The above pic has been making the rounds, and has been strangely divisive in this worker unfriendly economy.

Originally spotted on Reddit, the screengrab was posted by a co-worker of the guy who supposedly wrote it with these comments:

He believed he was in a temp-to-hire position, and after three months of extra hours and butt-kissing, turns out it’s just a temp position. He was a good worker too. I’d have recommended him. Too bad he burned his bridges… Obviously he had contemplated quitting long enough to make this thing, but still refused to speak to anyone about his feelings. Ironically, he complained about the ‘divas’ at his last job.

Veracity aside, is it that shocking that someone who was lead to believe they might be in the clear job-wise is spitting mad after realizing they’ve been mislead for months? Jumping through hoops for employers taking advantage of a terrified labor force is pretty rage-inducing. Do we really need to be grateful for the opportunity to be abused by these kinds of schmohawks? The OP seems to think so:

I’m literally in the same position he is, just one of a small team of temps, trying to survive until the next paycheck. I haven’t made over $30K in three years, last year I made $20K, year before that I made $17K, so yeah I’m a little callous when somebody walks off a decent-paying job because he’s not getting hired this time around.

[via Gizmodo]

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Popular song lyrics are confusing kids all over- who the hell was Helen Keller and how do you “do the Helen Keller” and “talk with your hips?”

Luckily, Reddit has the answer…

[Source: ImageChan]

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This image has value…and I’m not sure if I support it (via Reddit)

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The “storm is coming” ad from the anti-gay National Organization for Marriage (NOM) gained widespread controversy when it was released, and rightly so.

In the ad, NOM makes claims based on existing discrimination laws and falsely applies them to gay marriage in an attempt to scare viewers over what might happen if gay marriage became legal. You’d think watching it that the end of the world was nigh, and bizarrely NOM claims that gay marriage is a threat to freedom.

The ad was ripe for a takeoff, and now we have two. Users on Reddit got together to dub the ad, changing gay marriage to inter-racial marriage to prove that discrimination against gay couples is really no different than past bans on inter-racial marriage. Funny or Die went for a more humorous take, with a range of actors poking fun of the storm message.

The two versions following. The Funny or Die take has its moments, but the Reddit version really cuts through; it’s so good that it was given a “Homo Hero” award from Lesbian and Gay Foundation in the UK.

Reddit version

Funny or Die version:

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Proving once more that the best ideas are often stolen, Digg has launched the DiggBar, an iframed toolbar that offers a range of features.

At its core, the DiggBar is naturally a voting platform for Digg. Users can Digg a site while on the site via the frame, and if the page is not already in the system, use the DiggBar to submit it. Along side the service is a handy URL shortening feature that is used by adding digg.com in front of any URL in a browser. Socially, the DiggBar supports related content and “random” content, so you can navigate through items that have previously been featured by Digg.

If those things all sound familiar, they should, because URL shortening aside, it’s a dead copy of what’s already being offered by StumbleUpon (who now offers a similar iFrame toolbar) and Reddit (via the Socialite plugin). Some sites have gushed over the DiggBar, using superlatives such as “amazing” and “incredible;” yes, the implementation is solid, but the idea is none of those things. Forgive me that unlike others I’m not interested in dropping my head into the crotch of Kevin Rose with my mouth wide opened.

What is interesting though is that Rose and company have decided to take on StumbleUpon with the move, although admittedly it’s not in the same league yet (no category surfing for example). There’s talk of ads appearing in the DiggBar, but it should be remembered how StumbleUpon makes money: by selling page views that are added when users are stumbling. It’s a solid business model, and from experience, a great way to advertise a site. Here’s betting that Digg wants a slice of this action as well.

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Number two player in the social voting space Reddit has won by a clear mile in the April Fools Day prank competition by rebranding the site as Reddigg.

The skin includes the choice to Digg an entry, or bury it, vs the usual vote up or down on Reddit. Unlike Digg, Reddit offers a transparent voting system; the inclusion of a bury button up front is pure mokery.

A close second is Google, who worked off the theme of the Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity, with sub pranks outside of the original prank.

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In the past few years, we have seen the explosion of “social”. Obviously, lots of people ask why. I feel that a lot of it boils down to simple human nature. People are social beings, regardless of their tendency towards introversion or extroversion. Introverts are social, just on a smaller scale, maybe even just one-on-one interactions. Everyone knows that extroverts are social, because everyone talks to them at some point during a party. On the internet, “social” is a little different. “Social” means the connections you make with friends and acquaintances on various sites on the internet. These sites could be social news like Digg, Mixx, etc. It could also be a social network like Facebook orLinkedIn. There are also lifestreaming and aggregation sites to combine your activity into one location.

Why has there been this explosion of all things social? Because social works. Obviously, this is a little light on detail, but that is also the reason I am writing a series of posts on the success of “social”. There are various reasons why social works, and social works for different reasons on different types of sites. What works for a social news site may not work for a social lifestreaming site.

Continue Reading >

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According to MG Siegler at VentureBeat, the new StumbleUpon will be rolled out in the coming weeks, with some users gaining access to the new version starting from now. The plug-in free StumbleUpon will utilize what MG calls “clever JavaScript code” to show a bar at the top of the screen, giving users a similar experience without the plug-in, although I’d note it looks suspiciously like an old fashioned iFrame to me.

StumbleUpon has been fairly popular, attracting some 6 million users since first launching in 2002. However, their reliance on a browser plugin is a natural growth inhibitor; some people simply won’t install a plug-in, particularly one as obtrusive as StumbleUpon offers, others simply don’t have access, with StumbleUpon offering plugins for Internet Explorer and Firefox only. The new StumbleUpon caters to both registered users and casual visitors; anyone visiting StumbleUpon will be able to surf their range of sites on any browser without a plugin, and that’s got to help bring new users through the door.

StumbleUpon isn’t abandoning their browser plugin, despite the changes. It’s hoped that the new offering opens StumbleUpon to new users, but old users won’t miss out.

Social voting

StumbleUpon is also moving more into the social voting space through a new program called StumbleThru. Initial site partners include The Huffington Post, Rolling Stone, National Geographic and HowStuffWorks. It looks like a social voting widget ala Digg or Reddit buttons, and site visitors are able to vote for content via the widget. Users will either then be taken to the formal voting page on StumbleUpon, or to another site in the StumbleUpon network of recommended sites. According to VentureBeat, StumbleUpon is limiting this program to “quality sites” to avoid gaming of the system, so it’s limited on wider use.

Conclusion

I like StumbleUpon. I like it as both a user, and an advertiser. When we launched The Inquisitr, we had a small advertising budget, and I tried a number of sites, and one I kept going back to was StumbleUpon. The traffic was real, and it helped us in exposing the site to new visitors, and every time I renewed the ad spend, I could measure the success not only in traffic (you may pay for 500 page views, but if you get enough positive votes you end up getting a lot more), but in RSS subscriptions as well. As much as I haven’t used it now for some time, I’m happy to recommend it to others.

These changes are both an obvious and logical step forward for StumbleUpon. The site has been losing traffic, at least according to Compete, Quantcast and Alexa, and they need to do something new to increase page views, particularly at a time they may well be on the market. This is the right move, and it can certainly do no harm.

(image credit: VentureBeat)

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Kwoff launched this time last year, and comes with some strong local baking. Run by Sydney based Dan Walsh, the site includes on its founders list Stephen Mayne, a near luddite on Web 2.0 but the founder of Australia’s most popular subsciption email service Crikey (and yes, I pay to receive it), and former staffer turned writer Greg Barns, who more recently suggested that Facebook and other Web 2.0 services should be policed by a team of censors and all content moderated because OMG people might be defamed. OK, so maybe they aren’t the cream of the Australian Web 2.0 crop, but Mayne, who I’ve only had the pleasure of meeting once, is a smart operator who is a champion for independent media in this country, Barns well….well….lets just say he makes Andrew Keen look like a saint, and anything else I’d care to say would be the target of his censorship wand…or a pack of lawyers.

Kwoff got off to a low key start, but has slowly built a respectable audience. Alexa gives the site a ranking of 73,361, and for Australian sites 1446. It’s surprisingly popular in India and Pakistan as well. Of late, Kwoff has had a welcomed boost through inclusion of the add to Kwoff button on news.com.au properties (news.com.au being the local mega site for News Corp papers), and one Fairfax newspaper, which has helped boost awareness. As of today, we’ve added a Kwoff button here on The Inquisitr as well; although we aren’t an “Australian site” in a strict sense (and less than 10% of our traffic comes from Australia) this site is Australian owned, and I’m happy to support a local startup in this space.

I’ve met Dan Walsh a couple of times at events, and although I didn’t follow him up for this post (I’m time poor at the moment, but we might do an interview in the future), the one thing that has always struck me each time we’ve met is his passion for Kwoff, and his broader knowledge of the social voting space. As long as he ignores calls from Barns, I’m convinced that his drive, and knowledge, bides Kwoff well.

But can Kwoff succeed in a space dominated by US sites, with some such as Reddit offering Australian specific pages? It’s a hard ask, but with support from the broader Australian old and new media community, it’s looking good. Voting and submissions on the site are active, with top stories receiving 20 or more votes: not huge perhaps, but it wasn’t that long ago when stories hit the front page of Digg with 60 votes. My only real criticism of the site is one of aesthetics: it’s as ugly as sin. While content plays should always put content first, social voting sites need to offer a visually pleasing experience to compliment the participatory side.

We’ll keep an eye on Kwoff in the future, and check back in with anything new if it solves our opening question. Of course, if you’re a Kwoff user already, feel free to submit this to Kwoff or vote on this post

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Popular social voting site Reddit has experienced major issues this morning, failing to display pages correctly in what one Twitter user described as Reddit forgetting its CSS.

Visitors to Reddit see the shot above, the content displayed, but the page rendering missing. The problem also caused Google Chrome to crash, at least the Crossover Chromium version I was able to test (the shot above though displayed in Safari and Opera as well). The problem has been on the site at least 30 minutes at the time of writing this post (5am PDT)

We’ll update the post if we hear anything on the issues.

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Every now and then in the life of a blog, you post something that drives traffic through the roof. In our case, my post last night about news of Bigfoot allegedly being found drove record traffic to The Inquisitr, delivering out first ever day in excess of 100,000 page views (we’re 3 months old). Traffic has been up the last two weeks across the board, but nothing close to this post, so it was completely unexpected, although always welcomed. The surge is starting to slow down giving me a little time to reflect on what we could have done better, and what I learned from the experience. Here’s my lessons from a Bigfoot traffic spike.

Always Be Prepared

A Digg front page early on aside, we’d never had a huge day like this before, and we weren’t prepared. I woke up to find JR emailing me to say that the site was throwing the occasional database error and was generally slow. At that stage the story had 30,000 page views and the peak was yet to come. The challenge was to maximize server response times and neutralize any time outs, thankfully though our MediaTemple Dedicated Virtual server never once crashed, so in some ways we were lucky, I’d hate to think what would have happened if I’d been on a standalone box or shared hosting plan.

The scramble was on. How do we bring the load down. I started with WP-Super-Cache, but this took some time to install because I couldn’t ftp into the site for a while due to the load. Got that installed…then nothing. Oh, you have to update your .htaccess file, did that, and likely due to a redirect plugin I had running, it messed with the site settings, causing posts to return a post not found error message. Scrub that, look again, eventually find Hypercache and install that. Not sure if it’s working or not, but something took the edge of the memory load, even if the CPU was still tracking 99-100%.

My error was not having something installed and ready in advance. I spent hours trying to fix a problem when I should have had something easily at hand. If you’re running a WordPress install, find a good cache solution, and have it ready, or if you’re confident with the settings, have it on all the time, like many of the bigger sites do.

Sometimes quirky works

I know a few people have had a chuckle today over The Inquisitr getting traffic from a Bigfoot story, but we’re fortunate that the site has always had a space for odd and funny stories. When I wrote the post, I had no idea it would deliver this sort of traffic, but it did in spades. Sometimes thinking outside the square and being quirky can pay off. The lesson is that sometimes it pays to be different.

You don’t have to be first, but early helps

We weren’t the first site with the bigfoot story, but we were among the first to report it as word got out. Being first and unique is an important part of defining any blog, but sometimes a good story should be reported even when you’re not first to it. I’d bet the traffic to the sites who had this first was much bigger again, but we still managed to stake our claim.

Sometimes Digg doesn’t matter

The interesting thing for me in the traffic is that the story never hit the top of any of the major social voting sites, including Digg. We got a bit of traffic from Reddit (3k) but the rest came from all over the place (Google was 20%). Now we’ll never say no to being Dugg, and we love Digg traffic, but ultimately sometimes Digg doesn’t matter in scoring a surge of traffic. The other interesting thing with the traffic, 21% was via the front page direct, not the post. This in part was driven by references in the press to inquisitr.com without links. People seem to have no issues with copy and pasting a URL directly in for more. Naturally we’d have liked hard links, but you take what you can get.

Intro post

When I realized that the traffic was increasing and a significant amount of it was hitting the front page first, I put a post up introducing the site to new readers, complete with link to the Bigfoot post they were looking for so they could easily find it, and left the post on top for 6 hours. It’s a strategy used by Darren Rowse and I have no idea yet whether it worked but it’s a decent idea that’s worth considering if you ever get a big traffic spike.

Conclusion

Naturally I hope we have more days like this to help pay the bills and to grow the site. Whether this spike results in more long term traffic for The Inquisitr is yet to be seen, although I’ve noticed with smaller hits that the base level on the slow days keeps showing bigger numbers so I’m hopeful that this is some welcome momentum for the site. The lessons learned for me are to be prepared, and keep at it because you never know when you’ll strike a hit post. It can be done, and anyone with enough smarts and some luck thrown in for good measure can do it.

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Kevin Rose has announced the release of the new Digg Firefox 3 extension. Video demo above.

The key features: where ever you are, Digg will follow you:

Notifications: No matter where you are on the web, you can discover popular Digg stories and stay up to date on what your friends are Digging, submitting and commenting. These notifications are fully customizable. Within your preferences you can track different categories and media types, and turn notifications on or off.

I haven’t installed it yet, but it also promises the ability to Digg stories from the toolbar, a handy feature, but something you can get from other plugins (note though, if it allows you to do it without hitting Digg, then +1 as a feature). One for the Digg fans.

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The emphasis is mine, but the Google Analytics figures are critical here.Google Analytics is widely used by many sites, so in theory these figures in the mix should deliver reasonable results based on fact.

So what can you learn from Google Trends for Websites?

Omnidrive joined the deadpool in January

Despite Nik from Omnidrive claiming that May was a record month for Omnidrive, Google Trends shows the site flatlined in January. I checked the front page of Omnidrive: the service is using Google Analytics, so if there was any traffic it would be on this graph.

Propeller (formerly Netscape) moved ahead of Reddit in April for the first time, giving Propeller the number two spot in the social voting space. New comer Mixx is still a fair way behind, but is growing well. If you’re wondering why Digg isn’t in the chart, it’s because including Digg squashes the other lines flat.

Silicon Alley Insider is growing faster than the competition

If you take the two market leaders, TechCrunch and Mashable out of the equation, and look at the next biggest startup/ web 2.0 blogs, Silicon Alley Insider is growing the fastest.

People stopped using Megite. All at once

This could be a quirk in terms of the chart (maybe they stopped using Google Analytics?) but for a short time Megite was more popular than Techmeme, then the traffic stopped. Completely stopped. Tailrank is also showing no traffic as of mid April. Deadpool time perhaps?

Digg is more popular than the Australian Press

User generated content hating Australian journalists (not all journos, but some of them) should suck on this chart

Twitter may have officially jumped the shark

The graph seems to indicate that Twitter has peaked and is coming down the other side… only just, and it may change.

FriendFeed and Plurk have similar numbers

FriendFeed has solid, steady growth where as Plurk is a rollercoaster. Still, both are looking good

I’m catching up to Centernetworks!

I’ve always been obsessed by numbers and benchmarking (I spent too long working in jobs with KPIs), and the one site I really wanted to emulate in terms of traffic and position was Allen Stern’s Centernetworks. Great site, top bloke, and a great benchmark to aim for. I’m getting there. I don’t for one minute believe that The Inquisitr is pumping more traffic than Centernetworks, my guess is if I was doing half I’d be lucky, but it’s still really rather cool to have a chart that says I’m competitive with Allen. Now I just need some more links to improve the Technorati rank where I’m 9023 to Allen’s 1456. Enough self indulgence…must go back to working harder

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The site has announced plans for open sourcing of the social news protocol. It has launched a new development site and is actively soliciting programmer input.

Reddit’s alien mascot has more details:

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According to the Reddit blog, material for the show will come from hot stories on the Reddit front page every week, with show discussions occuring on a new yourweek page on Reddit. For those not local, the pilot episode and future episodes will be available online.

It’s an interesting experiment from Reddit, and it’s a show I’d watch. I’m still a frequent Digg visitor but I find the content on Reddit has more substance these days, to the point where I’ll often open 75% of the articles on the front page of Reddit where with Digg some days I wont even open one.

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