As Digg grows more with each new day, many users, including myself, are looking for ways to better network with friends and content. I propose the Digg Widget to help do just that.

But first…

Jeremiah Hoyet has an excellent post called “Will Digg’s Growth Affect The Community?” over on his blog, reeverb. Continue Reading

The Digg bury feature will kill the site, and depict social news in a very bad way

While stopping in a small shop for a pack of chewing gum today I ran into a reader of my blog. This has never happened to me before, but I just moved to a smaller city and launched a local blog with the name of the city in the title. This has helped me suddenly start ranking for city related keywords. In turn, many locals are finding this particular blog. As it turns out, this individual had seen my picture on the blog and knew who I was at first site. Weird no?

The gentleman works in IT at a local software firm, and was loaded with questions regarding what I do and how I find time to maintain so many blogs. It was all interesting dialog, but the real kicker is a discussion that came up about Digg.com. Apparently the guys in his office had been talking about it a few days earlier and they had all drawn the conclusion that Digg had hit its peak and would probably begin to see declines in the very near future. But not only that, he also felt Digg was putting social news in general into a very bad reputation.

I couldn’t agree more. Continue Reading

As much as it pains me to say this, several of the Republican candidates for President have a following that is playing downright dirty across the web. In fact, they’re flat out cheating, and we’ve caught them red handed.

What candidates have these cheating fan clubs? So far, we’ve been able to pinpoint large groups of cheaters who support Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo, and Newt Gingrich. Granted, we can’t start pointing fingers at the candidates themselves, because we have no way of knowing if they are indeed involved. My guess is that they aren’t. But we should certainly contact them and let them know we think they should condemn such actions. Continue Reading

It certainly appears that way. And Digg isn’t going out of its way to prove it isn’t the case. Last night my Digg account vanished for no reason at all. The message I got when I tried to login said that my account no longer existed due to “misuse”.

That’s odd, how would I have misused my account in the last week when I haven’t even USED the account in at least a week. And even when I was using it, I was only voting on OTHER stories for the most part. I hadn’t even Dugg one of my own stories in a month, so I couldn’t imagine what was going on.

I immediately contacted Digg asking what had happened. I used a very simple message that was polite and straight to the point.

Digg.com Staff,

Today I went to login to my account only to find that my user account is completely gone. What happened to it and why?

Please advise.

User Name: ericodom

-Eric

Before I shock you with the response, let’s have a re-cap of some of the posts I’ve made in the past about Digg.

Is this proof that Digg.com is biased?

More on Digg’s Political Bias

Others Stories and posts:
Why is Digg being censored?

Fascists, Stalkers, and Moonbats, oh my!

Digg Bury Brigade

Troubles in Diggville

Digg say hello to “fair and balanced”

Digg the rigged

It’s very clear that Digg is either actively working to diminish the influence found in stories that do not align with the beliefs of the left, or at least they allow Liberal user groups to game the system with the same agenda.

Was Digg biased against me in giving me the ban? It sure looks like it.

About 80% of the stories I Digg are what some would consider Conservative. I hide nothing in the way I vote and because of it my stories have never gotten any ground. Most of the time they will get a bunch of votes real quick, and then disappear into oblivion. Obviously, there is a group of users that serve no purpose other than to shoot content they disagree with politically right out of the sky.

Could it be that I was banned for being a Conservative? Not according to Digg. According to Digg I was banned for, brace yourself, ADULT CONTENT!

Adult content? Are you kidding me?

Your account was banned for violating Digg Terms Of Use by submitting
adult content.

For more info: http://digg.com/tos

-The Digg Watch Team.

Ok, perhaps I *accidentally* submitted a page that had a banner ad or something on it that could have been deemed adult. I then replied to Digg to show me the story that was in question, as I couldn’t access the account to look for myself.

Then comes this response.

Sorry about that. It was an error on our side. Sorry for the
inconvenience caused.

-The Digg Watch Team.

The account is now back online.

Come on Digg, you should be above this kind of game. There is no point in playing it. Either you’re fair, or you’re not.

Which is it?

Most Conservatives are ignoring the net regulation issue. A quick tour through the Conservative blogosphere will reveal very little information regarding the coming war between citizens and big government. It’s something that I hope groups like Scott Cleland’s NETCompetition can soon change.

Last week in DC I had the privilege of chatting with Scott about this movement and what needs to happen to put more light on the issue. We both agreed that the left is crushing us in the fight, mostly in part thanks to MoveOn.org and other online Liberal cronies. Continue Reading

A new website has gone public that is fully Web 2.0 compliant and will probably create some smiling faces within the blogosphere. The Beta project, Open Congress, looks very promising and I’ve already found myself surfing the pages with a certain level of addiction.

The site provides the latest house votes, bills, and news that is aggregated from blog posts throughout the internet. If you’re one who keeps an eye on bills, you’ll definitely want to keep an eye on this site.

Check out Open Congress!

Corporate Media, or as some like to call it… Mainstream Media, is sluggish when it comes to learning the tricks of the online trade. Our own local newspaper sites here in Nevada are some of the worst at giving perspective internet readers a reason to stick around.

Why? Simple really. They require you to LOG IN for a good chunk of their stories! What kind of madness is this? Why do I have to log in for YOU to use MY eyes to gain more advertisers? My theory is that they are grasping for data to try and figure out why they are failing so badly. But what they don’t realize is they quickly, in fact INSTANTLY lose potential readers such as myself.

Take Business Wire for example. You can’t read ANYTHING on their site without having to register and login. This is nonsense!

Reno-Gazette Journal, The Nevada Appeal, and even my favorite Nevada newspaper, the Review Journal are all guilty of this. Yet they seem to be shifting a lot of advertisers to the sites as opposed to the traditional print options.

So WHY on earth do they wish to turn what could be their most loyal group of readers, or “page surfers” away?

Inquiring minds want to know!

-Eric Odom

Last night I received a copy of an e-mail conversation between Crystal and one of the ConservaBloggers. The blogger was on the hunt for a way to use ftp to get files to his hosting account and didn’t quite know where to start.

Here at ConservaBlogs we use a specific plugin for Firefox to handle all of our ftp needs. The extension, Fire ftp, is arguably one of the easiest to use ftp clients available via open source.

First, in order to use this you’ll need to scrap that crappy Internet Explorer browser and pick up the free browser, Firefox. Then go to the plugin page and download the Firefox extension.

You’ll love it!

-Eric