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tamar
I should Sphinn this by virtue of the commentary. Then again, someone would probably call me out for that ... except I actually read the commentary.
And Ann, value or not, it's uh, unprofessional of a publication like SEJ which I believe is the sentiment of the other commenters here.
"I was talking about a Sphinn mod who did admit to me the blind Sphinn. "
I asked you to make an example of me, Lisa. Be more forthright if you're going to mention it at all.
Unsphinns are not the same as Desphinns. If someone accidentally Sphinns something, they are well within their right to Unsphinn it. It doesn't count against the story to Unsphinn it. It simply removes the existing vote. On the other hand, Desphinn is one negative vote; it negates an existing vote, and normally there's a reason someone specifies to Desphinn (like you see with the 3 Desphinns here). That's why I believe it's public whereas Unsphinns are not. The latter removes any involvement on that specific Sphinn (save for comments, if there are any written by that member). That's why I Unsphunn this.
As it is, the Unsphinn utility is heavily underused. I doubt most people even know it exists.
In any event, I admit to Sphinning this as an accident blindly. Clearly I should have ignored the Sphinn this button on the SEJ post when Gunjan IM'd me yesterday and brought this to my attention. To be honest, besides seeing the title and the Sphinn this button, I saw and read nothing else. Yup, now I said it and you know which mod is accountable. I'll be a little more diligent next time.
Lisa made a good point last night. This excellent post by Brian Solis (http://sphinn.com/story/118836) has 2 Sphinns - the submitter's and my own. Will it become hot? I'm sure it won't because crap frontpages and steals attention from the quality stuff.
Something to think about.
Brent, I'm not saying people don't make mistakes. I'm saying that the expectations of the publication may shift when they see something like this.
Story: Tamar’s Baby Gift Drive
Thank you everyone, and thanks so much for this totally unexpected gift drive. (I had nothing to do with it!)
And yes, minutes later, I really was tweeting about it. My doctor was telling me that she wasn't finished yet and I was so excited to share the news that I basically ignored her. ;)
Story: How to make money with SEO?
I happen to love Aaron's rebuttal here: http://www.seobook.com/most-seo-strategies-are-not-focused-hitting-home-runs
Jeremy and his crew have built a stellar product with BuzzStream. Definitely a valuable asset and resource.
This guy has way too much drama in his life. He also claims to have invented Facebook.
http://venturebeat.com/2007/09/02/who-founded-facebook-aaron-greenspan/
Story: The SEO Search Game
clifflyon, why don't you submit a story to Sphinn instead of spamming Brent's submission with a totally irrelevant comment?
Cliff, your first contribution to this site was a comment with a bunch of links about a Google issue. This story, on the other hand, was not related: it is about Digg's auto bury. If you want people to actually give you attention about your Google injustice, go to http://sphinn.com/submit and focus on a genuine submission. Don't hijack Brent's submission to promote your own agenda.
Cliff, here is a link to get you started: http://sphinn.com/guidelines.php
Let's think common courtesy here. If someone personally told a crowd of people (verbally) a story about something Digg related, and I'm brand new to the conversation and unknown to the crowd, would it be appropriate for me to chime in about an unrelated issue? Let's remember here that nobody knows me.
The same rules for common etiquette hold true here, and here, we call it [n]etiquette. Your FIRST contribution to Sphinn was laden with self-promotional links (which you or someone else subsequently deleted).
To answer your questions:
What comment is appropriate? Something about Digg's auto-bury, perhaps. I mean, after all, the story WAS about that.
For information about me, you can click on the link that points to "tamar" and see that my handle is my real name. I've nothing to hide, but while this is a side point, I'm also a mod here at Sphinn: http://sphinn.com/staff.php
I hope that clarifies.
I'm waiting for Sphinn v2 for that, Brent - I never see incoming messages with the current system. But I agree totally. The entire conversation didn't belong here. Sorry that I hijacked your thread even further.
Awesome! Well then, Pat rocks and so does Greg! :)
And Tipd.com rocks too. I'm not just saying that cuz I'm a moderator there either :D
"it was more convenient to go with the one strike you're out policy."
Except it wasn't a one-strike-you're-out policy, Halfdeck, nor is any of the rest of that statement true. I don't think any respected member on Sphinn has ever gotten banned that quickly without attempts of outreach to achieve mutual understanding on behalf of the Sphinn staff/volunteers. There was a lot more to that specific situation, and the discussion actually lasted quite awhile.
(As for Tad: I still wish I knew how to delete comments. I only know how to edit them.)
Going back to John's statement, I just want to make a few comments and observations:
John said: "I'm embarassed to see my questions taking up so much CEO energy for all the wrong reasons. It's really awkward. Almost painful. It's almost enough to make one wonder if there's not some other agenda or something underlying this activity?"
If Danny and the moderators didn't care about the community, they'd leave these issues unaddressed. The bottom line: Sphinn is a social news site, and guess what -- I think most people here wearing a mod/admin hat want that community to flourish. Mods and admins are very open about addressing concerns and they've spent a lot of man hours to do that. This goal would have been achieved publicly or privately, so I'm not entirely sure why this needed to turn into a big drama rantfest with nothing but completely off-base sour/bitter accusations.
Responding to community concerns is a relatively new way of community involvement (and one that I personally advocate). I suppose, though, that not everyone is used to personal attention to speciifc complaints. If the mods/admins actually address an open question, should that be construed as further adding to a big cloud of smoke? And if nobody said anything, I guess you'd have to argue that we're being silent (just as Danny said). I guess we can't win here. Either way, we're losers.
John, it may be helpful to see the good in people. Not everything here is a conspiracy.
"You can sugar-coat it however you want. Fact remains either one of the mods deleted onreact's comment and isn't coming clean"
Halfdeck, I'm failing to understand why you quoted me and then referred to someone else in your response. I have no knowledge of the Tad issue, so I didn't comment on that except to say that I don't know how to delete comments. I only responded about your earlier p1r comment. I can only respond about issues I have some knowledge of.
As a judge who picked out the finalists in 2 categories, I can only speak for myself to say that yes, I did read the articles. I also will guess, given the fact that most of the judges with me decided upon the same best articles to be in the finals, that they, too, read the articles.
To be honest, though, some of the articles that hit the finals really baffled me, so I'm going to guess that not all articles were read thoroughly or at all by some of the judges. In fact, I know that some of the judges felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume of posts that were actually in specific semifinal categories.
That said, should Matt weed them out himself? I'm really not sure. But as far as popularity contests go, I don't necessarily think it's that (at least not all the time). Then again, at the same time, some people will ask for votes and others won't. Is it, therefore, people "voting for the authors they already like," or are they paying homage to those who asked? I think it's really the latter.
Story: SEO License Plates
Yeah - funny to see that it was available. Last year, eVisibility's Steve got a similar plate in the same state. Not sure why he didn't just settle on "SEO" ;)
http://www.imnotadoctor.com/2008/03/07/seo-license-plates/
This looks awesome and while I've found much luck at the official WordPress support forum, I'm glad there's an alternative since the volume on wordpress.org is pretty exhaustive. Great work, Cesar.
@mrbleeuz, thank you for using English words in your comment. Unfortunately, that's about all I understood from it -- it actually isn't written in English.
@Missci, no. I was at Web 2.0 Expo and they have been using Digg's recommendation engine (which happens to suck) for awhile, but Digg would never be doing away with its highly propular frontpage. If you want that kind of front page personalization, there's always Mixx.
@guillebravo6: It's ironic given the topic of this post that a bunch of Sphinn account holders who use Digg pretty much exclusively (and never Sphinn, unless asked--a fact which I confirmed) came out of the woodwork to vote on this story.
My problem with this post is that there's literally nothing new here. It almost seems as if this is a repeat of my talk from SMX Social Media in October 2006.
The problem with Digg as evidenced by this article is that you need to get a lot of Diggers to help push your story to the frontpage (and this likely will also yield some organic votes). It's also why I gave up on Digg (because like I said in my post, begging for votes became a full-time job. Sadly, it's obvious that people still do it!) I don't use Digg anymore, yet I have forged *so* many relationships with people on Digg who now are not reachable via IM services because they are being spammed to death via IM to vote on stories. This is NOT an isolated incident. People are getting sick of being asked to vote for social news sites. Sadly, Digg set a really bad precedent.
By the way, Digg has a community. Sphinn has one too, and there are pretty regular and active members in it. You should get to know the community members and involve yourself regularly within this community: submit stories, vote, and comment (more so than you've done thus far). Being active in the community and networking is a key part of *any* social network involvement and will help you yield success that actually supersedes gaming the system. This article failed to touch upon that pretty critical point.
Story: Do Those Who “Can’t”, Teach?
@netmeg, I changed the submission URL to what I believe it was supposed to be. Apparently it was submitted with a 1 in front of it so Sphinn redirected it to Sphinn.com rather than to the story.
And @nicknick, no need to edit your description -- you can simply email the mods and we'll take care of it. :) There's a contact form link on the footer of the site.
Story: Do Those Who “Can’t”, Teach?
@nicknick, you're welcome, but I can only aspire to be like Danny. I'm not him, and as per my earlier message, I'm the one who fixed the link. :)
Story: 70+ Most Useful Mashable Posts for Search Marketers and Developers - II