Here’s a surefire way of ensuring your site won’t make it to the Digg social news frontpage:

Recently (I honestly don’t know when), MSN launched a Digg clone in the Netherlands, called MSN reporter.

You can submit your story, and others can vote for it or against it. The top stories go to the MSN.nl homepage.

Now the boys at MSN haven’t really thought this through, as they store what stories you’ve voted on in… your cookie-jar!

Do you have access to a shell account on a unix server with some spare space? If so it’s pretty easy to incrementally backup your files securely with SSH.

When Kellogg pulled a Pontiac and told TV viewers to search for its Special K brand cereal on Yahoo!, Hitwise wondered if people really were the sheep Kellogg hoped they’d be. A line graph later, sure enough, people generally do what they’re told, as long as it’s on TV.

Although the concept of Digg seems very simple, it is actually very complicated.

eWeek’s Steve Bryant wondered what Google’s homepage would look like if it looked more like Yahoo’s. The purists look at him like they’re smelling onions, but others look at it and think it’s not such a bad idea.

Steve Bryant went and basically redesigned the Yahoo homepage as if it were created by Google filled with Google services, and instead of being a jab at either company, it looks great.

Sites like Digg are well known for driving thousands of visitors to a website within a very short period of time.

I like Pixelotto.com, Alex Tew’s followup to his Million Dollar Homepage.

While keeping informed and up to date about what is being written about Digg over the past several months I have come across a lot of information that really isn’t that insightful or in some cases is even just plain wrong.

You have to get up pretty darn early, if you want to try and game Digg.

It’s a bad news/good news situation for Yahoo in Korea. Yesterday, it was announced that the nation’s second largest portal intends to make a deal with Google when its agreement with Yahoo runs out. Today, however, Yahoo renewed its “search marketing distribution” partnership with Korea’s largest portal.

Resistance is futile! As Brinke Guthrie noted, the Google Personalized homepage has a serious bug at the moment which won’t allow you to go back to classic homepage.

I’m a big fan of the script.aculo.us javascript library.

There’s a useful li’l weight tracker you can add to your Google personalized homepage, created by Brian W. Fitzpatrick, a Google software engineer. Brian calls the Gadget the Google 15, after the weight geeks usually gain after starting their Google jobs and being introduced to all the free food.

I just got an email from Google stating that Google Checkout transactions will be free until the end of the year:

Recently I came across a customer, who was very adamant on making a cool looking homepage and putting all their promotions and one of the main lead generation links (sign-up for newsletter) only on the homepage.

PHP security guru Chris Shiflett has a great post about the dangers of Cross Domain Flash.

This should be an eye opener to many. In September Mitre reported that web application vulnerabilities are claiming the top three spots on their CVE request list, beating out Buffer Overflows.

I came across Sphinx via the MySQL Performance Blog (which has some good entries you might want to check out). It is an Open Source Full Text SQL Search Engine.

Jason Calacanis of Netscape/Weblogs Inc./AOL just kicked off the day at the Blog Business Summit here in lovely and cloudy Seattle.