While setting up a ‘New Digg’ account for a network site, we noticed a small problem. Digg asks for a special feed. Most websites only maintain one feed, although many may offer various formats like rss and atom feeds. Few have more beyond comment feeds, if even that beyond the main feed.

After a quick bit of research we found the Digg community has expressed a dislike for high volume publishers. We too understand the difference between a blog or company update and ‘actual news’ or ‘stories of interest’ Anything more the those, is… well,  just plain spammy.

As we debated building a WordPress plugin or coming up with a hard coded solution, we found an elegantly simple fix for WordPress feeds. Tags, plain and simple, just use a special tag. For example we have tagged this as ‘diggfeed’ and you can now view the stories or the feed for the tag. How lovely is that? No code, no installation, not even a plugin is needed.

permalink examples:

pretty urls: http://forhiremedia.com/tag/diggfeed/feed

default urls: http://forhiremedia.com/?feed=rss2&tag=diggfeed

For non WordPress sites this wont help, but for any WP based site on the more current releases… your good to go. Now you can pick your best content only and have a good, worthy, social community friendly Digg publishers feed. Trust us on this one to, the Digg user community and the Digg staff will thank you for it.

…and now, just in case you missed it, some official words from @Digg.com to publishers.

Getting Started for Digg Publishers

• Create a profile. Every user receives content on their My News page by following profiles. Include your brand logo/picture and information about your organization in your profile to make it easy for users to follow you.
• Publish your content. As a publisher, you can automatically submit content to Digg through RSS, or manually using Digg’s submission box. Every new story that you publish will have a single Digg, and will instantly be posted to all of your follower’s My News. Some suggestions to keep in mind:
  • Publish 5 – 20 stories per day of your best content.
  • Use multiple profiles for different topics such as Technology or Entertainment. You can link your profiles to cross-promote all the content streams you offer.
  • 9am to 6pm Eastern time are generally the best times for publishing.
  • Keep a steady stream of fresh, interesting content. Try to avoid making batch submissions of content.
• Develop your following on Digg by promoting your Digg profile and content.
  • Add "Follow Me On Digg" buttons on your site to promote your Digg presence.
  • Post Digg buttons on story level pages to allow your site visitors to Digg content directly from your site.
  • Utilize Digg Widgets to encourage visitors to spend more time on your site while making it easy to Digg more of your content.

  Digg’s audience is composed of a diverse group of highly educated professionals. Learn more about our audience demographics.

  We plan to continue innovating to ensure Publishers have a meaningful experience on Digg – please reach out to us with any questions or comments. Enjoy Digg!

We could not have made it any simpler than Digg themselves. We hope to see you there soon.

For Hire Media Tagged: diggfeed publisher socialmedia wordpress

The staff at Rate Rush spent several weeks planning and tracking every story on both Reddit and Digg. These are the results in a great comparative infographic. They have also provided a time-based chart to present the overall average daily numbers by hour.

All in all it seems Reddit tends to be more profane while enjoying more regular news and Digg likes more information but prefers mainstream content. No surprise Digg is twice as active as Reddit, but the correlation of ‘top users’ running the front page by proportion was surprising. Percentage wise, Reddit seems to have just as many power users as Digg , despite the commonly held belief there are none. This was an interesting discovery.

It appears Digg has a big late-night-party type crowd while Reddit runs mostly on bakers hours. Yet again a surprise that goes against common social gossip and the advice of all those ‘social media experts’ out there.

I have no idea in the end what all of this proves, and understan, even less of what it really means, yet I feel oddly enlightened to something — I just haven’t figured out what yet.

For Hire Media Tagged: digg infographic reddit socialmedia statistics

Now that Digg Version 4 is here, much to the dismay of the community (who resoundingly spoke up about its apparent suckiness), what the hell do you plan on digging — I mean doing — with your free-time? For those of you who decide to leave Digg rather than battle Kevin Rose in an attempt to return the site to normal, we believe Reddit is the obvious answer to your quickly diminishing finger calluses and disconnection from the social web.

“But Reddit’s comment system is confusing!”

“Yeah, and the design is horrid.”

“Which subreddits do I subscribe to? There are so many!”

click through for larger view [art: ncomment]

We’ve heard all those nagging complaints before, but if you utilize the links we’ve collected here, nearly every issue you have with Reddit can be squelched. However, like anything new and unfamiliar, it may take some time. Digg wasn’t a puzzle you solved overnight, that we know. So take our advice, test the waters over at Reddit with these enhancement tools, and you may find yourself wondering why you were ever digging to begin with.

Reddit’s Equivalent to the Digg Hot Section

Many top diggers utilize this link for an additional content source. It is also an excellent place to comment on Reddit, ensuring other users the opportunity to read and reply to your comments. Try commenting on an article from Reddit’s homepage and your voice will likely never be heard.

SubReddit Finder

Many people complain about not being able to find the proper or most popular niche subreddits for an intended submission. This problem is created by one of the best aspects of Reddit: a user’s ability to create their own subreddit. Given that anyone with an account can create one, there are obviously thousands (51,597, at the time of this post, to be exact). As the name suggests, SubReddit Finder simplifies the process of discovering interesting and obscure subreddits to take part in.

MetaReddit

Another Reddit tool designed to simply the discovery of subreddits and more, MetaReddit offers a few options not available with SubReddit Finder, these being the Stalk and Monitor features.

Erqqvg – Popular Subreddits

This site offers a quick glance at the most popular subreddits based on the current top 100 stories on Reddit’s homepage. Politics, though many users strictly ignore that particular subreddit, is often the most-represented subreddit on the homepage.

Erqqvg – Reddit in Realtime

This site provides what many would consider the most in-depth look at Reddit, its content and its community. An hour spent here, sorting through the various tabs, and you are assured to walk away with a much greater understanding of what drives the site.

Karmanaut’s Map of Reddit

A useful visual map of popular subreddits.

click through for larger view

Reddit Reveal Firefox Add-on

This nifty add-on for Firefox provides some additional functionality to Reddit. Take a look at the screenshot for more information. Also available for Chrome.

Threaddit Firefox Add-on

An Mozilla add-on for enhancing comment threads.

Reddit Search with Google

Search Reddit utilizing Google and all possible Google search parameters. Using Google’s additional search-options bar [i.e. "Show Options"] you can further refine your results.

Useful Greasemonkey Scripts for Reddit

• Reddit Uppers and Downers Enhanced

Show up-votes and down-votes next to the total score on reddit comments. Originally written by mistercow and optimized by Allan Bogh. It now also works on user pages by default like commentroversy do.

• Reddit – Display Your Comment Karma

Displays your comment karma next to your link karma. Uses jQuery.

• Reddit Continuity Lines Scrolling

Click on a continuity line to scroll down to the next comment. The scroll is animated, and the comment that is next down the thread will be highlighted for a short period of time.

• Reddit Comment Boxes

Puts each Reddit comment in a box. Makes it easier to find out where you are in a thread.

• Group Subreddits

Does what it says. Groups subreddits on the home page. Works while logged in or logged out.

• Reddit Parent Comment Quick View

This lets you check out the parent comment of the comment you are reading without leaving your scroll location. Click on the “(QV)” link next to the “parent” link.

• Hide Reddit NSFW

Does not display NSFW submissions on Reddit.com. NOTE: This hides the entire submission not just the thumbnail.

• Reddit Commentroversy

Shows up and down votes for Reddit comments. If you want to see votes on all pages (i.e. for submissions), just add http://www.reddit.com/* to the included sites.

• Reddit Top Comments Sidebar

Displays the top comments for a Reddit post in a sidebar on the right hand side. Clicking on a post in the sidebar will take you directly to the Reddit comment. For each comment a “top comments” link has been added after “reply” to get you back to the Top Comments sidebar.

• Highlight OP’s Comments on Reddit Self-posts

In Reddit self-posts, the submitter often puts the bulk of their submission in a comment instead of the headline, and the comment may get buried. This will highlight their comments and bring their oldest top-level comment to the top of the page.

Reddiquette

This is a helpful source for understanding the general community rules. This is a must-read for anyone looking to be highly active on Reddit.

Reddiquette is an informal expression of reddit’s community values, written by the reddit community itself. It’s not meant to be a list of commandments, but really more of a collection of guidelines. (In other words, be flexible!)

For Hire Media Tagged: digg reddit socialmedia

Greasemonkey Userscript to automatically unfollow anyone who’s twitter profile you open. We have humorously dubbed this one the "Avian Assassin"…

// ==UserScript==
// @name           Twitter Unfollow Profile
// @namespace      forhiremedia.com/scripts/twitter-unfollow-profile
// @description    Unfollow anyone who's twitter homepage you open.
// @include        *twitter.com*
// ==/UserScript==
// Best with http://www.tweepler.com/friends or http://friendorfollow.com

// Use those services to locate people you want to unfollow and open up 

// their profile and they are automatically unfollowed. 
// JUST REMEMBER TO KEEP IT DISABLED UNLESS YOU'RE ACTIVELY CULLING.

// http://joanpiedra.com/jquery/greasemonkey/ compressed
var GM_JQ=document.createElement('script');

GM_JQ.src='http://jquery.com/src/jquery-latest.js';

GM_JQ.type='text/javascript';

document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(GM_JQ);

function GM_wait(){if(typeof unsafeWindow.jQuery=='undefined')

{window.setTimeout(GM_wait,100)}else{$=unsafeWindow.jQuery;run()}}GM_wait();

function run() {
 setTimeout(function() {
  $.post("http://twitter.com/friendships/destroy/"
   +$("meta[name=page-user-screen_name]").attr("content"),
     {authenticity_token: $("input[name=authenticity_token]").val(),
       twttr: true
        },
 function(data,status) {
 var message = (status="success") ? "Unfollowed  ":"Error: Still following  ";
 $("<div>"+message+"</div>")
 .css({fontWeight: "bold", padding: "3px", margin: "3px", background: "#13de13" })
 .insertAfter($(".profile-controls"));
  $(".is-relationship").fadeOut();
   }
  );
 }, 1000);
}

Adapted from [link] for Twitter account maintenance. Image via CrunchBase

FHM Page Follow Greasemonkey Userscript

Automatically follows all users on a page 1 by 1 in a Twitter friendly fashion.

// ==UserScript==
// @name FHM Page Follow
// @namespace http://forhiremedia.com/development/scripts/page-follow/
// @description Automatically follows all users on a page 1 by 1
// @include *twitter.com*
// ==/UserScript==

els = document.getElementsByTagName(‘tr’);
var users = new Array();

for(var i in els) {
var row = els[i];
var id = row.getAttribute(‘id’);

if(id != null)
if(id.substring(0,4) == “user”)
users[users.length] = row;
}

var unfollowed = new Array();

for(var i in users) {
var user = users[i];
var cl = user.getAttribute(‘class’);
if(cl.indexOf(‘following’) == -1)
unfollowed[unfollowed.length] = user;
}

var butts = new Array();

for(var i in unfollowed) {
var user = unfollowed[i];
var lis = user.getElementsByTagName(‘li’);

for(var n in lis) {
var li = lis[n];
var cl = li.getAttribute(‘class’);
if(cl == “follow-action”) {
butts[butts.length] = li.getElementsByTagName(‘button’)[0];
}
}
}

if(butts.length > 0) {
el = document.createElement(‘div’);
el.setAttribute(‘id’,'friend_adder_bar’);
el.style.position=”fixed”;
el.style.height=”28px”;
el.style.width=”100%”;
el.style.left=”0″;
el.style.bottom=”0″;
el.style.backgroundColor=”#112233″;
el.style.borderTop=”1px solid #123123″;
el.style.zIndex=”100″;

txt = ”

“;

txt += ”

“;
txt += “You have “+butts.length+” unfollowed friends on this page. “;
txt += “”
txt += “Follow All”;
txt += ““;
txt += “

“;
txt += ”

“;
txt += “Page Follow re-encoded by @ForHireMedia“;
txt += ”

“;
txt += ”

“;

el.innerHTML = txt;

document.body.style.paddingBottom=(“50px”);
document.body.appendChild(el);
}

Install FHM Page Follow Userscript

Several Seriously Intriguing Internet Stats

via: onlineschools.org
Stats and demographics of who’s online, and what they are doing with all that bandwidth.