Archive for February, 2007
I’ve gone through many stages over my time on the internets. I’ve been hooked on IRC, forums, social news, and SEO websites. However after years of experiencing all of those things, I seem to do an equal mixture of all of the above. However, it still amuses me that members of Digital Point’s forums think getting on a social news website means instant success. Members there have created all sorts of lame website attempting to get traffic from social news websites. What’s even sadder is these sites are actually popular. Stumble exchange has gamed a whopping 20,000 fake stumbles, boasting 549 members. Since Digg is the website I’m most familiar with, let’s take a look at their Digg exchange website.
How it works
When you login, you’re shown a list of websites that are awaiting to be submitted to Digg. Most of them are spammy sites, with no content. Basically people are just giving their homepage with random things on it. I don’t think most people that use this service understand the concept of Digg, or any other socially driven website. Anyways, you can then click a link which uses a web based proxy to submit the website to Digg with a pre-filled in title. The title is chosen by the user in their profile. I’m not for sure, but I think the proxy is so they can track what websites have been submitted, and what websites need to be Dugg.
Of course the most vital part of the website is the actual exchanging of Diggs. They start by listing 10 random websites that are pending front page, in this section. The more sites you Digg for other people, the more your “karma” goes up on their website. I see nowhere on their website suggesting that you get special treatment for higher karma, so there’s really no point in dishing out Digg’s. The funniest part about their website is their ToS, which states:
Please do not abuse the system by exchanging diggs with any site you come across as this will decrease the quality of the sites on Digg.com, which is NOT something we are aiming to do. Our aim at diggXchange is to allow tracking of who have dugg your sites, and to give an additional push to outstanding websites by introducing it to our specifically webmaster related community.
So how can Digg stop it?
Quite easily, this site is honestly a complete failure. A necessary part to the website, is listing all of the Digg submissions in queue that need to be Dugg. However, this is quite frankly their biggest weakness. Any Digg administrator can come along any time of the day, and ban each domain on that website. The exchance website tries to combat that by randomizing which sites they show, but a few reloads proves effective in getting them all.
How can their website be effective?
That’s going to be a hard task. If you’re forced to display the URLs in which people are supposed to Digg, the only solution is private registrations. Quite simply, you need enough people that you can trust. However, eventually people will notice the same 20 users Digging the same people’s stories over and over. Sites like these are really fighting an uphill battle.
Why even bother?
That’s actually a legitimate question. Social news sites in general bring floods of visitors, that click and leave. Sure you get thousands of unique visitors, but it’s not quality traffic. First of all, my website makes a decent amount of money with steady traffic from Google. I maintain a moderate click through rate on advertisements. If I ever get a large spike of traffic from social news, it destroys my CTR. We’re talking about less than 1% total. So really you’re not making money of these visitors. Along with lack of money, you’ll not likely get any dedicated readers. For instance, if you take the most five most popular stories listed on social news websites that I’ve had, you’d have a number around 250 thousand unique visitors. Keeping in mind I’ve been on Digg around 20 times or so, I now have 500 RSS readers. In perspective, if you got 10,000 unique hits from being on Digg, you’d probably only get a handful of RSS readers.
The only good part of getting large traffic spikes is other websites will link to you. However, this is of course never a guarantee. Your content has to be superb to get large amounts of link backs. However, I’ve made posts that received literally hundreds of tracebacks from blogs alone.
Summary
Websites like these are pretty pointless. They use techniques that are easy to combat, and are effectively being shot down. Even if you make it on a social news website, the quality of traffic you’re going to get is sub par. You’re almost guaranteed not to make more than $20, and not get more than a handful of readers.
I’m pretty sure that image from their website summarizes it best. A large spike in traffic that evaporates in a day.
While I don’t necessarily like Alexa, I like what they are trying to do. Their results aren’t fully accurate, but it’s really one of the best resources we have.
Recently they just updated their traffic rankings website to show more information about users visiting your website. In the updates they’ve included your reach percent, the country your users come from, the rank of your website in other countries, and changed the “Today” text to “Yesterday”. Alexa used to display your traffic stats for the previous day, and use the title of “Today”, which technically is inaccurate. So the last change mentioned is minimal.
However, the other changes are frankly awesome. Through these changes I’ve learned that my website is the 5,014th most popular website in Belgium, and the 19,437th in India. I’ve also learned that most of my viewers are in the United States, and my site reaches a whopping 0.002% of the internet. For some perspective Google only reaches 23.6%, while yahoo reaches 26.5%.
Below is an image of the above changes.
Despite my criticism of Alexa, it’s good to me. My ranking is a moderate 39,000. It usually ranges from 39,000-42,000. So I do admit it’s extremely consistent.
Noticed these changes while checking my Alexa rating, and looked for an official press release about it. I’m a bit late, maybe I should grab some RSS.
Ever wonder what modders are doing with their old NES systems? Here are 5 awesome examples. In terms of shear creativity, the NES PS2 look alike mod definitely wins. It’s really just a fancy paint job, with blue LEDs to highlight the PS2 font that says NES. However, it’s very unique and looks great.
NES painted to look like a PS2
1 Ghz PC stuffed in to an NES case
I saw this a while ago. It runs Windows 98, and plays old Nintendo games on an emulator. It even still uses the standard Nintendo controller. It has 512 Megs of ram, a 1 Ghz CPU, a mini ATX mobo, and a laptop hard drive so it fits in perfectly.
Alarm Clock
Complete with an LCD screen, and the ability to change the clock’s time, this is by far the coolest alarm clock.
There are more examples on TechEBlog. They include a DVD player (pointless because the PC in an NES case had one already), and a Lego NES case. I’m a hard guy to please ;)
When you tell your email to someone, and they ask what GMail is, what do you normally reply with? “Oh it’s Google’s email, but it’s invite only.”? Well Google’s mail is no longer for the elite nerd, as it’s finally opened to the public. Sure there have been many false alarms, but this one is real. This doesn’t mean they are out of beta though. That’ll be another 3 years or so.
Thanks for Cybernet’s Forum for pointing this out.
Here are some cool images of what UT3/UT2k7 will look like. Keep in mind these aren’t in game screen shots. It’s getting to be a huge disappointment that there are in fact no in game images. UT3 was supposed to be released in Q1 of 2007, however, that’s clearly not going to happen.
Hardestboss collected these.