… if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. ~Henry David Thoreau

Thanks Mom!

You see, you may or may not have known this, but I’m out of a job.

I won’t go into detail, but it was time to for me and my former employer to part ways. While I enjoyed the company of peers, it was very difficult for me to stay fully engaged in work that I wasn’t originally hired to do.

What now?

I have many opportunities for full-time positions and people inquiring about consulting and contract gigs. I’ve started creating my own company that I can umbrella all my projects and gigs under. But there’s just SO MUCH to do.

So, today I write.

One thing that is a definite constant in the industry I chose is the continual need for new content. That means either new graphics, video, audio, or written words. Since my drawing and design skills are akin to that of my 3rd grade son, and I lack the proper tools for a/v editing, I’m choosing to write.

And what a choice! All of my sites have been on hiatus, more or less, for the past 3 years. It’s a mess. Like I mentioned earlier, plugins are out of date, code is broken, DOMAINS ARE DEAD, etc. Add all that to the three years of evolving the industry has done with integrations of FB, Twitter, Google, and OpenID to all and every property on the web, and, well… I’m a little behind the eight ball.

So I choose the constant. I write.

Regardless of how many details are on my to-do list, I could spend weeks on them before I even put a single word on the web. My sites will look pretty, but they won’t have evolved much and they’ll still be getting the same few non-human visitors that they get anyway.

A few minutes, a few words, and I too can produce something new. Now carry this action to all of my sites and my garden begins to grow again. After the content, I can focus on tidying up one of the sites. Tomorrow, I write again, and then I focus on bringing a different site back to life. Then I do it the third day, the fourth, the fifth, and so on.

Soon, it will be 2005 again and I’ll have a wide network of sites and content in my toolbelt once again. Or so I hope.

But this time, it will be different. This time, it’s not a hobby. This time…it’s my job!

This has been one of those days weeks where I’ve worked myself to the bone. Busy before work, working my ass off at work, the keeping busy after work with going to the gym, parenting, taking care of the house, and other projects I throw at myself.

Busy.

Ridiculous. That’s a better word. I should tell the world. If I felt like it, here’s how I’d do it:

I injured my knee while running. Can’t run for 2-3 days. Sounds like a Facebook update. Gotta tell people I attempted to work out but now have a lame excuse for why I’m not. Maybe get some sympathy lovin from all the females I’m “friends” with.

Ready for the weekend! Sounds like a twitter update. Bye peeps. Signing off because I think I might have a life this weekend.

Looking forward to finishing this project on Monday. Definitely a LinkedIn update. Workaholic whore.

OMG I’m so sore! I lifted way to much at the gym! MySpace udpate. No further explanation needed. Would be posted with photoshopped picture.

(nothing) – That’s a Yammer update. Don’t want office peeps to know you’re M-I-A.

(nothing) – That’s a pownce update, because they are M-I-A.

RELAX! OMW! – An update via txt to my wife today, who [not so] graciously asked when I was going to be home.

OFFLINE – Meebo update that I’m setting right now. g’nite!

In the past, I’ve always found the concept of a tip jar for content creators and software developers kind of limited. And as a content creator (who’s also dabbled in software and mod development), everytime I put up a tip jar to collect donations I feel like a bum on the virtual corner of the internet street market. I may need to deal with my own demons, but the collection of such donations never felt guilt free.

As for the limitations of tip jars in the past, there needed to be a middle man to perform the transaction. The person sending and the person receiving the monetary “tip” both needed to have an account to transact the funds. Often through Paypal, and later through Amazon, these micropayments were rarely big enough to justify a transaction fee.

In the past I wrote about Billmonk, an IOU processor as opposed to a payment processor. The beauty of working with IOUs is the requirement for currency to be immediately available is eliminated. It serves as a record, and in many cases, IOUs in both directions of parties involved tend to cancel out past IOUs. (Or they continue to build up until one party needs to redeem his/her IOUs before continuing transactions). This model is very similar to the concept that TipJoy adapts. If you like something enough, you can leave a tip for the person that generated the content. It can be in any amount from 5 cents on up.

You do not need to have a positive balance to leave a tip. You can pay at a later date, or any tips you receive can be used to build up your balance to leave tips for other content creators. If you decide you want to cash you, you can use your positive balance for an Amazon gift card or donate it to charity.

Or you can do what I plan on doing: keep a positive balance to reward creators of great content with generous tips. Yes, this is a company that I really want to see succeed. They have the philosophy model that I can believe in. I’ve added their tip button to my site, and will add it on individual posts in the near future. If you ever come across any content of mine you like, feel free to donate a few cents here or there. My contributions will go to other authors who I feel have provided the net community with something of value. It’s my way of paying back a community I’ve become quite passionate about.

Yesterday I was browsing through Techcrunch when I came to this story. Michael Arrington discussed a unique concept about how one website was generating buzz by having advertisers buy things for their readers to get displayed on the site.

The site is PayItToMe.com. Basically the concept is that users submit photos of items they wish for to Pay It To Me and advertisers buy it for them. The photos are displayed in a desired items page. Then Reno, the guy running the site, brokers any deals with advertisers who are interested in paying for a readers item. The advertiser pays the reader directly through PayPal and then sends a screenshot as proof of payment to Reno. Reno then takes the picture, and adds it to the homepage as well as a unique page. He then links the picture to the advertisers site. The advertiser then gets to benefit from all the buzz the site is generating.

I told John about PayItToMe and he gave it a try. He submitted a picture of Heroes Season 1 on DVD and someone bought it! (could have gone for Heroes on HD DVD, John. They you could justify a Xbox 360+HD Drive at Christmas!) I was kind of surprised. I didn’t think it would work, but it did.

So, since it worked for him I decided to give it a try. But instead of submitting an item, I wanted to participate as the advertiser. At the time, the lowest priced item on the desired items page was a 30 pack of Bud Light for $22.99. It sounded like a reasonable request to me, so I contacted Reno and told him I’d like to sponsor that reader. He sent me the paypal info, I paid and sent him the details, then he put my link on the homepage. The traffic wasn’t like a Digg or Reddit front page, but it was still pretty substantial. I got 400 visitors in about 10 hours time (as of midnight last night). I’m still getting traffic from it, but Google Analytics has several hours delay so I won’t know until midnight tonight what my 24 hour turnaround was. Still, I’m pretty satisfied with deal as an advertiser.

Then I decided to submit an item as a reader. I didn’t want it too be too luxurious an item like the iMacs and cameras that some people were requesting, but I did want it to be an item I would enjoy and probably wouldn’t buy otherwise. So I added this picture:

I didn’t expect that I’d actually have anyone buy it anytime soon. I was hoping that traffic and buzz would build for the site and eventually someone would purchase it for me. But, when I checked my email this morning, I was VERY SURPRISED to see that a company had sent me a paypal payment so I could buy Halo 3. WOW!

The company that purchased it for me was Kalendra. A big thanks to them, and to show how grateful I am I’ll be providing a review of Kalendra on this site soon.

At first I was a little sceptical about PayItToMe simply because it was just a guy that had a blogger account and was doing all the transactions via email. Then I remembered a little site called One Red Paperclip who was setup almost exactly the same way. Through email and his blogspot blog, some guy traded up from one red paperclip to a house.

These guys are showing that it’s amazing what you can do when you just start something even though you don’t have the programming or design or HTML skills to get it going. If you have an idea, get it up and get it going. This may be a READY-FIRE-AIM approach, but at least something is happening and it’s no longer just a “yet another idea”.

Way to go guys, let’s see where you can innovate from here!

Does Facebook need a digital currency? Apparently a LOT of people think so. If you haven’t heard of Acebucks, you’re about to. And if you are an active Facebook user, it is only a matter of time until you too have installed and are using the Acebucks application.

What is Acebucks? Simply put it’s an underground currency on Facebook. It allows users to buy and sell digital goods, hold auctions, give gifts, and send digital money to one another. The market for this virtual stuff is HUGE. One only need look at SecondLife, World of Warcraft, or Entropia to see how big virtual economies can become. I remember reading a stat somewhere (sorry it’s almost 1:00 in the morning and I am NOT doing the research to back this claim up) that SecondLife’s economy would be 31st richest economy in the world if it were its own country. Then you hear of people selling virtual land–we’re talking land that is digital, ONES and ZEROS, here–for hundreds of thousands of dollars. It just goes to show what a little bit of too much free time can do.

Whenever a digital currency is combined with an open marketplace, you can expect things to explode. How exactly will this work on Facebook? Time will tell. Will I be able to sell and buy little badges that people can display on their FB page that say “You Rule!” on them? Probably. It will get really interesting though once they start tying into offline goods. I’d love to sell some ebooks through Facebook. Or even buy a few thousand diggs or stumbleupons from Facebook users. BuddyMedia has said that they will start tying in an offline store and selling things like iPods using AceBucks. They also stated that they’ll be releasing an API that other application developers can use AceBucks through.

This is going to pretty interesting. A userbase in the millions like Facebook means there is a lot of opportunity for a lot of people. How much opportunity? Well, the makers of AceBucks just secured a $1.5 million dollar round of financing if that’s any hint. Someone somewhere thinks this is a worthwhile endeavor. I think they’re right.

Acebucks via

Here’s what others are saying about BlogRush after they’ve had a taste:

Blogrush is at once an ingenious idea and a bit of a throwback to “Web 1.0″ affiliate schemes.
- Mashable at Blogrush: Traffic Generator or Pyramid Scheme?

While we’re skeptical, BlogRush might be “worth a try”. Although traffic exchanges are notorious for driving poor traffic, BlogRush’s targeting means you may get more interested readers, not just passers by.
- Mashable again at BlogRush: 8 Reasons to Be Wary…and Optimistic

So why do I like Blog Rush so much?

Well first of all read my disclaimer. John Reese is one of my best friends in this industry and was a guy who was very instrumental to me as a mentor in launching AuctionAds. John has the financial resources and the technical resources to make this thing fly.

Also several months ago when John was designing Blog Rush I came up with the idea of doing a friend roll. I can tell you this is working really well and I have heard nothing but positive comments about it. The only downfall with my friend roll is that I get nothing in return for giving traffic to my friends. Blog Rush is the answer to people who want reciprocal traffic.
- Shoemoney at How To Get 45k Impressions A Day From Blogrush

Not another fanfare of recycled junk, which is often the case online!
- Direct Response Web Media at Congrats To John Reese!

The base idea behind this isn’t new. This is the Web 2.0 version of a Banner Exchange network. The different being, rather than being stuck with 1 banner to display in a network across thousands of sites, instead your headlines and your site name get displayed on like minded sites. It looks to be quite powerful. Like so many others, I’m testing it out to see how much extra traffic it will bring to the site.
- Geeeek on Why aren’t you Blog Rushing?

Traffic Equals Money

Let’s face it, without traffic it’s pretty hard for a blog to make any money. The more traffic you have, the more money you make. Everyone wants more traffic and we’re always looking for more ways to get it. Internet Marketing kingpin, John Reese, has came up a great way to help your blog get more traffic.

BlogRush is a “Cooperative Syndication network” that rewards its users for their contributions to the network. BlogRush was designed to be incredibly viral and to provide its users with tremendous distribution leverage to receive exposure for their blog content that they could never achieve on their own; at least without a massive advertising budget.
- John Chow on Increase Your Blog Traffic With BlogRush

It at least sounds like something worth testing so I have added to MP. While it’s always nice to earn additional traffic, you can trust that if the widget spews nothing but spam, it will be removed faster than you can say “BlogRush”.
- Andy Beal on BlogRush Offers Free Syndicated Blog Traffic

My initial impressions of the system is that it’s worth exploring.

While I’m not a fan of traffic exchange programs – this one is a little different because it attempts to promote your blog on relevant blogs.
- Darren Rowse on Find New Readers for Your Blog – BlogRush First Impression Review

As I’ve been pondering the new BlogRush traffic building service (which I did a first impression review of earlier) over the last few hours I am increasingly thinking that it has potential to help bloggers find new traffic.

The bones are there for it to work – but how can you leverage it to increase your chances of converting for you and squeeze out some extra traffic for your blog.
- Darren Rowse does a second helping at Tips for Using BlogRush to Generate Traffic for Your Blog

But at the very least, having impressions on some high exposure blogs, such as those mentioned above, equals a free branding opportunity. One would normally have to pay hundreds of dollars to get seen on those sites. To me, this benefit alone is worth trying out BlogRush.
- me at What Is A BlogRush?

Some of the reviews seem to be pulling from the energy of the launch campaign. Others appear to have really taken a look at what BlogRush is promising and what it can currently do. The majority, such as myself, have a general attitude of “ok, I’ll try it this once.” John Reese must be known as the pusher, because I’ve never seen this many bloggers “try something” in such swarms before.

And…yeah…I quoted myself. Seemed appropriate with all the self-promotion that will continue to occur in the next few weeks as bloggers try to scoop up the remaining few who haven’t heard of BlogRush.

But not everyone licking the belly of this toad. Some have thrown up red flags that BlogRush might not appear all it seems to be:

Does BlogRush violate the adsense terms of service? I’m not 100% sure, but my opinion is you are on thin ice using any traffic exchange program on a site with adsense. I for sure don’t want to risk my adsense account for some flavor of the day traffic exchange.
- 45n5 at Warning – BlogRush May Violate The Adsense Terms Of Service

I’m really not a fan of blog widgets. There’s a lot of hype about BlogRush at the moment and I am personally a little doubtful that it’ll actually generate traffic that’s worth the real estate on my blog. Why? Because the click through rate may not be fantastic as it will also depend on where the widget is placed on other blogs.
- DoshDosh on BlogRush Review: Using Widgets to Get Traffic to Your Blog

5. These services typically benefit the first members the most. Those that fail to join early lose out. This leads to disenchantment and eventually the lessening of network effects.

6. Too Easily Abused. Refresh your blog 100 times, and you’ve earned 100 credits. This can be fixed partially by BlogRush by only tracking clickthroughs, not exposures, or some kind of IP tracking. There’s no mention on the site as to whether this is already in place.
- Mashable on BlogRush: 8 Reasons to Be Wary…and Optimistic

It’s still to early to tell if BlogRush is a long term strategy or not. In the meantime, you’re best strategy to capitalize on the traffic is to, of course, join BlogRush, and then write a few blog posts about it and hope that bloggers like me link to you because you had a quotable quote. Just don’t ping me, I’m done talking about BR for a few weeks while the waters calm.

BlogRush is to RSS feeds what BannerExchanges were to banners in 5 years ago. I used to run a very large and profitable traffic exchange, and you could almost say that BlogRush is a traffic generator. Basically, you display a widget, like the one I have in the sidebar, that will display recent headlines in the category you select. I wasn’t sure whether to select “business”, “marketing” or “technology” for my blog, so I’m testing it under marketing for now. BlogRush then aggregates headlines from related blogs and uses a formula to select which headlines from other blogs to display on your site. The formula is part relevancy, part recency, and a big part pyramid scheme to determine which ads get displayed where. Let’s not put a wolf in sheep’s clothing. This is definitely a referral based program. The more people you refer, and the more people their referrals refer, the more impressions you earn. BlogRush uses your impression balance to place your most recent blog post title in other blogger’s widgets.

The headline titles under marketing have so far ranged from all out spammy to informative and helpful. I’ve seen pure spam-blogs (or “splogs” if you’re so desperate to use an poorly coigned term) to extremely popular blogs such as John Chow, Problogger and Mashable. The cool thing about BlogRush is that you can filter out URLs that you don’t want displayed on your site, or even go so far as to filter out keywords that you’d rather not include. Problem is that this is a very manual process. If you don’t keep tabs on it, you’ll get overwhelmed badly, just like the early days of comment spam. If BlogRush is truly going to work for the masses, they should pre-filter content using a corporate Akismet account. This will at least reduce the amount of moderation needed by individuals.

As with any new memes, I’m willing to give a try. I don’t have to worry about getting Google bitch-slapped for creating artificial links either. First, this is a javascript widget. Each of those links are found only within the widget and not crawled by any bots visiting my site. Second, if the bots could follow JS (oh the consipiracy!) the blogs are indeed relevant to my site and targetted to my audience. But I’ll stick with the first since it deems most true.

I’ll report back in a week or so to show some of the results of any traffic that BlogRush generated. You have to remember that BlogRush doesn’t deliver hits, they only deliver impressions on other peoples sites. So just because you’re earning massive amounts of impressions, that doesn’t necessarily convert to click thrus to your site. If that’s the case, then I’ll brush this off as a gimmick and try something else. But at the very least, having impressions on some high exposure blogs, such as those mentioned above, equals a free branding opportunity. One would normally have to pay hundreds of dollars to get seen on those sites. To me, this benefit alone is worth trying out BlogRush.

BlogRush.com

“Oh no you din’t!”

“Oh yes I did!”

• Today is Day 20 out of 30 for My Own Thirty Day Challenge.

Thoughts.com doesn’t pretend to be the latest tumblr or pownce flavor. It doesn’t give users pretty templates to choose from. It doesn’t even provide users with their own subdomain to build a brand around.

What it does do is give users a voice, anonymous or not, to share their thoughts. Plain and simple. This is the closest thing we’ve had to true online diaries since LiveJournal.

I stumbled upon Thoughts.com in an advertiser directory. They were declaring their service as a new free blogging service. Of course, as an SEO I had to check out what they had to offer. I went for the software. But it was the content that brought me back.

From what I’ve seen, the users of Thoughts aren’t there to blog about the latest celebrity gossip or what new iphone app they just installed. They are there to talk about their relationships, daily strifes, sex, depression, religion, etc. They actually share true feelings. Imagine that.

Who are these people? And how long until they realize that they can sell out and offer their “feelings” to the highest ad-spot bidder?

I’m a people watcher by nature. I love characters. I love uniqueness. I love “we are all so different we are the same” theories. Reading through posts made by Thoughts users has given me enough inspiration to supply character descriptions to several novels.

There’s the Latin-American in Virginia who just found out she is pregnant and the boyfriend who thinks she set him up; the mom in Pennsylvania who was told she was beautiful for the first time in her life, ever, and it wasn’t from her husband; the New England teenager who found her drunken mom sobbing with a .45 next to her; the east coast freshman who’s biggest worry is if he’ll get in a frat; a recently divorced man in San Diego who’s struggling with getting back in the game; a lonely teenager who shares an insiders perspective to being bipolar.

These are all very real people sharing very intimate thoughts. At first I almost felt guilty reading some of the entries. But then I realized that this was a public site and these people are sharing their thoughts with the public. The emotions I felt while reading these confessions from strangers ranged from pity to empathy, from apathy to joy. It is very odd feeling a sense of joy for a total stranger.

Now what amazes me is how Thoughts.com could have been just another MySpace, Facebook, or Tumblr. They could have said “here, sign up to our service and make friends” like everyone else does. But instead, they offer one catchphrase “Share your thoughts.” and it works! People come to the site, sign-up, and actually share their thoughts.

I’m thinking about starting an account to vent off some of my daily drama’s there. So if you see a man from Nevada complaining about lack of motivation, well then you may have just found me.

P.S. – If I offered awards from my site, I’d give Thoughts.com the “Guilty Pleasure of the Year Award”

•  Today is Day 12 out of 30 for My Own Thirty Day Challenge.

Can’t say the same about the original 30 Day Challenge. As you may recall, I was a little disappointed with the 30DC during their halftime show. I felt they had been feeding us a too much milk and not enough meat. Well, last week they really started getting going by having everyone create accounts on a third-party blog service called Tumblr. I was a little turned off by the fact that they chose Tumblr to host the content. I knew they were going to have a third-party somewhere, even if it is parasitic SEO, because they promised you wouldn’t have to pay any money to buy a domain and host your own blog to participate in the challenge. I really was hoping they had developed their own article directory or something that would get more of a green flag for the flood of content it was about to receive. I imagine the DBA over at tumblr woke up on Thursday and was wondering why his database tripled in size overnight. The tumblr staff saw thousands of new accounts using the same cookie-cutter formula posting a bunch of articles with affiliate links in them. Yeah, I’d be a little pissed off too if my service that was previously fairly pristine started getting a bunch of gunk in it. So I bet you can’t guess what happens next?

Yup. Tumblr axed most of the new accounts.

Now the Ed, Dan, and Rob three tell us there is nothing to worry about. They say that they were aware this was a possibility. Oh really? If you did foresee this coming, then why didn’t you try to disperse the challengers to use 10 or so similar services instead of having them all swarm to one. I know it’s not the service that’s making the challenge what it is, but rather it’s the methodology behind it. Of course that makes sense. But what’s the true lesson.

Reminds me of learning to canoe in cub scouts. There were four of us in the boat I was in. We had a couple of white knucklers on board, they sat in the middle. I was on the rudder while another cub scout my size was at the bow. By nature, canoes rock a little when they are in the water. Well before we could even completely launch from the dock, these two knuckleheads (that’s punny) got in at the same time and felt it wobble. They both leaned to one side of the canoe. Then the canoe started tipping to that side, so they hurried and jumped to the other side. In one big motion the canoe swooped back out from under them and dumped us all in the water.

Lesson one: Don’t jump in the boat at the same time.

Lesson two: Sometimes it’s easier to be unique. Needless to say, I’m a big fan of kayaking.

• Today is Day 10 out of 30 for My Own Thirty Day Challenge.
• This post is also part of the 30 Day Challenge Series.

I don’t have a problem with social sites and what they have to offer. (Well, I’m lying here. I do have a problem. I’m addicted to them like Rush is to pain killers!) The only issue I have with them is that every time a new site launches and I want in, as I always do, I get a few invites to start inviting my friends. The same friends I’ve now invited to dozens of other networks. I’m sure they’re tired of getting invites from me. I have to tell myself that or I really start to feel insecure when they don’t accept my invitations to become my friend all over again. It’s like my validity hangs by a silken thread.

So I must say I was rather impressed with a well put together paper titled Thoughts On the Social Graph by Brad Fitzpatrick. His perspective and thoughts on how to untangle and decentralize some of the common threads in social marketing were more than refreshing. He started working on the draft when he realized that while Facebook developers were happy to build applications that worked with an existing network, many found it difficult to give full control of their hard work to a single entity. Apparently this is a very common concern. The worry is that developers could lose everything they worked so hard on overnight based on a set of changing rules. (They should try SEO!). Brad’s concept is to build a decentralized standardized markup that will allow users to have a public entity without being bound down by a single service. This will allow you to use data from one network (username, location, photos, who your friends are, etc) to populate data with a new network. Instead of inviting friends to come over, the friends who are already on your new network will already become associated with your profile. Since Social Network Friend Invite Spam is really only a nuisance at this point, I’m glad that someone is thinking ahead on how to tackle a universe of tens-of-thousands of niche Social Networks in the future. Best of luck, Brad!

• Today is Day 9 out of 30 for My Own Thirty Day Challenge.

But even more interesting is how Digg is making money. Google Ads? Federated Media? Is that their whole business plan? My guess is no, that they have other plans on how to monetize their beast and all the traffic they have. But they have yet to disclose of those plans. And that makes diggers sorta scared. (sic)

So today I’m asking if you were one of these guys, how would you make more money with digg?

Here’s a few ways how I’d do it (disclaimer: these ideas are from a brainstorm and may or may not be up to par):

1: Paid Memberships
The number one opportunity staring digg in the face is the opportunity to convert its cult-like following into paying subscribers. I’m a digger, have been since the start. And if digg were to offer a Premium Membership for a small fee, I’d probably take them up on it. Call the premiums Super Diggers or even Bigger Diggers (can you say that without snickering?).

So what would premium accounts consist of?

It is well known that a lot of diggers don’t click ads. So I’d first suggest dumping the adsense and FM ads when they are logged into their premium account. This accomplishes two objectives actually: dedicated digg members won’t get annoyed if digg adds more adspace to regular user pages in the future AND the click-thru ratio (CTR) will actually be higher since ads will only be displayed to referral traffic (which I’m assuming the majority of are not digg accounts). Higher CTR means higher earnings per click and more targetted ads.

Second, don’t just take away ads for premium account holders, but use that real estate space for something that would be a value added benefit to digg holders. Perhaps related stories to whatever they are reading, or a mini digg spy in the sidebar, or latest friends comments. That void needs to be filled with something of benefit no matter how small. Premium Members will know that instead of ads they get X.

Third, scew the timing, but not for Premium Diggers. This comes straight from the example of slashdot. Add a delay of 5 or 10 minutes to any story before it appears in the “Upcoming Stories” area for general and non diggers. Then give premium diggers first access to those stories, giving them 5-10 minutes to read and comment on something before the rest of the world. Do this on the front pages too. When something has made it to the front page, let Premiums know about it first. Give them first crack at it. A lot of servers are smashed to pieces when a page they host makes front page. Letting Premiums know first will give them more opportunity to view the page before it goes down.

Last, I’d recommend pimping up Premium Members. Give them a badge or an icon that goes next to their name. Make their names and comments appear red instead of blue, giving the appearance of added authority for that comment. Let them animate their avatars or have bigger ones. Allow the avatar to link back to their site. And put undercarriage neon lights under the avatar too. There you have it, a pimped account. That alone would be worth the membership price.

2: digg for Jobs
The second way I’d recommend that digg add additional streams of revenue is by adding a job board. We’ve seen several “cool jobs” on the digg frontpage already, now there needs be a whole section for them. I know what you are thinking “Well, if Digg Jobs, then why not Digg Real Estate and Digg Dating?”. I know, I thought that too. Geeks, digg’s core audience, dream of the nice ultra-wired home with the basement theatre and of getting laid, but those just won’t work (at the moment) as well as jobs. Allow members to post “cool” job postings in this new area, but also setup corporate accounts that let select (hand selected even) companies post their jobs via data feed for a metered fee. Something that most geeks dream of is a cooler job. Life beyond the cubicle if you will. Allow them to seek and digg out the jobs they think are more than interesting. An security analyst job at Google? Digg! An NSA job as a tech savvy bodyguard for “important people”? Digg! Paid blogger? Digg! An inkjet refiller at a mall kiosk? No digg.

An added benefit of this would be the way that Digg already saves digging history. Any digger who catches a job of interest and would like to review it later (for when they are home maybe?) would just need to go to their digg history.

Maybe also allow diggers the opportunity to host a resume or two or apply online directly through digg. Perhaps corporate accounts could digg interesting applicants in their accounts: Embedded linux device programmer? Digg! Game Tester with 14 years experience? Digg! Geek Squad tech who almost has his A+ certification? No digg. (kidding)

3: The Deal with The Deals Section
If I recall correctly, in the early days of digg someone suggested that digg patch their own affiliate code on anything submitted to the deals section. This made some sense but would definitely be difficult to implement and monitor.

My suggestion is a slightly amped version of the above. Like the Jobs suggestion, offer corporate accounts to hand selected merchants (Cj.com, Amazon, dell, godaddy, iTunes, Sony Direct, ebay, woot, etc) and let them upload their limited time deals via data feed. This could be for a metered fee (impressions or CPC) or a cost-per-action (CPA) basis. Or a hybrid of the two. Diggers could still submit their own deal findings to the section, but corporate accounts would have a stronger presence. In the end it would be the diggers decided which deals were diggable or not.

Some cons are that diggers love deals, but hate spam. So its crucial to pick corporate accounts that are akin to the likes of diggers. A nice Sony PSP package with 2 free games? Digg! A car loan for a low credit score? Spam!

4: digg Wear and digg Gear
Out of all my brainstumped ideas, this one makes the second most sense (seriously, subscriptions should be the number one consideration). When you have a loyal userbase like Digg does, that loyal userbase likes to define itself as such. They like to wear t-shirts that tells the world “Hey, I’m on digg!” There’s 3 shirts on Jinx.com, but seriously is that it? Find a local printer, a near buy small biz warehouse, and setup shop. Give the diggers the option of “digging” each shirt by placing digg buttons on each sales page. Ask for digg shirt submissions. Have a “design the shirt” contest. The turnout will much better than you can imagine.

Then lot of fun could be had with the digg store. Start with shirts since they are easy and are almost guaranteed sales. Then start experimenting:
* Offer LCD wifi finders with the digg guy on it.
* Create a website repair kit with LAMP for Dummies books, a XSS white paper, a small toolset, and put them all in a digg toolbox.
* Put the digg logo on a laser mouse and call it the “rapid digg” mouse.
* Load up USB keys and MSPRO sticks (for PSP) with Diggnation content.
* Have autographed posters of Kevin and Alex (don’t laugh, diggers will buy them. They feel connected somehow. Kinda creepy I know.).
* Top user accounts: $1000 /mo
* digg Beer and digg 40′s. ‘nuf said.

5: diggNation Expo
Take this from the PAX example. Geeks like to gather. As the rest of the world assumes they are introverts and isolated, geeks know they like doing geeky stuff together. Have a digg expo where users can listen to Kevin give a keynote and watch his years of body language training. They can meet web 2.0 companies and beer and caffiene brewers in the exhibit hall. There can even be workshops on finding digg stories and writing digg headlines (look in the upcoming stories, workshops are badly needed). Have a gaming hall, a hacking hall, a deals hall, a marketers hall (since everyone is trying game digg these days) and a sports hall (just because everyone insists that digg needs more sports).

All in all, make it THE annual geek pilgrimage. E3 is gone (as far as we’re concernced) and gnomedex is too pricey and corporate. DNE would be a great replacement.

6: digg API (if you love it, set if free)
The data underlying digg is full of business intelligence. Have free API accounts for meddlers, and corporate API accounts for corporate data hordes. Offer statistics of your users for each story and digg. Allow websites to use digg as a ranking tool (Product 1 has 1300 diggs! Product 2 has 12 diggs.) We’ve seen stack and storm, imagine the contributions from thousands of enabled API users? Theres so much potential to releasing a digg API.

7: diggFund

This doesn’t make digg any money per se, but does increase their brand and loyalties from digg users. DiggFund would be a NPO operated by digg to use towards charities that digg users are sympathetic with, like EFF and iPac. Setup a donation box for diggers to donate too. Then let diggers decide where the money goes each year or quarter by digging the companies they like most. Divide the fund among those companies based on the percentage of such diggs.

9: digg site Sponsorships
Just an average ad campaign strategy that makes sense for digg. It will work too if digg subscriptions are in place so regular diggers won’t get annoyed by ads. What are sponsorships? Basically they are ad campaigns that take over all the adspace on the homepage or a section of site. If I were MLB and the world series were coming up soon, I may consider a sponsorship of the digg sportspage. Or if I were Sony or Nintendo, and the PS3 or Wii were about to launch, a sponsorship of digg gaming would make a lot of sense. MSN sells sponsorships for $500K per day. Although digg doesn’t have the same traffic as MSN, they do have core niche audiences. They should be able to secure at least $100K/day sponsorships without too much hassle.

10: Co-branded digg sites
Another crazy idea that might just make sense. A successful model used by Amazon was to license their engine to Eddie Bauer, Target, and recently Toys ‘R’ Us. A digg engine would come in handy to big content powerhouses like CMP, ZiffDavis, GameSpot, IGN, CNET, etc. We know that Netscape had issues switching from their old CMS to a new digg-like structure. But licensing of the digg engine wouldn’t be the same experience because each company would have different uses for the license. Some may want a way to syndicate the content they already create and allow their users to “vote” for each story. Others may want to create a new site entirely and theme it based on their vertical. And there may still be some who have a savvy user base who DO want to switch to a digg like system. If digg were to license such technology, they could also plugin their userbase of 300K+ users and allow the stories to be published to the front page of digg too. There are many different scenerios that lincensing technology would enable. I wouldn’t be surprised if digg has already been contacted by Fortune 500 companies looking for a digg “like” engine.

11+: The Others
Some other things I came up with during my brainstorm, but am too lazy to expand on are (or they don’t need it):

digg Magazine
digg Datting and digg Real Estate (there I said it)
digg Ad Network
digg Internet Cafe and LAN Bar
digg Europe (or individual countries)
digg Asia

digg Australia
digg Africa
digg South America
diggTV (Kevin, you really want to bring back TechTV? With Rev3 and digg, you may be in the best position of your life to do so!)

Ok, so I did enough thinking for Friday already. Anyone else care to share ideas?

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I seem be following the web 2.0 “industry” more and more lately and it is approprate that I have a nice little file for all things web 2.0. Soon before long this blog will be like driving down a pastel highway in my AJAX car, with bubble roadsigns and mashups happening all over the place.

I’ll still cover things geek and funny and seo. Especially since Web 2.0 seems to be the new SEO (another thing to think about).

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