Many have speculated that if companies such as Google were to take over Digg, that they would integrate such a site into searches as well as news services. As Yahoo! has shown, it can be easily integrated into web articles such as the ones published on their site. This will allow the editors of Yahoo News to understand what people want to hear and bring easier access to such news.

While social bookmarking sites have existed for a while, it is unknown how integrating it into a search engine will change the quality of results. It does however, allow search engine creators to understand what information the internet population is looking for. This can create many improvements in search quality, while it may also bring up irrelevant items when doing a search on a topic.

Yahoo is exploring new ways to reinvent itself and allow it to increase its market share of the internet over Google. Such an initiatives can teach other sites how to improve their traffic while improving the internet environment for everyone.

1. Do not promote you Propeller link in other social bookmarking sites like Digg or StumbleUpon but especially in StumbleUpon. I attempted to do it in SU. When I first submitted my article, I had no read and prop. After I waited for more than two hours, I checked my stats again. There was no change in stats and there was nothing to do but a small cheat. I submitted my Propeller link to Stumbleupon. Ten minutes later,I had only three props and more than 200 reads and my rating increased to 5.0. After one hour passed, my rating increased to 7.5 with more than 1500 read and only four props. At the end, my article was in the frontpage. However, in the next two hours, my submission in Propeller was removed then I was completely banned from the system. This was a great experience since I am not cheating anymore.
2. Join the groups but send related contents to them. I was joining every group I saw. As far as I remember, I joined more than 50 groups before my ban. When I submitted an article, I was sending it to all groups and doing this continuously. This might be one of the reasons for my ban. You should send related contents to the groups. Try to become an active user in the gropus.
3. Make a lot of friends. Follow their submissions and prop their articles if you like. You can always follow your friends' submission from the “Friends' submissions“ part.
4. Check it frontpage articles and try to understand their main properties. Try to learn what active propellers want to read about and what they prop.

Every article has only 24 hours to come to the frontpage. After 24 hours, even if your submission has been rated to 10.0, it will not come to the front page. It will stay as a passive submission in Propeller. So, you should be as fast as you do. Otherwise, your article will pass away without seeing the front page.

Barack's Digg Profile

Thats right, Barack's on Digg. If fact for a busy politician running for president, he's pretty active and has submitted and popularized some great stuff. Digg always has front page info about Barack, so visiting the popular in politics pages, you will find more than enough information on Barack news.

How Obama Stands On Almost Every Issue

A rundown of almost all of Obama's standing on issues from civil rights to the environment to corporations and war. If you're new to learning about Barack Obama, visit this site first to learn more about how he stands on almost all the deciding issues during a election. You can find his stance on almost anything here.

Obama's Facebook Profile

Like Obama's myspace page, his facebook page is very similar. The fact that he is reaching out through mediums such as myspace, facebook, flickr and twitter shows dedication to the youth and trying to connect with them and get them involved with politics and their country.

Barack's Twitter Account

Yeah. He Twitters too. In fact he has great tweets, and their not pesky or bothersome. An informative way to keep up with where he is, who he's speaking too and campaign news from Barack himself.

Baracks Official Wesbite

This link will take you directly to his official campaign website and stance on the issues. I have also included a link with a summary of more of his views in broader categories and his voting history.

Obama's YouTube Channel

Barack's youtube page is the first place to go for new campaign videos, videos of his speeches, meetings, debates and so much more. Almost 1200 videos and countless hours of everything you could ever want for in front of camera appearances.

Flickr Stream

It's pretty cool to see Barack's Flickr stream, where you see the pictures from a president elect's point of view, and not just user submitted photos of him. You can also keep up with where he is, because he has thousands of photos.

Barack's MySpace Profile

If you're a big myspace fan, friend him and check out his myspace. It's similar to his facebook and his official campaign page. Having a myspace page, hopefully he can connect with and encourage more of our youth to do more research and get involved with their countries issues.

Wikipedia Barack

Check Wikipedia for more information on Barack. If your not a wiki fan then go to his website. But wiki has a great database of information about his early life and early political career.

Official Voting History

Check Obama's voting history since being a senator. This is for you if you are a die hard fact checker, you can see how he voted during each of the sessions, on each issue.

Stance on Foreign Policy

A great question and answer session with Barack about his stance on foreign policy, from war in Iraq, to Chinese growth and development, to Iran and North Korea. Great to hear it quoted directly from Obama instead of it being transcribed ten times over by the mainstream media.

Daily Kos

Daily Kos is the biggest political blog on the internet and is a liberally leaning democratic grassroots blog. The idea is activism and contributing editors that are selected through the Kos community. Daily Kos will almost always be in discussion over Obama's political track, many times breaking news and uncovering follies of big media conglomerates.

Hopefully these websites will encourage people to learn more about Obama and educate themselves, their friends, peers and family. Becoming active in politics and issues that directly affect you is crucial, especially for our youth. Voting is the number one easiest way to get involved.

Cracked

With a caption of America's only humor & Video site since 1958, cracked.com offers funny stuff. Categories include TV, music, Celebrities, Tech, Sex, sports, News and More Funny stuff. It is very popular at digg and almost every article from this site hit the front page of digg and get thousands of diggs.

YouTube

YouTube needs no introduction. Users can upload videos of their interest, home-made or professional, onto this site. Almost every day there will be videos from youtube on the front page of Digg.

Lifehacker

Lifehacker is a blog that features tips, short cuts and downloads that help you get things done more efficiently. This site publishes over 20 tips per day and offers a free download of lifehacker code (productivity of software applications). Most of the blogs from this website get hundreds of diggs.

Ars Techinca

Ars technica (art of technology) is a specialized website in original news and reviews, analysis of technology trends and expert advices on technology. Most of articles from this site get hundreds of diggs and some get thousands.

Live Science

Live Science offers blogs and articles in space, health, environment, technology, history and strange news. Most of the articles and blogs are very popular at digg.

Steam

Steam offers browsing games of all sorts including action, adventurous, racing and sports etc. Many new games are available here and they are quite famous at digg.

PCWorld

PcWorld offers blogs, reviews, articles about all latest tech gadgets including cameras, PCs and mobiles etc. As this site is all related to latest technology, most of the reviews and articles get popular at digg.

Defective By Design

Defective By Design is a broad-based anti-DRM campaign that is targeting Big Media, unhelpful manufacturers and DRM distributors.

Wired

There are many sections in Wired.com including car, culture, entertainment, gadget, gaming, how-to and politics etc. It offers blogs in Gadget lab, Epicenter etc and they are famous at Digg.

 

These five websites will keep you up to date on what's popular on the internet and maybe even make you laugh a bit. Hopefully by using these sites you can get your internet fix in a matter of minutes instead of hours! Happy Surfing.

I had 'dugg' an article about Eva Peron City: Buenos Aires which collected a lot of reads so I went to Digg to find out if they had come from there. I had a message from someone who was supposedly a fan of mine. I didn't take much notice of the name of the person because I was interested in their link.

The link was to a video which claimed to show everything there is to see in Buenos Aires, so I clicked on it. A box popped up and told me that I needed a plug in to view the video so I clicked the button and allowed it to install.

At this point AVG virus checker started to flash up virus warnings. I also use the Microsoft virus protection system (the one with the shield)and this started to give warning signals.

Then, I got warning sounds and boxes from a virus protection system that I didn't recognise. I thought that I may have installed extra protection and perhaps forgotten about it, so when the programme indicated that I had a serious virus infection, I clicked the button to heal it.

At this point all kinds of warning signals were going off on my laptop.

I investigated the virus which had HREU in the name but no other details and discovered that there are fake virus protection programmes being circulated around the internet and some actually introduce trojan horses to your system.

I am not a computer geek by any means but I did know that I shouldn't close my system down without eradicating these viruses in case they were executable files and they installed on my system when I started it up again. . AVG revealed 28 instances of viruses and Adaware found 40 instances of malware.

My system is checked thoroughly every day and it was clean last night. So, the only conclusion I could come to was that I shouldn't have opened the video link sent to me via Digg. It had disabled my virus protection and allowed viruses into my system.

Video and other file links sent to you via Digg, StumbleUpon and other social networking sites need to be treated with the same caution you exercise when opening your personal email.

Fortunately, I have been able to clean my system up but it has wasted three hours of my day. Be warned.

I closed my system down thinking that I had cleaned it up. When I restarted it I thought everything was normal but when I tried to get onto the internet I was bombarded with adverts for porn sites, gambling and all kinds of things. My browser had been hijacked and I was being redirected to various website.

I discovered that these sites were all being fed to me by something called 'adjuggler'. I tried several Adware removal tools including Adaware but nothing worked. Each time I restarted my computer it was back again. I eventually found something called Superantispyware which removed the problem.

At last I contacted the Digg support and they answered me that I could not submit that article because it was spam. I was stunned by the reply because neither the article nor the website contains spam content. At that time I got curious about the spamming or banning of websites at Digg. Then I searched for and learned many things. Here I am sharing the information with you.

There are three types of bans in Digg:

Permanent Ban:

When you try to submit content, a message appears saying “URL is on the banned submit list.” This is a permanent ban.

Temporary Ban:

“This URL has been widely reported by users as being regularly used to spam Digg's submission process and cannot be submitted at this time”. This may be a temporary ban. Some sites which were listed with this tag don't appear to be currently banned.

Banning for Some Period:

Sometimes the banning may be for a period of time. Then the message appears like this “Please link directly to the story source. This URL has been reported as a news middle-man, it will remain blocked for x days”, x being any number.

Digg banned many famous sites like Geocities, Furl, News Now nearly one and a half years ago. But after sometime it let many of the banned sites backed in.

Actually, Digg banned adult content of all sites and some sites containing spammed advertisements.

At present some domains and websites are banned at Digg.

Here is a list of some banned sites. The articles from these sites cannot be submitted at Digg.

Computersight

You can find excellent computer related articles here.

Ezinearticles

Ezinearticles.com is an online writing site for expert writers to post their articles to be featured.

Go Articles

Goarticles is a free content article directory.

Indian Pad

This is a social bookmarking and blogging site like Digg.

The beauty of social networking sites is that you encounter REAL people instead of statisitics and empty hits or clicks. There is more warmth and human aspect in these social sites. You can really connect with thousands of real people. Not only do you get a chance to promote your site, people see YOU as a person as well.

Anyway, enough for introductions. Here are my tips for website generation.

Start With Myspace, then expand to other social networking sites - Ok, there are many ways, more than a hundred ways to get more traffic from Myspace. First, develop a cool, interesting profile page. This is important. Make sure that your profile appeals to your target market. If the website you're promoting is about weight loss, make sure you include some mention of your weight loss passion somewhere in your profile.

Myspace Tip # 1

Participate in the Myspace forum frequently. Don't blatantly promote your website there! Just contribute articles, give comments abbout relevant topics, answer replies, and so on. As you do this, you will notice that lots of people are sending you personal messages and friend requests.I've experienced this myself. Remember, your goal at this point is to GET MORE PEOPLE INTO YOUR FRIENDS LIST.

MySpace Tip # 2

As soon as you get a considerable number of people on your buddy list, use the bulletin post feature at least twice to thrice a week. There is no rule that says you cannot promote or advertise your website using the Myspace bulletin feature. So bulletin posts can actually serve as your commercial advertisements. Buyer beware: repetitive posting of the same topic or announcement is seen by Myspace as SPAM and might be grounds for termination of your account.

MySpace Tip # 3

Post Videos On Your MySpace Profile. Now this could really explode your traffic if you have a video that generates user interest then sucks them directly to your main website. Just how much can VIRAL VIDEO do for you? Well, it depends. There are overnight sensations and Youtube/Myspace stars. There are also videos that turn into a flop. Here's the criteria for a succesful Myspace viral video: 1) It must be relevant to the topic of your main website, 2) it must display your website link on the video itself. 3) the video must generate viewer interest by either being funny, controversial, or mind stimulating

Myspace Tip # 4

Use the Myspace blog. Post your website link at the end of each blog post. Each time you update your Myspace blog, your friends list is notified and some of them will hop into your new blog post instantly. Then a great percentage of these readers will check out your website link as well. Keep your blog posts light, easy and simple. Don't forget the KISS concept (Keep It Simple Stupid). If you go above people's heads, who will enjoy reading your posts?

Ok, we have outlined some specific tips on how to generate traffic using social networking sites, particularly Myspace. You can use the same concepts mentioned above in similar sites like Friendster, Multiply, Everyone's Connected and Tagged. There's really not enough space here to discuss each social networking site, so to save time, I primarily discussed MySpace because its the most popular among them all.

In my next articles, I will discuss Youtube, and how you can use it and similar video sharing sites to bring more traffic to your webpage. We will also discuss other ways to bring a horde of traffic to your blog, business page, or personal website.

1. Look Out for the Kind of Material that Does Well on Digg

   This does not mean that yours will do fantastically well, but you stand a better chance with world news, cutting edge scientific research, and bizarre pictures than poetry or short stories (especially those from blogs). Articles that do well on Digg are those that leave a certain taste in your mouth. They trapeze carelessly on that thin line between confidence and arrogance (so for my constant readers, if you notice a bit of arrogance in this article, you'll understand that it's not the usual climate I bring to my work), are quick and seem to fire the information towards you in an almost now-you-see-me-now-you-don't sort of routine. Keep in mind that while Digg has a variety of users, the majority are young adult males who are interested in girls and gaming.

2. Do Not Submit Your Own Material

   No matter how good you think they are, don't submit things which are clearly yours. Emphasis on "clearly." Why? The simple answer is that they get buried. Wait, and if they are as good as you think they are, they may get picked up by someone with a bit of weight on Digg, alternatively, get friends on other writing forums who are also on Digg, to submit them for you.

3. Don't Be in Awe of Top Diggers

   They are just normal people like you and me. One day, 3 years ago, they stood alone, outside with the chaff and tumbleweed, a place reserved for the poorly newcomer who's waiting for that illusive shot at the front page. If they submit a story that you do not like and it gets around to you, do not Digg it just for the sake of it. Stick to your principles, because wild Digging now will come back to gnaw you in the future. Let yourself be known for Digging articles that mean something to you. This way when you start to get noticed, people will trust the things you submit. They may not agree with them, but they will respect the fact that you do not deal in trash, and would be more likely to give you the vote.

4. Make Friends

   Don't crazily add hundreds of friends whose shouts you never Digg or whose submissions you never look at, because bit by bit people are going to "unfriend" you because of your poor performance, and it would be harder to win them back the second time. Sometimes older Diggers would add newcomers because they feel that they would be more inclined to Digg their material, due to the association of what is perceived to be "the higher power". However, if they take you off their lists, they won't put you back on.

5. Follow Top Diggers You Like

   Do not be a fool and blindly stalk top Diggers. If you really like their material, Digg their submissions, if you've got a genuine comment to make on their material, do so, but do not lap up the scent of their trail just because they are popular.
   
   After a while, if you are genuinely enjoying they things they like, they will notice and add you, not as a pet pup but as an equal in their field of favourites. If you prefer science and technology maheshee11 and supernova17 are great to follow, as they take pleasure in this specialty. If your interests lie in world news and interesting technological advancements adrian67 is a perfect person to Digg. If space news and development are your craving (I adore space pictures) vroom101 knows just where to find them. If you fancy a bit of everything including politics, technology and general articles you should watch msaleem . Then there is suxmonkey who submits general web content with a fierce line of humour and offbeat stuff running right through his content. openthink is liberal with his submission of pictures and has a keen interest in odd things and interesting lists.

6. Look for Websites that Make the Front Page Frequently

   Your poetry may be classy, but it will not do well on Digg. Someone will Digg a hole and bury it in a shallow grave as soon as it appears on the Upcoming page. Go through the items on the front page and look for the source of these materials. Add them to your favourites and select a few stories from these sites when Digging. Keep in mind that while Digg has an algorithm, they are still biased in who they choose (and do not choose). Yours may not do as well as MrBabyman or Zaibatsu, but it will peak enough interest to get you noticed.

7. Pay Attention When Submitting

   No, not to bury other articles like yours. I've never done this, although I know that it is done frequently. Look at how many Diggs other stories like yours are getting and maybe reconsider if you really want to submit that article. If the others like it aren't doing well, what makes yours special? You may even want to change the name, or add a descriptive summary.
   
   When you get going, choose carefully when you submit. Tons of submissions only annoy your friends when they're Digging, if they've got a choice either to Digg your 20 subs or 5 substantial, interesting stories from other submitters, they would be more likely to look at their rare gems and read them, rather than at the abundance of bescumber (if you don't know the meaning of this word, you should really look up it up) you've unleashed on the pages of Digg.

8. Spend Time on Digg

   I couldn't be one of the top Diggers because even though I know all of this now, I do not spend enough time on Digg (which is why I'm handing over this information. What? Did you think I was just being kind?). I am very busy, and I really do not want to spend my computer time (which I use for researching and writing) on Digg. If you're willing to spend more time than I do, wake up early before Adrian and sungoddess808 (who's already making a super impressive mark, having only joined up this year) and you'll do just fine. In a matter of months you'll be the guy/girl every one wants to befriend.

9. Digg

   I was told by one of the more popular Diggers to go through my list of friends constantly and remove the inactive ones. This makes perfect sense. If you have been inactive for the past 3 weeks, you're only taking up valuable space on people's list of friends, where you certainly have no right to be.

10. Don't Bombard Friends with Shouts

    Not only could you be banned for spamming, you could be totally ignored by all. I had a request of friendship from someone I wasn't sure of (I looked at his profile and noticed that he was submitting a lot more than he was Digging while sending a lot of shouts) I stupidly befriended him anyway and he started to send me 20 (literally) shouts every day, even after I asked him to limit them to one a day (I ask all of my friends to, but don't mind if now and then they send me more). I found myself dreading opening my inbox. When I checked his profile, I discovered that he was sending these shouts to hundreds of other people as well. A few days later, when I tried to send him yet another shout to explain that he was not my only friend, and that I had incoming shouts from different people - Lo and behold his page no longer existed.
    
    Once you learn to use Digg, you will see that if you go to "Friends activities" page and choose the "submissions" options that you would find a list of all the submissions your friends have made that day. There are also the options of seeing what they have dugg and the favourites they have chosen. Once you get going on Digg, you may find that you only need to send a shout or two every other day. It's easier for everyone that way.

11. Take Time to Personalise

    Make it your duty to at least give the impression that you care. Put up a picture on your profile, (it doesn't have to be a mug shot) and say something about yourself no matter how short. It helps people to identify with you and the material you're submitting if they know something about the person. I have a fantastic group of real life friends so I used to scoff at the idea of on-line friends, dismissing the people who had them as sad losers. However, this was before I joined Triond and Digg. I've made contact with some people with whom I feel a real connection. Now, "on-line friends" is not such a strange concept at all.

12. Keep Submitting

    Yup. However, keep your noggin crisply focused on the fact that us Digg users are not heroes, just players in the game, and that the Digg site is not your work place, it's just a ballpark you obsessively visit because a tiny bit of you could be the OCD freak your mother warned you about, who would do anything for a challenge. And remember not to spam Digg with any particular site.