In Friday’s post, I admitted the social media can be a waste of time.  I talked about doing some unproductive things online and how, despite that (or even because of that), marketers should be paying a LOT of attention to social media marketing.  But as many of you have commented in the first post, social media is really not a waste o

If you’ve ever played a card game on your computer, then, according to Sheldon Goldberg, you may have Sheldon Goldberg to thank for it.  Goldberg holds a patent titled "Method and system for playing games on a network," and is now suing companies like AOL, Yahoo, and Google over what he seems to consider his property.

The ball dropped for the 100th time in Times Square, so I suppose that makes it official.  It’s a new year, 2008 to be exact.  So what does this mean for the search engines? Simple, change the way it used to work, right?

$300 million could be the magic number that sends Digg to new ownership, as bloggers speculate on who might end up the new top Digger.

Since we are winding down 2007, I thought it would be appropriate to put together what I thought are the top 10 blog posts about Mixx.com that have been written in 2007.

Certainly there have been a lot of interesting blog posts about Mixx, but these are certainly the best ones.

So, without further delay, here are the blog posts that I think are the top 10 blog posts about Mixx for 2007:

Please note that I have not put these in any particular order.

Since we are winding down the year of 2007, I thought it would be appropriate to put together what I thought are the top 10 blog posts about Sphinn that have been written in 2007.

The keys to successfully creating content that really grabs social media users – think not just Digg and Del.icio.us but also forums – are commitment and creativity, or so says the Interactive Site Reviews panel at PubCon.

Sometimes it’s not so much that you’re handling traffic from Digg.com, it’s that the traffic is handling you. Crashed servers, slow-loading site, all that traffic and nobody clicking on ads can equal wasted time and money, but it doesn’t have to, as long as you know your visitors and how be ready for them.

It seems like Digg users have been asking for–and Kevin Rose promising–a category for images and photos forever. Well the long wait is now over and you can finally uploaded your favorite lolcats image.

At the Digg blog, Kevin Rose announces the launch of image support and also better organization of existing categories. Here’s what Digg users are waking up to today:

It took a while but Digg finally has an images category available for contributions and sharing with other Diggers.

Dave Winer has a great post about the next step in Digg clones.

This is something I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about too.

What makes a great selection of links? Does it take a million people? Or only a handful.

It’s hard to find anybody to agree with the logic, and certainly the only people that appear to be writing about it have done so to heap ridicule and scorn, but (apparently) the same person to bring us WhyFirefoxIsBlocked.com has now introduced WhyDiggIsBlocked.com.

In the spirit of the season – we’ve compiled a few things we are thankful for around here at Ignite.

Users of Digg can keep an eye on how candidates (or presumably their campaigns) interact with stories appearing on the social media site.

One has to wonder what kind of traffic and ad revenue the New York Times gave up while its Times Select subscription model was in place.

Rupert Murdoch plans to make WSJ.com free to increase readership and generate far more in advertising. Right now the site gets 1 million viewers and Murdoch hopes to see it go to 15 million. For now a subscription just to the online edition is $79 for a year.

Microsoft has confirmed that a new version of its Messenger instant messaging software will ship with and when Mac Office 2008 hits stores.

While we don’t know anything about features, or even if it’ll be named Windows Live Messenger or MSN Messenger (presumably the new name, though), at least Mac fans are getting a new version.

Only one website’s buttons appear on Wall Street Journal stories, inviting readers to share articles, and those buttons belong to Digg.

Over the past few years, I’ve written a number of posts that caught the attention of Digg users. Many were surprises, but a dozen or so were written specifically for Digg, mostly for clients.

I’m speaking tonight at a panel put on by Business Wire.  If you want to come, please do so, and be sure to say hello.  The topic is on social media generally, but more specifically looking at using social media for enhancing your news value. 

It has now been nearly 6 weeks since the new shout feature was launched at Digg and I am not a big fan. Here are 10 reasons why I hate it:

1. New diggers are now able to get submissions on the homepage.

2. It doesn’t require as much skill to get submissions on the homepage – anyone can do it.

3. New diggers are adding 900+ friends, shouting them all and getting 40 diggs in less then an hour.

4. It’s even harder to get my lame submissions on the homepage.

5. Top diggers are being challenged.