something so, so, so of interest to SEO type people. (And thanks for all the kind emails!)

We use a TracFone for our "on call" phone. We used to just rotate phone numbers but then you have to keep track of everyone's number and every once in a while someone will blow through their plan because of a support call and that is both annoying and expensive.

TracFone Is A Great Deal

Someone did some research and found that for under $100 we could get a simple phone, 800 minutes of airtime, and a year to use them. And if the phone was lost then we could get a new phone for $20 and swap the airtime for free.

Perfect.

When we signed up (over the internet, a fairly painful process but not requiring any human contact and associated sales pitch!) we signed up for "specials on airtime." I actually like looking at this sort of advertising because you can see that a company can spend a fortune on it and do a poor job.

Missing the Spellchecker

But this is a special case - this is the third email where the TracFone guys have mis-spelled "instantly" as "instanstly." And I've dropped them a note on their "contact us" page to let them know. Never a reply and clearly they haven't changed it.

So maybe they're missing more than a spell checker - maybe they're missing a while customer service department.

Another Useless SERP

Oh, and I checked with the wise and all powerful google - the word "instanstly" only occurs 2,190 times with 406 mentions in the primary index. So I am pretty sure that this blog post will rank first pretty quickly. That is some long tail!

I also looked for "instanstly trac" to see if anyone had written anything about this - 10 results total. Now, I've had some queries that returned nothing, but I can't recall anything returning only 10.

It's always great to get a new tool like the Social Heartbeat Monitor ™ and I always appreciate an article explaining why someone built it.

But that is often all you get. I have to admit, I rarely read detailed instructions, so I'm a bit reluctant to, you know, write 'em.

How It Works

The Social Heartbeat Monitor ™ page has a a pretty traditional advanced search form built around a grid. And since most of the people here are going to be search professionals, I am very much going to continue to resist explaining how to use an advanced search form, but below I have covered the search, status, and filter options so that it is all a bit more clear.

Search Options

The search options are the normal and useful ones:

• Name
• URL
• Domain
• Description
• Page Title
• Meta Description
• Meta Keywords

The "domain" variable is the stripped down url, so "http://promote-my-site.com" becomes "promote-my-site.com" - which is handy for deduplicating our list against the one you use.

It is also useful for using "%.br" to find all the Brazillian domains. The url is what we were able to make load in our browser: "http://www.myfunkysite.com" loads but "http://myfunkysite.com" does not.

Status Options

These are pretty simple:

• Live - site is what you think it is - pligg or scuttle or myspace/facebook clone and you can login, post, etc
• Dead - does not resolve, throws error pages >5 days a month, etc
• TBD - have not had time to look at it yet
• Waiting - waiting on a response to test the site
• Zombie - site resolves to a link farm, or it loads but does not work reliably enough to be "live"

I'm sure someone from Gartner could come up with more expensive names, but those should be pretty clear.

Filter Options

And the filter options (equals, min, max) are:

• Page Rank (PR)
• Google Backlinks
• Yahoo Backlinks
• MSN Backlinks
• Pages Indexed by Google
• Pages Indexed by Yahoo
• Pages Indexed by MSN
• Name in Google
• Name in Yahoo
• Name in MSN
• Load time

I think the only things here that require explanation are:

• Name in Google/Yahoo/MSN - How many times does "VOIPigg" show up in each search engine. Think of this as a rough (very) strength indicator.
• Load time: how long to load the home page from our server. Yes, yes, I know that this isn't perfect, but it gives you a rough order of magnitude (ROM) for how fast/slow a site is. The range for live sites is from almost 10 seconds from Alexadigger to four tenths of a second (0.04) for eZine Writer.

All of the search and filter terms are available as columns in the grid. Obviously.

Downloads

Now, rather than swearing at google docs, you can download the whole list as a csv and filter away in Excel. Heck, if you're a glutton you could even put it back into your google docs and hum the Heintz Ketchup "anticipation" song if you want.

You do to register first to download. Why? So you can have the option to be notified when the list changes. Or when you next want to download the list you can get only the stuff that has changed. Handy, we think, and worth a quick and painless regsitration.

Feedback

Please do give us your feedback of the features and functionality. Things that seem obvious to us but not to our beta testers have pretty much been eradicated, but each time we release a new tool and thousands of people come bang on it we find they've done stuff we did not anticipate.

We already caught the problem when someone puts "-0.5" in the PR field, but what else will people come up with?

Enjoy!

And remember, since the Social Heartbeat Monitor ™ is fully ad supported freeware, you can count on it sticking around. We have around a hundred updates to the list but wanted to wait to get it into this new form before putting them in.

We're taking down the downloadable list of 2,162 social bookmarking and networking sites and replacing it with an interactive analytical tool that gives you a lot more information and display control. It will let you see the heartbeat for any social bookmarking or networking site. Thus, in a fit of imagination, we called this the Social Heartbeat Monitor ™.

(Plus it is much much cooler than a google doc and you can get the list directly as a "csv" file.)

Things you can find out

We've built some controls around a grid so that you can filter the list of 2,000 plus social bookmarking and social networking sites down into the sublist you're probably most interested in. By my watch it is between 30% to 70% faster than google docs. (Attention google: my technical staff is better than yours!)

We added the kinds of controls that will help you find something specific:

• You want PR5 or better Live Sites? No problem, there are 534 of them.
• Sites that are live but between PR2 and PR4 with >1,000 pages indexed in google? 403 of them.
• Insert your question here....

But most importantly, we introduced the idea of a heartbeat for each site.

Heartbeat?

It's great to have a big list, and it's even handy to have a "Live" indicator so that you know that sometime in the last two months I was able to use the site in an appropriate fashion (create user, login, post). But we're including what we call heartbeat information:

• Pages indexed in Yahoo/MSN and what-is-their-name, oh, yeah, Google
• Backlink count for Yahoo/MSN/Google
• Load time

We'll be keeping this information on a weekly basis for each site so that you can track a site over time. And, because we really believe in making this information widely useful, you'll be able to download the performance over time.

Made for Custom Analysis

For example, Mixx is getting huge buzz right now in the SEO community and has 133K pages indexed in google. Does anyone (outside Mixx) have any idea what that was last week? You'll know in a week if you come back.

To put it even more in perspective, Digg has 9.8M pages indexed and Dogster has 134K pages. Dogster? Yep, it's exactly what you think it is. But both Dogster and Mixx are PR6 sites with similar google love. Where should you be putting your funny dog stories? (Trick question, the answer is both digg and dogster, wtih mixx in third place if you have time!)

Do you find that your stories do better on PR4 sites or PR8 sites? Do you want traffic or links? Now you have to consider.....

Tribal Knowledge vs. Experimentation

Well, we know all about long tail search and long tail e-tailing and long tail PPC campaigns, etc, etc. And there are even a few of us talking about niche sites versus huge volume general sites (ex: Digg vs. VOIPigg) but you know, it's all been logic, supposition, and educated guesses.

At Promote-My-Site we've written about getting a diversified portfolio of social bookmarking and social networking sites. So we started thinking about analyzing sites - how many backlinks, what is their PageRank, what is the change over time, etc. It's all obvious stuff to want to know, but except for traffic share changes for the "big 10" you can't really get any of that. For free anyway. And you certainly won't get that easily downloadable.

No longer. Now you can experiment using our Social Heartbeat Monitor ™. Find sites that are in your specialty, look at smaller but still high value sites (there are a ton), re-post some of your greatest hits. Once you find a combination that works and gives you good ROI, find more sites like it using our filters.

Calling All New Sites

We spend an astounding number of hours pulling lists from the internet and came up with 2,000 to look at. Yesterday I got emails about three new ones. We'll be constantly adding things to the list and we'll give you a way to find "what's new." You can also easily suggest new sites right from the Social Heartbeat Monitor ™ page.

Time Will Tell

We believe that a social bookmark and network heartbeat will be a valuable tool for looking at the change over time of a social networking or social bookmarking site. We think you'll enjoy it and find it useful to build a portfolio of performing social network and bookmarking sites.

Presented entirely without comment or format changes, this digg shout from stejules :

Hello fan
Become a good digger, you must be first a good user on your machine, (handle the Beast)
no prob 200 manualy shouts and you are a profi and in the front, hey stay, not huzzling away,
you could USE the right tools, then it "could" (hehe) come automatically to automatism. (Robo01 to Robo02)

Stop and think shortly about all that

Look at this picture it is amazing crazy bad, and I think I will also have a digg camp with you as recruits.
http://twitxr.com/image/17344/

Here my help for you, to become a digger like me, if you want, if not please unfriend me, thanx.
Friends who aren't active at my account will be kicked off, without talking,
because of I have to handle a lot of friends, you understand.

WATCH OUT:

1. Use Mozilla Firefox 2.0.*.
--with Mozilla Firefox you have the most social bookmarking tools available (plugins) (digg/ facebook/ stumbleupon/gspace/flickr/ lots more) UC
-- important use the tabs inside the browser
2. Read this Monster Digg and bookmark it or digg it or both.
http://digg.com/tech_news/10_Killer_Firefox_Extens ...
At the end I will tell you which of these tools I really use.

3. Have a special LOOK for "Snap Links" https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/433 ...
-- opens all links with one click and move twenty diggs in a minute opened for reading and checking out.
4.HOT Google + Microsoft + Yahoo

5.HOT flickr Pics digg a cool one and make other happy

6. HOT Youtube, Hulu, Metacafe,

7. HOT Urban Art Graffiti, Events, Pictures

HAVE A LOOK FOR YOUR NICHE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Help me to become a top digger and I will help you, too.
Below you see the links, for which I beg you to digg, these are a lot but
you have now SnapLinks and can learn with my duggs!

Please digg, share, or commen, commenter are also needed, really commenting is very important,
but please you are here at my home, be nice lol

Watch out the headlines of these links follow them and have a look to the content.
These are the topics what I am looking for right now (HOT means itis only for me interesting)

http://digg.com/world_news/Stand_with_Tibet_Suppor ...
http://digg.com/hardware/The_worst_server_room_dec ...
http://digg.com/political_opinion/tibetan_monk_FRE ...
http://digg.com/odd_stuff/Iraqi_cop_rides_motorcyc ...
http://digg.com/software/Social_Bookmarking_2_0_Di ...
http://digg.com/tech_news/Pulver_Launches_An_Onlin ...
http://digg.com/tech_news/Last_fm_Widget_Now_on_ev ...
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Now_I_find_him_B ...
http://digg.com/tech_news/Mashable_DiggSuggest_Is_ ...
http://digg.com/software/Filter_Your_FriendFeed_Se ...
http://digg.com/programming/Semantify_Automate_You ...
http://digg.com/tech_news/Vidoop_Kevin_Fox_Scott_K ...
http://digg.com/world_news/Cyber_Crime_Cops_Get_Or ...
watch this out learn more about web 2.0
http://digg.com/odd_stuff/What_Is_Web_2_0_by_Tim_O ...
Something color war 2008 thing green tagging war in the internet, more later!
http://digg.com/movies/Watch_out_Gary_Vay_Ner_Chuk ...
Wanna read more check this!

Watch out the headlines of these links follow them and have a look to the content.
These are the topics what I am looking for right now (HOT means it for me interesting
only for mw, but I will update it this day and post for you like a dashboard.

1. HOT: Mac and Apple specially iPhone SDK dev crap [Industrial News] - [Hack Videos]
-- my first Made Popular Monster digg I think i will never have a one like this Dudes, it was a lucky punch, but it has motivated me!
-- http://digg.com/videos/apple

DID YOU SEE THE QUEUE video-apple (Questions 2.0)

2. Japan Culture, Science, technology, Cars, GREEN (Germany, Denmark, ...) and have a watch to the
b.Chinese Copy and Paste will gone! ;D, Human rights, ART Artists they have great artists
c.India
3. HOT: BitTorrent articles, specially with TV Broadcasting, and further Internet Law Bittorrent (please read good)
-- paradise for all torrentfreaks toorentfreak.com ?????? use it as start and find more trustful and interesting torrent blogger, or become oe ;D!
4.HOT:World News Specially China - Tibet Conflict, Olympic Games 2008 Beijing - Peking China, Iran, United Kingdom, Great Britain
5.HOT: Sport Football European Championships in CH/ A, English Premiere League, Spain , Italy Primera Division, Brasil, Argentine,Mexiko

Digg is a very hard business, if you wanna be the best.
I must organize so many things, for example finding good and trustfull friends, that is not easy by 500+ increasing
please understand that it takes so long time for adding you to my my mutual friends.
Believe me shout to 500 fans [manually] is not fun it is hard work.

I open the Shout GOAL forever!

Now there are different ways for me to grab you

1. You can be lucky that I pick you up @ my queue and digg your Dugg.
BE SURE I will be there. I need Information [Nr. 5: "Input, input, inout] you C

2.You are a good submitter I see one or maybe more articles and check you out,
if your dugg is what I like you will be mine, for the motorcycle ride, you know.

3. i like your profile and the message from it.

;D
Greetinx
Ste
Sign the Petition and help Tibet
http://www.avaaz.org/en/tibet_end_the_violence/22. ...
Carthago delenda est!

I stand (well, sit in my post-dot-com boom Aeron chair) awed.

In my last article about Google possibly punishing Digg I contrasted Digg versus a niche pligg site, VOIPigg. And I noted that you might too casually dismiss VOIPigg:

Let's say you were in the Voice Over IP (VOIP) business and you were writing content around decision making, technology, standards, all that jazz. Which do you think would be better - digg or VOIPigg?

It takes the exact same amount of time to submit to both Digg and VOIPigg, so obviously Digg is a better use of your time.

I should have been clearer - it was meant sarcastically. You have to do both.

Traffic versus Readers

Look, because Digg gets an order of magnitude more traffic than VOIPigg doesn't mean you wouldn't be better off at the niche social networking site.

Of the 100 people showing up every day on VOIPigg approximately how many are there to read VOIP articles? Right, 100%.

Of the bazillion people at Digg how many are there to read VOIP? And how will they easily find your content?

Digg Friend Finder

Well, you could use our Digg Friend Finder and find the (currently) 158 people who have submitted on VOIP. And friend them. And then find the people voting on those stories and friend them too.

But, really, you should do both, if you want a diversified portfolio of readers and a diversified reputation.

In one of this week's hottest Sphinn stories, Google to punish pagerank for Digg stories, it is clear that people are really focused on the readers, links, and prestige of Digg and the other top-tier social networking and social bookmarking sties.

Which is fine but the level of upset makes it clear that a lot of people don't have any real diversified portfolio of links and readership. Nothing wrong with making buggy whips, but you gotta watch out for changes in consumer taste.

Let's take a look at what Google (supposedly, it was taken down) said:

We are working on strategies to level the playing field, effectively bringing back natural search patterns enjoyed in the pre-social bookmarking days. For webmasters who use social media responsibly, this is nothing to worry about - we will be targeting mainly a small minority of prolific bookmarkers with a new algorithm that looks at linking patterns over time.

Webmasters who rely heavily on bookmarking their own sites to gain traffic will likely see a drop in pagerank before the end of 2008, and we will be working closely with two major social bookmarking sites to find a solution that will have no detrimental effect on the average internet user.

Let me translate from google-ish

• "level the playing field" means: Make more money over here and get our stock back up from 430 to $700+.
• "pre social bookmarking" means: We used to be able to control what was hot, not Digg
• "use social media responsibly" means: Guess what we mean else we'll make your website disappear
• "new algorithm" means: Anuj and Prakash are going to be busy in Bangalore
• "will likely see a drop in pagerank" means: Let the rending and wailing begin

What will be the most interesting to me will be to see if breaking cover and running to cover your tracks is better than just freezing until the predator flies over.

The Key Phrase Is....

Kind of buried at the end: "we will be working closely with two major social bookmarking sites." Two. Let me repeat: Two. We took all the lists that we could find on the internet and spent months combing through all 2,162 Social Networking and Social Bookmarking sites to see who was alive and who was dead. (And, yes, you can download the list at that link!) We currently have a sublist of over 400 sites where you can create a login, actually login, and post a bookmark or story.

Automation

Really, you're going to need to automate some of your manual habits if you branch out from the tippy top tier players. We've reviewed a lot of the social networking automation options out there for you. It's not really going to be fun - life is easier if you use one or two sites rather than a dozen or more. But if people were using multiple sites then there'd less hyperventilating about this vague but important threat from google.

And if your (natural) competitors are going to have a problem, then that is really signaling an opportunity for you, isn't it?

Bear Stearns Closes at 30

And sells the next day at 2. Bam! Billions of shareholder equity lost. A year ago this would have been unimaginable.

Let's have a though experiment.... Eccentric Saudi Prince buys Digg for $750M, bans all content not involving funny Kitty Pix, Digg'ers flee to Mixx, Prince shuts down site in a huff.

What if all your links were from Digg? Or if all your readers were from Digg? Or if all your reputation in the social media world were resident in Digg.

Oops.

Do Nothing

Two words: Buggy Whip.

If you just keep on using one or two sites and your competitors diversify, then you will lose in the SERPS, all other things being equal. They will have a more diversified and stable reputation base, get readers who never see your stuff, etc.

Find the Niche Sites

Let's say you were in the Voice Over IP (VOIP) business and you were writing content around decision making, technology, standards, all that jazz. Which do you think would be better - digg or Voipigg? Who? Voipigg. It's a niche pligg site with good content control. Low volume, like most niche sites, but the 100 or so people who show up regularly are all looking for VOIP related stories.

It takes the exact same amount of time to submit both sites, so obviously digg is a better use of your time.

Think Risk Aversity

Really? Think about what started this whole discussion - threat of wholesale stripping of pagerank for heavy Digg users.

I think the mindset of "only have time for one" is a false dichotomy and that in today's competitive environment you have to make the time to develop and implment a diversified social networking strategy.

Well, when I wrote about this handy utility to see if your site was really down, little did I know that I'd really need to know it right away:

Hmmm, could it be the hosting company:

Well, yes it is. I am soooo disappointed in cari.net right now - years of great service and then a very very bad week.

So I give them a call and here is my conversation:

Me: Can you give me a status?

The Guy: Not really, all the network guys are downstairs with the vendor reps so there is nobody to ask.

Me: The vendors are there?

The Guy: Yes, the outage started in one part of the network and has been rolling over our data centers for the last few hours.

Me: Great.

The Guy: Don't worry, they're calling in everyone they can find to come help.

Me: Somehow that is not so reassuring.

I have a nice long post about Google, Digg, Page Rank Penalties, and why we all need a diversification strategy away from the top few social networking and bookmarking sites. But I have to go call all our affected customers (not everything is on Cari.Net - I am professionally paranoid) and tell them what is going on.