A discussion of earning with Affiliate Programs, SEO, Wordpress Blogging and General Motivational Ideas for Internet Publishers

We’re a little more than halfway through the month of October and once again, it’s been a very busy month. The social networks and blogosphere have been providing a plethora of topics and content to blog about. Here’s just a few of the most popular stories from around the web.

Google Acquires Jaiku
Mashable social Networking News has asked the question, Breaking: Google Acquires Jaiku, Why Not Twitter? and from Jaiku’s site We’re Joining Google. Now the multi-million dollar question, Why the heck would Google even be interested in these seemingly “junk technology” sites? It looks like the Web 2.0 revolution is going to make the dot com implosion of the late 90’s look like a triple decker red herring sandwich.

Speaking of Twitter - Blogger Pays his Rent using Twitter
Blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick has recently posting the interesting article Twitter is Paying My Rent. I have to admit, I just don’t see anything useful in Twitter, but if this guy is paying his rent using it, more power to him. I just wish I could figure out how to use Twitter for anything useful? It just seems like a big waste of time to me, but maybe the attitude of “Time is Money” doesn’t apply to the internet and text-messaging generation.

MSNBC Acquires Newsvive
One of the most innovative social news sites, and a personal favorite of mine, Newsvine, was acquired by MSNBC. According to Charlie Tillinghast, president of MSNBC Interactive News, Newsvine will remain a stand-alone site with MSNBC providing technology resources. The complete story is avaliable here : MSNBC Interactive News Acquires Newsvine

Yahoo Assumes Control of MyBlogLog
The rumours have been flying since early 2007 that Yahoo had acquired the blogger community MyBlogLog. The rumours have finally been solidified with Yahoo recently co-branding the MyBlogLog site and now requiring a Yahoo Id to access the service. This acquisition and subsequent co-branding has seen bloggers across the blogosphere removing the MyBlogLog widget from their sites. We’ve removed the widgets from all of our blogs in solidarity. After all, who wants to be passing the “link juice” to a Yahoo owned company ?

John Chow Reaches a New Milestone
One of my favorite bloggers, the quintessential John Chow, has announced New Blog Milestone - 10,000 RSS Readers. Congratulations to John Chow and here’s looking forward to the next big milestone, the 100K mark.

         

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As far as “Social News” websites go, Newsvine is by far the most professionally designed, intuitive and elegant website in the plethora of available communities. Whereas Digg is by far the most popular and driven by it’s fanatical Linux and Macintosh user base, Reddit is designed for simplicity and is easy to load in your browser, NewVine is the best looking, slickest and most professional of all the Social News/Social Bookmarking sites. Newsvine has a significant number of enhancments that make the interface completely customizable for the end user. The layout is organized and has dynamic features which make Newsvine a truly unique content aggregator. Here is a basic screenshot of the Newsvine interface:

I particularly like the “Newsvine live” feature on the right hand side that scrolls the incoming stories. The move rather quickly but there is always something interesting scrolling past every few minutes. The site allows users to close panels, arrange them how you want and totally customize the interface. I’ve submitted a few stories to Newsvine recently and I did get a decent amount hits, not as many as Reddit or Digg, but it was still worth the half a minute it took to submit.

As with most Social News or Social Bookmarking sites, members can submit sites, vote or comment on articles, add friends to their profile, join groups and other social activities. Members create and maintain their own Newsvine column by writing articles or just pointing to existing ones. One of the most interesting aspects of Newsvine is that you actually get paid for your article submissions. Here’s how it works:

Now that’s a real twist and a leg up on competitors like Digg, Reddit and Fark.

Drop by Newsvine and check it out.

http://www.newsvine.com

If you’d like to discuss Newsvine, here’s a new forum thread I created for discussing it.

NewsVine - Elegant Social Bookmark and News Site

Happy Publishing.

         

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I’ve really begun to believe that Digg is one big malodorous, mephitic, noisome, odiferous, stinking pile of feces and has little or no values for anything. Today I received an email from Digg that they had updated their user profile areas. Here’s the email.

To begin with, the losers at Digg had banned my Digg account and many other DigitalPoint Forum members accounts because we were social networking and digging each others articles that were all very good articles. Correct me if I’m wrong, but making friends on forums who read your blog and digg your new articles hardly seems to be a reason to ban numerous accounts. On top of that, they removed all the stories I Dugg and all the stories my friends had dugg in the past. Ok, fair enough, if Digg wants to destroy their crappy community, that’s their business, but if my account was banned, Why the HELL is my email still on their mailing list?” This kind of stuff really annoys me more than anything, ban a user, remove their contributions but don’t remove their email from your mailing list. Nice going Digg, you suck worse than I previously thought and are now a spammer in my book.

Outraged, I decided to go over and look at Digg again and see what was on top for today and I came across a wonderful suprise as to what the most popular story on Digg was. Have a peek at the image below.

The Word Asstunnels Gets Viral ???? Very interesting concept to be at the top of Digg, so I simply couldn’t resist and I clicked on the Asstunnel article and realized why Digg is such a turd and is an Asstunnel of it’s own. Here’s the amazing post that made it to the top of Digg. Be forwarned all you serious bloggers and content creators out there who spend hours researching and writing high quality articles that would never see the light of day on Digg, here’s all you have to do to please the anal Digg gods…

First off, this article is so obscure, you’d have to be aware of who MediaDefender are in the first place, second, the morons who wrote this aren’t even aware of Urban Dictionary. I guess they spend too much time trying to fiddle with their Linux or macintosh boxes when they’re not pirating software or music on BitTorrent or Digging retarded stories. Here’s a photo the founder of Digg.

Regarding the article about Asstunnels, the company Media Defender is an anti-piracy firm hired by the recording and software industry to try to stop unauthorized sharing of copyrighted music and software files. While I’m not a personal fan of file-sharing and do believe that it is stealing when you download something that should be paid for. I’m biased on this opinion because I have worked as a software deveoper when I wasn’t working as a musician. I do believe that file-sharing does lead to sales in both music and software because there is a small percentage of people who go out and purchase the real software or music CD’s based on things they’ve downloaded. I am against the actions MediaDefender has adopted such as purposely corrupting and distributing corrupted files on file-sharing networks. I am in no way a fan of MediaDefender or the RIAA but these Digger’s seem to revel in the fact that they thumb their noses at the authorities regarding a real issue that isn’t easily resolved.

Regardless, the article I pointed out here is not my idea of something worthy to be shared with all visitors to Digg’s site if they are pretending to have a modicum of quality to their articles and if they are going to unreasonably ban people and them spam them after they’ve been banned.

Digg is the real Asstunnel here.

         

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