R U a Digg n00b that gets pwned by 1337 Digg Commenters? Well RTFM so teh next time ur comment won’t be an EPIC FAIL!

On Digg, having something to say is only half the battle, knowing how to say it is the other half. This guides you to dissect the jargon, people and memes used in comments on a daily basis. Each section is broken down in detail to help you boost your Digg cred the next time that you leave a comment.

3G - Third Generation of mobile phone standards and technology

AMD - Advanced Micro Devices (mainly a CPU competitor to Intel)

API - Application Programming Interface

APOD – Astronomy Picture of the Day (link)

BS – Bullsh*t

CCTV - Closed-circuit television (UK public surveillance)

CCFL - Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamps (Modern light bulb that uses a fraction of the electricity of regular light bulb)

Have you ever wondered how videos show up in web search engine results? How do videos get hundreds of thousands to millions of views on YouTube? Who’s watching my videos? Well, with a little hard work on optimizing and networking your video content and a helpful tool called YouTube Insight, you can be on your way to working with video and optimizing it for real business results.

YouTube Insight is a handy analytics tool that displays statistics for YouTube Videos. By using Insight you’ll discover statistics such as:

• how many views your video has over specific periods of time,
• the demographic and geographic breakouts of the views and
• how people are finding the video content (web search, YouTube search, embed, etc…)

Though Insight’s data is not always 100% accurate (YouTube states this when you are working with it) and can use some further development in features and functionality, it’s a great start to gaining “insight” to this ever so important media.

Images are an important way to add that extra kick to your blog posts. They are often the first thing that attracts visitors to read further. But where do you find good image?

After completing your masterpiece, you begin to search endlessly around the internet for an image that depicts the core message of your post. When you finally find that perfect one, it is locked up in licenses and conditions that require a lawyer or a credit card. You are obviously frustrated and find yourself spending more time looking for another image than writing that post. Let’s explore some resources that will help you find that image!

Stock photography sites require a paid subscription and offer many choices and sometimes the best results. It can also be the most played out, overused, politically correct looking fluff out there. However, there are so many sources available, from the super expensive sites like Getty, to the middle of the road places like Shutter Stock and iStockPhoto.

Fresh news is a fundamental element of social media and can be used in a variety of different ways to one’s advantage.

Across virtually every social network site, users scramble to be the first to break a news story. Inevitably, this leads to hundreds of duplicate story submissions and ends with one winner amongst hundreds of losers. But even if you weren’t the Woodward & Bernstein who successfully broke the story, there’s still hope. Remember, the story isn’t over once the news breaks; indeed, in many cases, it’s just beginning.

Taking a step back, a story that is ‘breaking news’ material is news for many different reasons. Every popular news event has multiple angles and subplots that make the story newsworthy for different individuals. For instance, the Boston Celtics recently beat the L.A. Lakers in the 2008 NBA Finals. Why is this news?

Yesterday I presented at SES Toronto along with Lee Odden and Dave Snyder on a panel called ‘Twitter: Ultimate Time Waster, or Great Tool?’ I figured that in order to show how Twitter actually works - it would be best to use Twitter to do it. Here’s the results of the experiment and an extended version of my presentation. Also if you’re on Twitter and would like to follow me - here’s my profile: http://twitter.com/chriswinfield

The Best Way to Learn about Twitter is to Have Twitter Do My Presentation

• Started at 4:45pm EST
• No pre-planning or promotion around it at all
• Final question was asked at 6:04pm EST
• Over 275 answers in less than 90 minutes

OK, so you have a great topic ready to write about and now you need to research it out throughly. Creating an effective linkbait piece, one that actually makes people want to link to it, requires some decent researching skills. There is a ridiculous amount of information online just waiting for you, but some of that information may be just that…ridiculous.

The task then becomes figuring out which is the best to use and which needs to be ignored, when to look somewhere else and where that somewhere else is. Here are some ideas and techniques that can help facilitate your research both on and off the screen.

I just got back from the excellent SMX Advanced show in Seattle. Danny and the whole Third Door Media team did another excellent job of putting on a first-rate conference.

Over the next two weeks, I will speaking at three different conferences. The nice thing is that each of the conferences will have a completely different audience to reach. Here’s a quick rundown:

Millennial Financial Services Forum [June 9th] — I will be speaking alone on a panel called Authenticity is the Key to Providing Value/Social Media Marketing:

The importance of an authentic marketing campaign is dire to attracting these Millennials. This session will guide you through the advantages of social marketing networks and social news sites and how to truly reach to reach GenY (or social media/news digg.com). This is your one opportunity to gain a client for life, regardless of their account balances right now. Don’t miss it!

This is a look at Vanessa Fox’s informative webcast called Search Marketing 101 - Does My CEO Really Need A Facebook Profile hosted by Search Marketing Now.

When people think of social networking, Vanessa feels they tend to think of the high profile stuff like MySpace and Facebook and these are great examples, but she stressed that there are all kinds of social networking. Social Networking is anywhere people are talking online. From a corporate perspective, what you are interested in - is where people are talking about you and are talking about the topics you care about (competitor brands, issues that involve your brand).

Examples:

• Digg
• Faves.com
• Amazon (is social networking because of customer ratings and reviews)
• Blogs (big place where people talk about things - voicing opinions, posting comments)

“Contact Us”, “Learn More”, “Click Here”, “Free Money!”. OK that last one I made up, but we have all seen these calls that ask us to do something.

Calls to action in interactive media are usually buttons or links that begin a process. Making these important calls stand out requires some designing further than, and in addition to, the underlined hyper link.

The text and words used in calls to action are topics of another discussion. For this tutorial I am focusing on the design elements of a graphical button and specifically simple gradients with a 1 to 2 pixel gap from the border created in Photoshop. This tutorial is similar to the previous one on creating cool graphical text, but changing a few things and applying it to buttons.

Last week I wrote about how to create great header graphics for linkbait pieces. Now I would like to go a bit deeper into that and explain how I create graphical text, text that is an image, that stands out and screams to be noticed.

Like the last tutorial mentioned, it is important for your article to have an image associated with the content of the article. When you go on Digg and see a link to a story without an image or photo what do you do? Well, I tend to not click on that story and move on down the line. The same holds true, to some degree, to linkbait pieces and the inclusion of catching header graphics.