Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Slashdot, Newsvine, NowPublic, Yahoo! Buzz. Between these seven sites, traffic to a particular website can easily exceed 100,000, potentially much higher.
With so much power to drive people to various websites across the Internet, why are none of them greatly involved with charity? I’m not talking about donating – I’m sure that the companies or their executives donate. I’m talking about making a difference. I’m talking about using their power to drive traffic and applying it to charity websites.
The reason that they don’t is that they (other than Slashdot) are strictly driven by the actions, likes, and intentions of the users. You could argue that there is a human hand or two manipulating the system from time to time, but that’s an entirely different post.
Would it be wrong or unjustified to use the server-busting power of their front pages for an occasional bit of philanthropy? It wouldn’t be hard to do at all. There would be those who would cry out “don’t preach to me” or “keep your humanity to yourself” but for the most part, I believe the communities would embrace it. Who knows – they might just learn something from time to time that has more substance than lolcats and bacon.
Digg could very easily create a category for charity. They could hire a handful of people to moderate the category more closely than others to keep the spam to a minimum. The threshold could be lowered a bit (if necessary, though it probably wouldn’t be) to get a story or two a day on the front page.
As with all categories, if a user doesn’t want “charity shoved down their throat” they can always turn the category off completely.
Reddit could adopt a different type of charitable technique. By making a charity subreddit that was featured as one of the primary selections on the front page and making it a default, the subreddit would grow quickly. No need for moderators – the community self-moderates well.
Even better, they can integrate their technology into a new site dedicated to charity, activism, and philanthropy.
Slashdot is clearly more tech-niche-oriented, but their control of the front page is a perfect way to make sure that tech-related stories involving charities (there are plenty) received attention from time to time.
Newsvine and NowPublic have strong communities that really pays more attention to original stories written on the websites by the users than most of the links posted there. It would take the users themselves, especially the “powerful” ones, to take more of a stand and write about charities (then link to them, of course). Still, the sites can help promote it through special sections dedicated strictly to charity and posted on the front page.
Yahoo! Buzz – still a tough one to understand from a traffic perspective, but potentially the most powerful of them all. As with Slashdot, the super-popular stories are hand-picked, so squeezing in a story or two every now and then for the sake of righteousness would be a piece of cake.
StumbleUpon already has a way to implement charity into their system. They have an advertising platform that allows people to buy Stumbles for a nickel. Why not open that up and allow some charities to join in? They could easily send a conservative 500-1000 people a day to a page with a 5 cent discount given to charities. My math is spotty at best, but I believe that comes to a total cost of none, both for the charity and for StumbleUpon. If it does well, the charities can always purchase more than their low daily quota.
Regardless of what they do, it is important and practical that they do something. Times are tough for many. Charitable giving is naturally down as a result. With the power that they wield, it just makes sense that they should use just a small bit of that power to help make the world better.
Here is an email that I (and a lot of other people) received from BlogRush John Reese:
After careful consideration, we have decided to shutdown the BlogRush service. If you have the widget code on your blog you will need to remove it.
When BlogRush launched in late-2007 it spread like wildfire all over the Web. Thousands of bloggers were talking about it and the service exploded to become one of the fastest growing free services in the history of the Web. During the first year of the service it successfully served 3.4 Billion blog post headlines and the BlogRush widget could be found on blogs all over the world; even up until the moment we closed down the service.
BlogRush didn’t grow without its fair share of problems — from security issues to abusive users trying to ‘game’ the system to much lower click-rates than expected. We also had some problems with trying to fairly control the quality of the network, and in the process made many mistakes in deciding what blogs should stay or go. All of these issues, ultimately, limited the service’s full potential.
Our team worked very hard to try and build a service that would truly help bloggers of all sizes get free traffic to their blogs. This was our primary focus. Not once did we ever try to monetize the service with ads or anything else. BlogRush never made a single penny in revenue. We wanted to be able to help our users FIRST and then worry about monetizing the service later. Unfortunately, the service didn’t work out like we had hoped. (It happens.)
I want to say “Thank You” to all of the great bloggers that at least gave BlogRush a test to see if it would work for them. We sincerely appreciate you giving the service a try.
We have received several offers & inquiries about acquiring BlogRush, but we are choosing not to go that route. While many might think this is crazy, we truly feel it’s the ‘right’ thing to do for our users. Believe it or not, it’s not always about the money. In fact, BlogRush will have lost a small fortune when it’s all said and done, and it was by choice. There were many things we could have done to monetize the service but we wanted to make sure it was going to benefit our users first.
Last but not least I want to say that I hope the failure of this service doesn’t in any way discourage other entrepreneurs from coming up with crazy ideas at 4AM (like I did with this one) and from “going for it” to just try and see if something will work. Without trying there can be no success. And as we all know, ideas are worthless without action. The Web wouldn’t be what it is today without entrepreneurs trying all sorts of crazy ideas.
On behalf of the entire BlogRush team, we wish the best of luck to everyone with their own blogs, ideas, and crazy ventures.
Sincerely,
John Reese
RIP
Many predicted that the site would have problems, specifically since it seemed a lot like a traffic exchange and was being gamed by thousands of its users. Still, it’s a shame because it did add an element to many websites that was slightly different than similar offerings.
Coincidentally, I actually removed it from this blog a couple of weeks ago, not because I looked into my reliable crystal ball and saw the problems, but because my new theme didn’t work right with it. As a proponent of many Internet startups, the passing of BlogRush is painful. We want to see most startups succeed. There are people involved behind the scenes who have put effort into these sites and services, so any time one falls, it does not sit well.
Imgur.com understands social media better than any other image-storage service on the Internet.
They started by posting high-quality, original humorous images. They then got the attention of Reddit but being the “go to pic place”. Digg and other social news sites are starting to get it.
How did they get so strong so quickly? They kept it simple.
They are everything that tinypic isn’t. You don’t need an account. You don’t need an email. You find an image, post it, and score. It owns the Pics subreddit, a huge one with over 130K subscribers. It’s the most common image source on Digg now with more front pages every day. In short, Imgur understands how to appeal to social media users. If alexa is to be trusted, it’s worked. Their reach has increased by 392% in 3 months and they are closing in on being a top 2000 site in the world.
While they aren’t nearly as big as imageshack, tinypic, or flickr, it should only be a matter of time for them to build up the site-bulk required to compete with other image services. Either way, we give them mega-kudos to really understanding Web 2.0.
Dynamic Meta Tags for Blogger – Two choices:Meta tag is an HTML tag that resides in the <> section of a web page. Unlike other HTML tags, meta tags do not appear anywhere on the page itself, so most visitors never see them. Different meta tags serve different purposes, but they are generally used to provide additional information about the page.
Examples of meta tags:
< name="distribution" content="global">
The word ‘Meta’ means data-about-data. When we say meta description tag, it describes the contents of the page.This is one of the most important data that Google use to index your site. We can see great results in traffic after implementing it.
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