Reddit and Digg are fairly similar in regards to this post – but I am going to concentrate on Digg.

When Digg started out it was hailed as a service to help bloggers market their articles/posts/thoughts/art etc.The simple math said that if something was good then it would rise to the top of the pile. It would stand out as todays must see/read.

It gave the little guy hope. Hope of finding an audience. Hope of spreading his/her words to an ever growing populous of avid readers.Hope of, dare I say it, significance.

See, the problem with blogging is that we really only do it with the vein hope that someone will give a rats ass about what we say and comment or start a discussion.

In the very early weeks of Digg people would find your voice and respond. They’d trounce your web server and have your hosting company screaming at you because all of the other little websites on your shared host are now out of action as well as your own.

It was a chance to get noticed. The entrepreneurial spirit drenched its pages.

Now, it is a decrepit, dying, corrupt beast gasping for its last breath.

At any one time on Digg‘s front page you will find a story from one of the major news corporations. This is not surprising you may state – after all they announce the latest breaking news.

You can also find the same story posted many times with different titles by different users.

Teams of people with multiple accounts all get together to promote their wares. Companies exist to market articles from all sorts of companies e.g News Agencies, and Political leaders with agendas to push (I’m looking at you Obama).

When people are paid to market articles and they use Digg to do it – the whole site is no longer in the hands of the little guy. It’s been taken over. No battle was raged and no one died.The money just walked in and took what it wanted – namely – the front page and every other page that you could be bothered to look at.

The whole site is now so wrapped up by agenda pushers that it no longer holds any value to the small blog writer.

You could almost associate the way that big corporations and political parties have raped Digg and other social networking sites with the way the banks have screwed the financial system. They have no essence, no spirit and they have pushed aside all the little guys to enforce their command on the playground.

In their never ending quest to increase the number on their quarterly profit and loss reports they have stolen everything that made this past boom so great.

Social networking as it is now, is just one big scam to cram as many people into one portal as possible and then spoon feed them adverts – but I am getting off topic.

So why would you buy Digg? Any attempt to weed out the corrupt users will just lead to more ways for them to cover their tracks. If you have got users – they will never go away.

The money you’d have to fork out to buy the company would be completely wasted as the time it would take to break even would be well into Web 6.0. During which time your unique visitors will probably have dropped to like 3. You, your fake account and one other person who just hasn’t caught on yet.

Categories: Uncategorized

I released a Plugin in August that was not fully compatible with WordPress 2.6+. That post was here : For WordPress: Affiliate Link Cloak Plugin.

The issue lay with how WordPress handles global variables. The most recent versions of WordPress import plugins within a function which screws with variable scope.

The issue has now been resolved – so the plugin is now working in WordPress 2.6+ versions.

This plugin allows you to cloak your affiliate links so that readers of your site will not know that you are including your affiliate details on links to sites that you recommend to them. Full details can be gained from my original post : For WordPress: Affiliate Link Cloak Plugin.

Any issues – please leave a comment…

MCN Redirect – Affiliate Link Cloak Plugin

Tags: affiliate, affiliate link cloak plugin, link cloak, mcn redirect, mcn_redirect

Categories: Uncategorized

I have created a simple WordPress plugin for anyone who wants it.

Basically it allows you to cloak any links of your choosing so that the user doesn’t know where they are to be redirected when they click on them.

There is a page in the admin section of WordPress to maintain the list of cloaked links as well as a sidebar option list in the “Write Post” page so that you can easily choose which link to insert into the post you are constructing.

The links will be in the format :

<your site>/go/<your link text>

e.g http://blog.mcnicholl.com/go/musicreviewzone

The above example is setup to redirect to http://www.musicreviewzone. There are many improvements that I could make to this plugin, but finding the time is difficult. If there is enough demand for enhancements – then I’ll see what I can do

The plugin is pretty simple but hasn’t been extensively tested – definitely working with WordPress 2.3.2 – definitely not working with 2.6 – I’ll find out why and post an update. So be warned. Any feedback is welcome and if you could drop me a note to say how it is working out for you – that’d be great.

User Manual:

1. Install the plugin
2. Go to Manage->Redirect Links to administrate your cloaked links
3. Go to Write->Post to use the links. You should see a side menu called “Redirect Links” – from here you just have to click on a cloaked link to insert it into the body of your post.
4. That’s it!

Screenshots:

Download the plugin here : 20080827_mcn_redirect

Tags: affiliate, cloak, cloak links, wordpress plugin

Categories: Uncategorized

Over at the forums on Entrecard, there is a movement growing, prospering and above all striving for the free speech of adults everywhere.

Recently the owner of Entrecard banned some members who verbally attacked one of the moderators of the forum. Those who where banned, were wronged as the forum that they were venting their frustrations on had been specifically setup for just such things : to vent – and the moderator was giving just as good as he was getting.

The new forum, named Firestorm, was created by the programmer of the site as a direct response to some members becoming irritated by the attitude and written language used by others – believing it to be rude and offensive.

Now the banned users have had their accounts reinstated and issued with apologies as the whole sorry mess was a big misunderstanding.

Ofcourse this hasn’t helped right the wrong and some of the banned users are now trying to make their last stand: To protect free speech.

The internet is a volitile place and some areas can be quite disturbing. It’s like walking through a city – some areas are pleasant, some disgusting and the rest is just dingey. Forums can also be viewed in the same way. Anyone that doesn’t like something contained in them should just not look at it.

This post is a little rant-ish, sorry for that. Just needed to let that out

Move along. Nothing to see here…

Categories: Uncategorized

With only 2 weeks to go I have just realised that I haven’t bought any presents nor had any ‘christmasy’ inclinations. What made me realise? I hear you ask….. Well – every christmas the free TV channels start playing high budget films. Roll in ‘Oceans Twelve’.

Since I work a full time job alongside setting up a business of my own its been :

while (!(hasMentalBreakdown())) {
work();
home();
work();
sleep();
}


So here starts the countdown until Christmas! Do you have all your presents bought?

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Categories: Uncategorized