The secret of being Dugg, exposed

I wrote an article about Smashing Magazine and was going to post it next week. Not sure if I’m still going to.

You’ve probably seen Smashing Magazine at least once; almost every entry they “write” has made it to the front page of Digg because of their abuse use of Top X Lists.

The reason I’m considering not posting my original article and giving them any more praise for mastering the art of being Dugg, is because it seems that they like to borrow their lists from others.

Today’s post which has almost 1400 Diggs at the moment, is called “83 Beautiful WordPress Themes You (Probably) Haven’t Seen“. A couple people have commented on Digg saying it looks a little familiar to another post on another blog, “80 WordPress Themes“. In fact, it looks exactly the same other than them adding 3 additional blogs to the list.

I could be mistaken and both sites might be owned and written by the same individual, albeit highly unlikely.

So, I’m not sure whether or not I’ll ever post anything else about Smashing Magazine. I’d like to hear what they have to say about this “borrowed interest” first. Anybody want to step up to the mic?

UPDATE: Read Vitaly Friedman’s comment below. Amazing how quickly he got back to us. I’m still not a fan of republishing content from one blog to another. But thanks for clearning up the issue Vitaly nonetheless.

What would the best community app be like?

When it comes to forums, the selection has always been limited to vBulletin, phpBB, Vanilla, and a few clones of each.

Same for blogs. You’ve got WordPress, Typepad, Textpattern, and hosted versions like Blogger, Vox, etc…

We use WordPress and Vanilla for YGG, which each have their strengths and weaknesses.

Through the process of building the current and previous versions of this site we’ve learned a lot about communities and the apps available to create and maintain one.

I think all of them are significantly broken in some way.

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9 Tips for Managing Chaos

In 2005 I organized 2,000+ volunteers over the course of 5 months on the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. I was responsible for the lives of up to 200 strangers; feeding them, providing shelter, managing projects… Strangers who daily drove off in 12 of my vehicles to use power tools they weren’t experts with… The chaos can’t be controlled, only managed.

Here are 9 chaos management tips for anyone running their own business… or trying to juggle 2 bowling pins, a baby and a nail-gun.

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The socially conscious career

“Go Green. Get Rich.” was the headline on the cover of a recent issue of Business 2.0. In an economy where consumers have an enormous amount of influence and impact on the products companies are producing, the people’s concern for a more sustainable future is fueling the fire of a rapidly growing industry.

Clean air vehicles, renewable energy, carbon offsetting, feeding starving children, solid waste management—not the sexiest of syllables, but the numbers are easy on the eyes.

Feeding starving children a nutritional meal doesn’t sound like a great business model. Last I checked, most starving children couldn’t afford healthy snacks. Nonetheless, Nutriset‘s sales last year topped 25 million with its major buyers including UNICEF.

PyroGenesis is hot shit…literally. The Montreal-based company has refined a process called plasma arc gasification, turning solid waste into marketable by-products. Using this technology, Carnival, the $11 billion cruise ship operator, reduces 5 tons per day of cabin and food waste on its vessels into a few pounds of harmless sand. In not too distant a future, wasteland might just be the land upon which we stand.

The world is filled with serious concerns. Those that can build an intelligent, creative solution will discover that there is profit to be found in doing good.

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Zecco’s got IRAs

Zecco, a site we’ve proclaimed our love for in the past, has finally released IRA services. They’re offering zero commission IRAs with access to over 300 listed ETFs for you to build a diversified portfolio with asset allocation across large-cap, small-cap, foreign and fixed income securities. You also get $0 commissions up to 10 trades a day and 40 trades a month in both your regular brokerage account and your IRA. That’s up to 20 free trades a day.

The only real fee here is a $30 annual whack for the IRA which isn’t much - hey, they can’t absorb everything!

On a personal note, I currently have a Zecco account and have had a few conversations with customer service representatives before. They’re not outsourced and they’re fantastic to deal with. I highly recommend them! Check ‘em out.

This ad would have owned the Super Bowl

2007 was one of the worst years when it comes to Super Bowl ads. It seemed most companies either went the celeb or violence route, producing nothing near as powerful as Apple’s 1984 or as addictive as Budweiser’s Wassup.

One spot that I wish ran during the Super Bowl and would have taken top rank, in my opinion at least, is a promo for NBC’s prime time. Not only is it hillarious, its intelligent in that its created a new wave of pop culture that even Drew Barrymore jumped on in last week’s episode of SNL.

You need to get all over this. “That’s what she said“.

Furniture is getting smarter. Too smart.

We’ve seen a walking table, an expanding table, and now, an accordion chair that morphs into just about any shape. I think my office chair tried to kill me while I was sleeping last night. Be afraid.

Bill Gates slaps Apple’s ads

There’s a great interview with Bill Gates at Newsweek about Vista. They asked him some questions about Apple’s PC/Mac commercials and it sounds like he got a little heated up. Here’s an excerpt…
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Are you bugged by the Apple commercial where John Hodgman is the PC, and he has to undergo surgery to get Vista?
I’ve never seen it. I don’t think the over 90 percent of the [population] who use Windows PCs think of themselves as dullards, or the kind of klutzes that somebody is trying to say they are.

How about the implication that you need surgery to upgrade?
Well, certainly we’ve done a better job letting you upgrade on the hardware than our competitors have done. You can choose to buy a new machine, or you can choose to do an upgrade. And I don’t know why [Apple is] acting like it’s superior. I don’t even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you’re really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? There’s not even the slightest shred of truth to it.

Does the entire tenor of that campaign bother you, that Mac is the cool guy and PC -
That’s for my customers to decide.

In many of the Vista reviews, even the positive ones, people note that some Vista features are already in the Mac operating system.
You can go through and look at who showed any of these things first, if you care about the facts. If you just want to say, “Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along,” that’s fine. If you’re interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. I mean, it’s fascinating, maybe we shouldn’t have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine. So, yes, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user interface-wise. Let’s be realistic, who came up with [the] file, edit, view, help [menu bar]? Do you want to go back to the original Mac and think about where those interface concepts came from?

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Them are fightin’ words. Wouldn’t it be cool to see Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to head to head on Celebrity Deathmatch?

You can read the rest of the interview here

We love Juxtaviews

juxtaviews

We all know someone that knows everyone. They introduce you to celebs at parties, address a-listers by their first name, and make you the most envious person in the room. Juxtaviews is the equivalent of that person, only nicer.

If combining a juxtaposition and interviews results in an inside look at Cambrian House, Feedburner, David Seah, and Threadless among others, we like that combination. That’s exactly what Juxtaviews is, a collection of interviews with some blog and business superstars that we all wish we had the courage to interview ourselves.

If you haven’t been there yet, head over to Juxtaviews. You’ll love it as much as we do. Maybe you’ll even see a YGG interview on there someday. ;)

Amazon Affiliate — A good source of income?

mit advertising lab

Last week, MIT Advertising Lab shared some stats on their Amazon Associate performance. Their blog features three hand-picked books every few weeks at the top of the site.

Many people use the Amazon Associate program and insert the recommended book widget into their blog sidebar. But you don’t hear much about how they’re converting, most likely because the majority of small sites that feature them don’t convert at all.

MIT is different. By displaying the books like they’re a part of the site and making them stand out, since November 2006, they’ve sold 116 books through their site. Yes, 116 books!

Even though Amazon only pays up to 8.5% of the book’s price, the amount that MIT has converted is still very impressive.

If you currently use Amazon’s affiliate program or have considered it, take a look at AdLab first and think of unique ways you can make relevant books stand out on your site.

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