First off let me state that I love the Digg and Reddit community, they constantly provide stellar content. I try to get involved with them, but it requires too much attention and it isn’t very personal. The amount of material that flows through these sites is, quite frankly, mind boggling.

I prefer Reddit’s approval system versus Digg’s, but I like Digg’s UI, which is much cleaner. I think they should join together to form Diggit. I digress.

I don’t think these sites play well with bloggers, if you notice most of the material on these sites is static, which it has to be i.e. the digg/slashdot/reddit effect. You need either a top shelf server (with decent connectivity), major cached content, or a static page to serve up.

See How to handle thousands of users with your blog

Also I think there are some major drawbacks to such community driven sites like Digg and Reddit. It seems that the content for everybody is derived from such a small portion of users, the top users, or whatever they are. Serious questions of gaming do arise in these sites, but none-the-less I enjoy perusing what they have to offer. Some of the coolest articles I’ve read have been on these sites. Also you don’t really need to contribute to benefit from these sites, which is cool for busy IT people.

See Top 10 Things Webmaster should know about the Digg Effect

Here at this site I’ve seen a little traffic from such sites and sure they bring some good traffic momentarily, but the traffic doesn’t stay. They are here and then gone. I don’t feel sites like these build readership, which is what blogging is all about. Your content will get temporary readers, which is a cool feeling as a blogger, but they won’t stay.

Bloggers should focus on networking with other bloggers, this is what web 2.0 is all about. Stay passionate about what you write and see what other people other saying about your topics! Commenting on blogs can help you think of ideas and maybe even inspire people to write about different things. I’m not the definitive source for what bloggers should be doing, but I hope to offer my unique position on various topics such as blogging. :-p

I think the purpose of this post was basically to say, Bloggers you don’t need to be on Digg or Reddit in order to have success. Blog your heart out.

Related: Digg, Reddit

If so, please stop
You are polluting the blogosphere.

I recently joined a blogging community called my MyBlogLog, which is a blogging community tool to connect bloggers and people who enjoy blogs; notice the right side my blog. They were recently acquired by Yahoo! so it will be interesting to see where the site goes. I was apart of del.icio.us before they went to Yahoo! and that was a fairly painless process. I’ve found some cool blogs and met some interesting people in my short time on MyBlogLog. It has been a good experience and I’m hoping I can continue to network with some great bloggers. There has been some drawbacks to my BlogLog experience. It seems about half the people on there are viral bloggers (probably a little less). And incoincidently this blog is a result of a comment by me on Adsense Tracker post about MyBlogLog communities.

This is how I define a viral blogger:

1. Creates sites that are keyword driven
2. Joins social networking without participating or solely to “game”
3. Joining such sites and adding users to drive clicks (such the viral name)
   • “Hey <USER> added such and such I’m going to look!”, people are curious creatures

Ah well I thought I would be nice enough to supply you with an example of these viral bloggers. I think communities like MyBlogLog can help rid us of viral bloggers like: (more…)

From newscientist.com.

Basically we’re doomed.

SO here is the situation: ancient bacteria that ruled the earth gets frozen in ice, humans come about – all is good – no big dinos, humans warm earth up, and then ancient bacteria RULES THE EARTH AGAIN? Oh yes, the cycle is nearly complete.

From the article, they say that old bacteria takes longer to regenerate because it loses a lot of its DNA (up to half in some cases). But they are thinking something about cosmic rays has degraded the bacteria. I don’t know much about this type of thing, but I am fairly interested in this ancient killer bacteria.

Maybe we should take this global warming thing a little more serious people. I’m going to use the new amazon service fresh; when it is available in my area. doh.

From ThinkSmarter Blog, very cool IT blog

This blog posting is going on my door at work! This single posting could help IT professionals and users everywhere! Trust your IT guy, just as they trust you to do whatever it is that you do.

1. If you ask me technical questions please don’t argue with me because you don’t like my answer. If you think you know more about the topic, why ask? And if I’m arguing with you…it’s because I am positive that I am correct, otherwise I’d just say “I don’t know” or give you some tips on where to look it up, I don’t have the time to just argue for the sake of it.

I’ve had this happen to me a few times, and it is quite frustrating. I give my opinion on what the problem’s most likely cause is and I get no I don’t think that is the problem. If you really didn’t want my opinion why did you call me?

4. There is no magic “Fix it” button. Everything takes some amount of work to fix, and not everything is worth fixing or even possible to fix. If I say that you just need to re-do a document that you accidentally deleted 2 months ago, please don’t get mad at me. I’m not ignoring your problem, and it’s not that I don’t like you, I just cant always fix everything.

Actually, I’ve used this same exact wording while helping people before. It’s for those pesky calls that you really can’t control anything i.e. this some website that is not apart of our system is running slow and I really wanted to access it, or Internet Explorer crashed while I was doing something. Well, with any program, if I am no way affliated with the program and/or site, there is really no way for me to help with it other than to listen to your problem.

5. Not everything you ask me to do is “urgent”. In fact, by marking things as “urgent” every time, you almost ensure that I treat none of it as a priority.

Truly one of the things I hate is to get mail from a user that is always marked High Priority. Enough said.

9. Yes, I seem blunt and rude. It’s not that I mean to, I just don’t have the time to sugar coat things for you. I assume we are both adults and can handle the reality of a problem. If you did something wrong, I will tell you. I don’t care that it was a mistake, because it really makes no difference to me. Don’t take it personal, I just don’t want it to happen again.

Yeah sometimes I am blunt, but to expand a little bit. It’s quite frustrating when you have to fix the same problem over and over again with the same user. When I write the steps down for you repeatly and you still don’t get it; it doesn’t make me happy.

That is some of my commentary on the great blog post of ThinkSmarter. Please check out the blog I enjoyed it.

From physorg.com

Does this remind you of iRobot? but no Will Smith.

South Koreans are currently drafting a code of ethics to allow humans and robots to live together. Sounds a bit creepy.

“Robot ethics are part of human ethics. The purpose of this charter is to find ways of coexistence between humans and robots, not to restrict the development of robotics,” Kim told AFP.

At the forefront of robotics, the Koreans are the best ones to do this kind of thing. Can you imagine our government trying to create a code of ethics for robots; when they need one for themselves. The robots are a series of tubes. I digress.

“A society in which robots and humans live together may come faster than we think, probably within 10 years.”

Now I wouldn’t mind a Robot to do tedious jobs like vacuuming, hello Roomba, but this is sounding like something from iRobot. Standards to protect humans from using robots illegally, and protecting data acquisition seem to be at the forefront.

Is that robot or Robot?

Related: TimesOnline, Gizmodo, Reuters