Social media websites are vulnerable to manipulations, which will may eventually lead to their complete extinction.

Digg is big nowadays. Getting the story on the frontpage gives you a very good exposure and it worth a lot of money. For stories inside sections the ratio of link visits to diggs is approximately six (I don’t have extensive stats but that should be about right and well along Occam’s razor rule). The story, which makes it to the frontpage gets much more. Let’s try to evaluate how much exactly does it worth to stick in digg’s frontpage for one day.

Considering that digg.com traffic is estimated as 9M unique visitors monthly (and that for US only!), the cover story keeping on the top for one day will be visible to some 1M visitors at least and will probably get around 3000 clicks. Equivalent AdWords campaign would cost you $2-3k. Or you can check Digg’s rate card here.

Now let’s see how complex it is to make it. It’s surprisingly easy. At the moment of writing the minimal diggs for the cover story was 50 (Newly Popular) and 634 for “Top 10 in All Topics”. Top 10 was led by story with 3600 diggs.

You only need 50 diggs to hit the frontpage! If you have enough friends you can do it. If you neither have friends nor morale you can do it even simpler. All you need is few thousands digg accounts under control. There is a captcha there of course but since you don’t need millions of accounts but thousands only, you can register them manually. 30 seconds per account = 1500 minutes = 25 hours for 3000 accounts, outsource it to India and it will cost you ~$200. Now you can go and digg whatever you like right to the frontpage and enjoy marketing effect worth $3000, 15x more than you spent, right from the first time you do this.

This simple plan is not perfect but you can improve it great deal if you need. For example you can go Elance (the very same place, where original Digg was arranged to be produced for its famous $200) and post “digg marketing tool” project there. Here are requirements for you to copy and paste:
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I saw today something, which was not supposed to happen. I guess this is why it’s still in Labs.

The only thing to add is that despite of its “even-not-the-beta” status Google Reader is probably the best RSS-reader at the moment and I enjoy using it much.

Web 2.0 is an English-speaker. What about 800M users, who aren’t?

If you stop a random person on the street and ask him what is the best search engine in the internet, what do you think he will answer? Don’t hurry to suggest “Google” as the most probable answer. It depends on where you are. If you are in Moscow, then the answer would likely be “Yandex”, in Beijing – “Baidu” and “Naveer” in Seoul.

Back in 2000 when I got my first “serious” job as online marketing analyst, which meant spending 8+ hours daily online, I figured out that internet is not exactly a global network. On physical level it is and you can access any information from any part of the world (albeit special cases like Great Chinese Firewall) but on the language of content level it’s divided into distinct clusters barely overlapping.

Speak to me

Most people in the world speak one language – their native one, some speak two or three and virtually nobody more than three.

No matter how good is your content, your audience is limited to the number of people speaking your language. While this inconvenience is not new to the web (the same applies to all other media) it’s much more noticeable here because you can access the content but can’t make any sense of it.

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It’s here and you should really take a look! Bravo, Apple, you did it again.

The device combines iPod, GSM-phone (so good they decided to go GSM way — means it’s going to work in Russia too) and “PocketMac” running on OS X! GUI is completely touch-screen based and looks just a level higher than anything you could see before in similar Windows Mobile devices. On the top of that you have all wireless interfaces you may need — EDGE/GPRS, Bluetooth 2.0 EDR and WiFi b/g.

Do you want more? Probably not. However Apple do have more to make you thrill — iPhone has built-in accelerometer and automatically detects screen orientation, proximity sensor to turn off the screen when you use it as a phone and ambient light sensor to automatically adjust screen backlight.

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