Digg, Site Updates | featured news

I finally had to do it. I stuck with Digg for as long as I could. It’s the first social news site. Even after the infamous version 4, I stuck with them.

A decent number of Digg's hardcore users had already jumped ship since v4. I was too lazy to do the switch - mainly because the headlines I saw on their homepage didn't quite fit those on Wopular's. Digg was still providing me with relevant and interesting news.

I'm finding that StumbleUpon has been the most effective social button on the site. I've been consistently sharing my blog entires on StumbleUpon and other content sharing sites like Digg, Reddit, Twitter, Linkedin, +1, Facebook, and maybe a couple other ones. It's mostly a waste of time except for StumbleUpon.

I knew Yahoo Buzz was one of the “sunset” sites - properties that would be shutdown by Yahoo. I still kept it on the site, but moved it to the bottom of the homepage. The quality of the articles being voted up have been on the low-end months before its eventual demise was announced; sometimes, you even get spam. The site had also been redesigned to its bare essentials.

I did some house cleaning over the last couple days with some feeds on the site.

I removed Bloglines from Search because the site's closing down in November. Ask.com, which owns it, thinks that RSS readers are going the way of the dinosaurs. That's not good news for me, but I'm just gonna chug along.

Digg v4 reshuffled some of its categories, so some feeds no longer work and had to be removed - Digg Travel, for instance. Same deal with Yahoo Buzz.

I'm just starting to submit stories from my blog to Digg, hoping against hope that they'll get some Digg love and drive some traffic back here. So far, no luck. The only Digg love my blog entries get is from me - and ONLY me. But I noticed a nice side effect - articles submitted to Digg almost instantly appear in Google's search results. Nice! Sure, the link goes to Digg, but from there, potential users can get here. It's a good trade-off.