Google Hot Trends

I find the Google Hot Trends RSS feed interesting. I don't know if anyone else out there looks at this stuff, but a raw look into the most searched terms is an obvious but nifty way to keep up with the movement on the interwebs. I'm a big fan of social media, and have a Google Reader account full of feeds, but I always seem to find news/interests/trends in the hourly hot list that I haven't yet read.

Mixx on FriendFeed

Mixx (& NetVibes) feeds are now available in FriendFeed, the popular "life streaming" service. I only got into FriendFeed a few weeks ago but have since found it to be a great site, allowing you to keep up with all your friend's activities across the web. Thanks to FriendFeed for responding to our requests for Mixx!

Faith & Clouds

via LOL god

Pop Culture Graphs

Yes they've been around for a while, but I can't help posting my favorite few:





via GraphJam

The Digg Revolt

I didn’t do any Mixxing last night and I missed all the action. If you have been living under a rock like I apparently was late yesterday you probably missed all the “Digg revolt” happenings. From what I have feverishly read the top Digg users (many from The Drill Down podcast) organized an emergency show to talk live with the Digg brass. This has gotten attention from Valley Wag and other top media outlets.
I will let the links speak for themselves, as they are closer to the action, but I can’t help but wonder: Mixx FTW? I moved to Mixx for a number of reasons, but simply put it is a better social bookmarking site with a better community. I hope the final move will be to Mixx, whenever it may officially come.

The Diggnation PR Machine

When I became a fan of Digg in the past (something I have since moved away from, but that’s not the point) I was really interested in the Diggnation podcast, and all the peer appeal I found within. At that time Digg was already well on the track to shadiness in its business practices, but I was unaware of this, simply not having been exposed to Digg or social media at large. When I watched Kevin and Alex dude their way through each “frat-tastic” episode I felt it to be an entertaining look at Digg stories from the inside. It seemed to be a real enough experience, listening to commentary from the “kid” who created Digg; he seemed to be analogous to my friends and I, and I found connection in that very aspect.
Now when I look back at my attitude during those early months with Diggnation I feel a bit foolish. Having since learned more each day about the common practices at Digg I started to feel my young adult male connection erode. Honestly it’s less about the rumors of the auto bury list, bury brigade, shady super users, or heavy handed bannings, and more about the ideals driving those actions. Obviously those things don’t endear me to Digg, but the motivation to risk user revolt/alienation by employing these actions can only be related to tidying up the community for sale. Digg is obviously cleaning out the frat house before the serious bidders take the next walkthrough. It’s fairly well established in all the articles about Digg always being up for sale, the price tag having risen from around $50M to $300M during this time.
This is where my discontentment with Diggnation comes into play. During the past year or so, when the shadiness was being planned and executed, Diggnation was a constant source of “drinking buddy down the street” PR. Always out there to reassure all of us 15-30 year old users that your old drinking buddy from Diggnation would always be just that. Kevin Rose was a guy who sat on a couch, drank beer, ogled hot chicks, and made goofy observations, just like you. I must say the mercenary angle of it all does appeal to my business instincts. Diggnation is certainly not a bad thing for Digg to rely on for positive user relations; hell it’s really a textbook example of what a podcast should be: youthful new media. The textbook just can’t teach much on sincerity. In the end though, I think Diggnation is forever gone from my iTunes podcast subscriptions, I just don’t think I can buy into it any longer. I just see Kevin as the real, or imagined, emperor of Digg, making all these recent decisions based only on the almighty dollar. Like I said, a good bit of this is really just cut throat business strategy, but does anyone really believe Digg is a “digital democracy” anymore? A better analogy might be a populous third world dictatorship scrambling to clean up appearances for the United Nations, in hopes of attracting investment in its oil fields.

Thank You Mixxers

I just wanted to take a minute to thank all my Mixx brethren out there. Only a few hours after posting on my love of the Mixx community the story was submitted (by droppyale), and subsequently shared out to me (by joefowler3). My humble blog received readers from 15 countries around the world, and I have only Mixxers to thank.
Thanks again for the love, and most of all for proving my point!

Mixx v Digg

I’ve known about Digg for quite a while, but never really got into it until April 07. Since then Digg increasingly worked its way into my browsing habits until it was basically my favorite site. I was especially fascinated with the Digg Labs interfaces, most notably Stack & Spy. Apparently I’d joined the party at what seems now like a “time of upheaval” with bannings and the associated fallout with all those other gray areas of operation. I read more stories from Diggers who I knew as big time contributors being banned for shady reasons, or no reasons at all. It was from these high profile refugees and their unknown brethren that I learned of Mixx. Specifically it was the blog post on cGt2099.
To me, Mixx is everything I really ever hoped for in Digg. It’s really that simple. While the volume on Mixx may not be quite what I’d like to see, the future of the community more than makes up for that temporary issue. The community was quick to accept me as their friend and posted friendly and thought provoking comments on submissions. No matter how good a story was on Digg that mysterious mob of a-holes would almost invariably appear with mean spirited/vacuous comments. From that group of users I inherently found little sense of actual community. I readily admit I am most probably a victim of circumstance as it pertains to the Digg community. Digg is now something akin to a swirling cosmos of matter and anti-matter where you can easily grow lonely amongst the chaos, something I’m sure was not an issue just a few years ago.
Anyway, if you haven’t checked out Mixx, you should. It’s the social news equivalent of your friendly neighborhood mom-and-pop shop versus Wal-Mart. You love mom and pop, right?

What Should I Read Next?

What Should I Read Next allows you to enter the books you’ve already read and provides suggestions accordingly. I can’t say I’ve built my list up very well yet, but I’m curious to enter 10 or 15 more and see what it makes of my reading habits. What recommendations come from William Gibson, Bret Easton Ellis and Hemingway? I do see this as an interesting tool for readers whose friends aren’t exactly the literary sort. I have friends who can read, they apparently choose not to do so. This leaves me with precious few peers from whom I can glean recommendations, and perhaps most powerfully, the mystical tubes of the internets.
In the past few years I have been especially reliant on lists and Amazon reviews/recommendations, which have been better to me than I might have guessed beforehand. From my research the most premier list of novels is the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels. I can dig The Board’s List just about as much as anyone can when it comes to these “top whatever” lists, but I must say I am far less in agreement with The Reader’s List. Do we really need that much Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard in the top 10? Either I missed something with Rand or simply haven’t joined the right science fiction based religion…
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As quick note, I hope any readers out there from my generation never shy away from speaking with the “older folks” about classic/good books. It’s the same old story in that there are so many other distractions for the younger demographic that discussions on books seem to be less prevalent (or acceptable?). Don’t underestimate the opinions of your parents’ or grandparents’ generations as many of my favorite books first made a splash during their day. Just because none of your Twitter homeboys are intimately familiar with a 90 year old book doesn’t mean it’s not worth reading.